Starbucks to open stand-alone Italian restaurants

After years of trying to win over lunch and dinner crowds, Starbucks is preparing to open its first stand-alone Italian restaurant.

The company is teaming up with Princi, a small chain of 24-hour bakeries in Milan and London, to offer customers freshly made items including focaccia sandwiches, margherita pizzas and tiramisu. The first stage of the partnership will debut this week, when Starbucks opens a Princi bakery in its upscale Reserve Roastery in Seattle. The company plans to eventually open bakeries inside all of its Reserve locations, and next year hopes to open stand-alone Princi eateries across the country. The openings will be in New York, Seattle and Chicago.

“We’re getting into the food business,” said Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks. “Princi will be fully integrated with bakery operations, so not only will we be roasting coffee, but we’ll be baking bread, pastries — the kind of Italian pastries you’ve never seen in America.”

The move is the latest effort by the 45-year-old coffee purveyor to expand into food. Many of its attempts — prepackaged cake pops, truffle mac and cheese, “sushi burritos” — have fizzled, analysts say, in part because Starbucks stores haven’t had kitch-

ens. If customers are paying $10 for lunch, analysts say, they want it to be prepared on the spot.

“There is a perception that Starbucks is selling an inferior product,” Nick Setyan, an analyst for Wedbush Secu- rities, told The Washington Post in September. “Custom- ers are saying, ‘How good can that salad or sandwich be if you’re not making it in front of me?’”

The new Princi locations are to have full kitch- ens staffed with bakers and “food ambassadors” called commessas. about baked 100 eggs items, The for menu, breakfast, includes with caprese salads for lunch, cocktails and small plates for dinner, and tarts, cook- ies and crostatas for dessert. Items will be priced between $3 and $11. In 1980, Italian baker Rocco Princi started the boutique com- pany, which now has five European locations. In July, Starbucks announced that it had invested in Princi and had become the company’s global licensee.

“We have never baked in our stores in 45 years. But all of that will change with the creation of this unique partnership,” Schultz said at the time. “Rocco and his team at Princi possess a passion for handcrafted food and artisanal baked goods that mirrors how I feel about our coffee.”

This isn’t the first time Starbucks has pinned its hopes on a stand-alone bakery. In 2012, the company paid $100 million for La Boulange, a San Francisco-based company with 23 stores. Starbucks planned to open about 400 new locations in five years. Three years later, Starbucks closed the bakeries because they were “not sustainable for the company’s long-term growth.”