Starbucks’ next move: 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 Tuesday, 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,” Howard Schultz, the chairman of Starbucks, said in an interview. “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 kitchens. 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 Securities, told The Washington Post in September. “Customers are saying, ‘How good can that salad or sandwich be if you’re not making it in front of me?’”