You’d think that Starbucks, with its thousands of locations all throughout the world, would have enough of the coffee market. However, any glance at grocery store shelves will tell you that Starbucks might be in a lot of places, but they’re not everywhere a coffee drinker will turn for a fix. That’s about to change. Starbucks subsidiary Seattle’s Best Coffee will be putting its beans on grocery store shelves.
If you know the name Seattle’s Best, it’s from Burger King. Burger King and Starbucks have teamed up to provide coffee from Seattle’s Best Coffee at all 7,000 Burger King locations, alongside such highbrow treats as the pizza burger. According to estimates, 80 percent of people drink coffee at home rather than at stores. That’s a whole lot of market share untapped. Hence, Seattle’s Best will move into that gap, according to company president Michelle Gass, by providing a familiar, light roast akin to Maxwell House or Folgers, for working-class folks.
“We can have some fun in a world that has taken coffee to this very complex place,” said Michelle Gass, summing up the company’s plan for grocery store marketing. “In this category ‘simple’ is going to be the new ‘bold.’ ”
Added Starbucks CFO Troy Alstead, “As big as Starbucks has become, we still have a small share of coffee consumption. We set out to figure out how we can — modestly and over time — get more of people’s coffee habits and coffee consumption and get it in more places than where we normally would.”
Tags: Starbucks, Seattle’s Best Coffee, Michelle Gass, Burger King, middle-tier coffee drinkers, Starbucks to offer coffee for home use, Seattle’s Best Coffee sold in grocery stores, Starbucks enters grocery stores, product launches, Tony Alstead