Source and roast your own beans, don't overroast the beans, charge a premium over Starbucks for not producing crap coffee from overroasted beans. Starbucks does some impressive work with the candy flavors it adds to distract from their coffee, but...
Curious then why Starbucks doesn’t adjust.
Is it something in the scale manufacturing, such as, more margin for error in the overroasted side, so taste will be the same signature burnt at every Starbucks in the world?
Is it that their market is former fast food coffee drinkers used to bland and burnt drips from McDonalds who will try a Starbucks, find it so ‘robust’ (ahem) as to be obvious, and that’s the end of the experimentation?
There has to be a data driven reason.
Poor quality beans and robusta are ‘hidden’ with a dark roast as the flavour moves to bitter. This also lasts a long time and doesn’t go stale for ages. As a general rule in coffee, light roasts have a variety of tastes and dark ones are just bitter. This saves a lot of money. Low quality arabica beans are less than half the price of good ones, and that’s for me, purchasing a few kg at a time. Starbucks will be using a lot of low grade robusta and that stuff cheaper again. Combine this with a brand which makes coffee where the dominant flavour isn’t the coffee but the milk (if you can call miscellaneous juiced nuts etc that) which is often flavoured. I don’t think the coffee will be their primary cost in consumables, I’m guessing milk is. If you want to have a play, get a heat gun and a kilo of beans. Have a play about with different roast styles. It’s a slippery slope but it isn’t an expensive one.
Edit: Here is a link with a breakdown of Starbucks costs. Not sure how accurate it is, but it puts the coffee as 16c per cup, and the milk at the same. The cup itself is about 32c according to the article. http://coffeemakersusa.com/pricing-breakdown-cup-coffee/
Like, once a Starbucks drinker goes out and buys a heatgun to roast their own beans they will discover the truth that has been hidden from them all along.
I always just assume that someone who drinks Starbucks regularly would be the most aquainted with how it tastes and might not need someone to tell them.
Making a consistent product year over year with inconsistent raw materials, in high volume with wide distribution, and maintaining prices most people can afford is very difficult.
Sure you can get better coffee if you spend time doing research and sourcing beans and roasting equipment, but that doesn't mean there is no place for Starbucks in the world.
On the other hand, Starbucks keeps spreading to smaller cities. So they seem popular with someone at least.
The people complaining here aren't the average Starbucks customer.
For example, burned coffee is more of a caricature of its normal taste unlike, say, burned popcorn which tastes like charcoal. You could probably tell most people including me that some burned coffee is some local artisanal roast and I'd chalk up any changes in its flavor to that and move on.
People clearly just aren't making coffee purchases based on taste, so you have to liken the whole thing to people going to bars. At which point Starbucks is simply the well-known bar in town with no surprises. You know their hours, you know where it is, you know you can get a table and dominate it shamelessly for hours, and so do all the other people in your group.
Sure, you'd like to try one of those lil cafes around the block sometime, but it's something you procrastinate just like anything else that will introduce the slightest change in your life.
That said, Starbucks is obviously popular with a lot of people. Personally, I think their coffee and some of their other drinks are fine. I don't always go there (not that I'm a coffeeshop regular) but that's for reasons other than their coffee quality. (I admittedly tend to use darker roasts when I make coffee at home as well.)
> It would be more accurate to ask: “How the F can anyone make any money when Starbucks is on every other street corner and has the advantages of scale they have.
Specialists stores have specialist profits - they wont be hitting the mass market, because the mass market taste profile is different.
If you try to grow, then you may as well give up to starbucks which has the money to taste test and advertise enough to ride the wave of human attention.
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Starbucks coffee tastes like crap to me and the reason is they chose crappy quality beans and then over roast them.
$15 lattes, anyone?
You can have a preference of reds or whites but anyone who's trained can taste when a wine has oxidsized or turned sour and those are pretty objective statements of fact.
Overroasted coffee is definitely a thing if you've done coffee tastings and actually know what coffee tastes like and how the roasting process affects flavor profiles.
No, it's an actual answer of one way that a number of relatively small and some fairly large coffee shop chains can and do survive when Starbucks exists and is ubiquitous.
It includes, of course, an endorsement of the taste to which those shops appeal as part of that strategy.
Coffee snobs like those downthread notwithstanding, most people don't care. I don't care most of the time although I try to frequent local shops for the variety. So anything that gets a lot of people to default to Starbucks, especially for a morning caffeine fix habit, is a win.
They tend to sit out over a heat source and, if the coffee wasn't lousy to begin with, it is after it's been burning over a flame or other heat source for an hour or two.
(not a native English speaker myself, and I tried my best to interpret your difficulty).
He told me they make an overwhelming amount of money off of the tasting room attached to their physical brewery because the beer itself is effectively water in terms of cost so they make profit by not having to pay any middle men in the tasting room.
My suspicion is that in the coffee world, if you source and roast your own beans and serve them direct in a venue you own you get a similar effect. I think it must be essential to run the roastery yourself to make it work. That work goes well beyond what is required to just open a cafe and serve someone else’s coffee.
Starbucks has simply insane process automation, training, branding, marketing, custom drink labs pushing out new flavors every two weeks, complete control of their global supply chains.
It would be more accurate to ask: “How the F can anyone make any money when Starbucks is on every other street corner and has the advantages of scale they have.”