World’s largest Starbucks opens in Shanghai

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This article was published 11/12/2017 (2858 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Starbucks once made waves with the indulgent sizes of some of its drinks, such as the Trenta, which contains a staggering 31 ounces of joe.

Now, as part of the company’s aggressive expansion in China, the Seattle-based coffee retailer has opened its largest store in the world: a nearly 30,000-square-foot compound that does more than serve coffee.

The new Starbucks Reserve Roastery, which opened last week in Shanghai, is the first non-U.S. location of a new series of shops designed to offer a more “immersive” experience for coffee lovers, according to Starbucks. The first such roastery, which opened in Seattle in 2014, is about half its size, CNN reported.

The Shanghai location is the world’s largest Starbucks. It includes three coffee bars, one of which clocks in at 88 feet long — the chain’s longest to date. The coffee bars will serve cups made from beans grown in China’s Pu’er in Yunnan province, USA Today reported. A two-storey, 40-ton copper cask towers over the store, refilling the coffee bars’ various silos.

As a nod to the local beverage of choice, it also includes a tea bar made from three-dimensional printed materials, and an in-house bakery employing more than 30 Chinese bakers and chefs, the company said.

The experience is curated to keep people mulling about the store. It is the first Starbucks location to integrate augmented reality, which refers to technology that combines real-world surroundings with technology — in this case, the customers’ smartphones. They can point their phones at various spots around the cavernous room to learn about the coffee-brewing process.

China might seem like an odd place to open the world’s biggest, and arguably flashiest, Starbucks, given the country’s traditional warm beverage has long been tea, not coffee. In fact, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said the company struggled when it opened its first store in China in 1999.

“We had to educate and teach many Chinese about what coffee was — the coffee ritual, what a latte was,” Schultz told CNN. “So in the early years, we did not make money.”

Now, the company is expanding faster than frothed milk. Since 2016, it has been on pace to open an average of a new store every day for five years, CNN reported. In 2021, the company plans to have almost 5,000 stores across the country. For comparison, there were more than 11,100 Starbucks in the U.S. in 2012.

“When people ask me how much can you really grow in China, I don’t really know what the answer is. But I do believe it’s going to be larger than the U.S.,” Schultz told the New York Times.

Over the past year, sales in China grew by seven per cent, compared to three per cent in the rest of the word, ABC News reported. Some believe that’s why the company chose to open the splashy location in Shanghai.

“This is a show store,” John Gordon, a restaurant analyst at Pacific Management Consulting, told CNN. “The point is to be in a highly, highly visible, touristy area where there’s foot traffic, offices and urban housing in order to promote the brand.”

The Shanghai store’s boasting rights as the world’s largest won’t last long, though. The company plans to open a 43,000-square-foot location on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue in 2019, theChicago Tribune reported.

— Washington Post