Skip to footer

Starbucks launches a delivery service that brings coffee to your front door

Starbucks, the king of the coffee mainstream, is aiming for an upscale clientele with a new specialty coffee delivery service. 

|
Ted S. Warren/AP
Barista Jay Rapp prepares a Chestnut Praline Latte at a Starbucks store in Seattle.

On Tuesday, Starbucks Corp. announced that it is going to launch a delivery service.

Before you get too excited, the delivery service is more for coffee connoisseurs than average Joes – at least for now.

The service will deliver an 8.8oz bag of Reserve coffee – Starbuck’s gourmet brand – to customers within three to five days of its being roasted at the Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room in Seattle. There are a variety of subscription options including a $24, one-month subscription, and $288, year-long subscription.

In the past few years, independent coffee roasters have cultivated cult-like followings of coffee drinkers who are interested in upscale brews and where and how their coffee is grown and roasted. Starbucks is trying to appeal to this market.

"Starbucks Reserve Roastery subscriptions are — aside from visiting the Roastery and having our partners scoop the coffee right in front of you — the freshest, fastest, and most innovative whole bean coffee experience in the marketplace," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said in a press release.

The company opened the Reserve Roastery in December 2014 and plans to open 100 specialty Starbucks stores that serve only Reserve coffee. 

Additionally, as part of its digital initiative Starbucks is starting to allow customers to order as well as pay through its mobile app in select stores. Customers can choose a store and order on the app, and then pick up the order and pay when they get to the store, according to CNBC.  

But for those who are more interested in having their brewed coffee come to them every morning, Starbucks is also planning to launch a beverage delivery service by the second half of 2015, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Starbucks is "finalizing plans for two distinct delivery models — one of which utilizes our own people, green-apron baristas, and the other, which leverages the capabilities of the third-party service,” Schultz told analysts last month, alluding to the Reserve and beverage-delivery services.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Starbucks launches a delivery service that brings coffee to your front door
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Bite/2015/0217/Starbucks-launches-a-delivery-service-that-brings-coffee-to-your-front-door
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe