Starbucks (SBUX, news, msgs) is making changes to the way it grinds and brews coffee as it tries to win back customers amid economic weakness and increased competition.
Instead of grinding coffee only in the morning, baristas will grind beans each time a new pot is brewed. Timers will buzz to signal when it's time to make a new batch, according to internal Starbucks documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The changes are part of the Seattle company's effort to reinvigorate the "Starbucks experience" in the face of competition from less-expensive rivals such as McDonald's (MCD, news, msgs) and 7-Eleven. With Starbucks' changes, customers will be able to hear the whir of grinders and smell the aroma of fresh coffee all day.
The adjustments will begin to roll out in Starbucks' more than 7,000 company-operated U.S. stores next month, a company spokeswoman said.
Two years ago, Howard Schultz, then chairman of the company, wrote a memo to executives blaming the chain's excessive focus on growth and efficiency for cheapening the coffee-shop experience he long had championed.
Schultz wrote that an earlier switch to preground coffee had taken the "romance and theatre" out of a trip to Starbucks.
"We achieved fresh-roasted bagged coffee, but at what cost? The loss of aroma -- perhaps the most powerful nonverbal signal we had in our stores," he wrote.
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Currently, baristas decide when to brew fresh batches "based on multiple signals ranging from demand (quantity), to expiration and timing," the new documents say, explaining that the revamped process "reduces this complexity by eliminating many of these signals."
Now, depending on how busy a store is at a particular time, baristas will use 24-, 12- or eight-minute "cadences" to brew coffee so that no variety runs out. And instead of dedicating one coffee brewer per variety, the new procedures require that containers be rotated as necessary through different varieties so customers don't have to wait for a certain type to brew.
The documents say that currently, "by using dedicated (containers) to brew coffee, our customers may experience a coffee outage 14 minutes out of every hour, or 23% of the time! This coffee outage occurs for seven minutes during every batch, making brewed coffee unavailable to our customers."
As a result, customers can be forced to wait, choose another type of coffee or leave the store empty-handed. "To solve the brewed-coffee outage problem, we must change the way we brew coffee," the documents say.
This article was reported by Julie Jargon for The Wall Street Journal.
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