The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

Starbucks to start baking

gerhard's picture
gerhard

Starbucks to start baking

http://www.bakersjournal.com/news/starbucks-invests-in-italian-bakery-princi-6673?custnum=11405181136&title=&utm_source=E921&utm_medium=email&utm_camp...

 

I like their coffee but I think the food they serve is terrible, I would rather have a McDonald breakfast than anything Starbucks offers.  Hope this will improve their menu.

Gerhard

Wild-Yeast's picture
Wild-Yeast

Gerhard,

Starbucks has spent a lot of time and money attempting to get the patisserie part going for their shops. It has always failed in that it did not satisfy their customers - these failed attempts actually drove clientele away to their competitors. Google San Francisco Starbucks La Boulange for a litany of their failures. La Boulange later reopened under the original owner.

I believe their one major failing is the inability to make adjustments on the spot to adjust to the demands of local clientele. Instead one stamp fits all delivered from a central warehouse just-in-time for reheating crisp in time for opening in the morning.

Wild-Yeast 

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

food service customer that we stored for and delivered to in the markets we served around the country..

First off, Starbucks had their coffee and paper good delivered separately (by another company) from every other thing they sold in the store.  This is one reason their prices are higher than anyone else in the coffee shop business - they paid about twice the storage and delivery costs of everyone else in the business who had 1 company do this work instead.

 They also required that their stores be delivered dark on special trucks from 10 PM until 4 AM - when their stores were closed with their employees and customers out of the store.  

Our drivers had to carry the keys to the back door and alarm codes for each of the stores.  They would go in, par up the various milk products required based on what inventory was left over from the previous days delivery, put the chilled stuff ordered in the cooler and the rest of the stuff in the back room, then set the alarm, leave and lock the doors.  People charge extra for this kind of hand holding - at night. 

On top of that, they had two kinds of stores.  One was Starbucks owned which received fresh baked pastry.  The other was franchise stores.  They got the same pastry but it was frozen.  It wasn't delivered frozen.  We had to thaw it out the day before we delivered it at night so that it was ready to sell the next morning in a non frozen state.   Starbucks didn't want their name on the delivery trucks either.

If you missed a delivery window, for any reason, you were fined by Starbucks.  Needless to say, since the pastries were all baked locally or for very small region at best, the quality of the pastry varied from one bakery to bakery.  Overall, it was pretty good though, at least that is my experience, certainly not bad or horrible.  By the time the bakery jumped through all the Starbucks hoops.... it was expensive because of the particularly weird Starbucks rules associated with everything they did and rules for those those that made and delivered their product to them.

They had a huge problem with employee theft of product too which led to most of these weird systems - they couldn't trust their employees so they were willing to increase the costs of the product to try to compensate for poor quality help.  When you don't pay your people, they will steal from you every time.  But that isn't just a Starbuck's problem.  Employee and customer theft is a big problem everywhere stuff is sold - except maybe in parts of Utah.

So the big problem that Starbucks has is that their stuff is way overpriced compared to the competition.  They are paranoid about everything and don't trust anyone to do the right thing.  In short, they;re a big pain in the ass to do business with so they have to pay through the nose for everything.  I'm not saying that is bad or they shouldn't get what they want - it's just really expensive.  They try to make up for it by claiming higher quality to keep their high paying cult following from going somewhere else.  This makes a great entry niche for smaller competitors to get started and make a great profit margin because the price bar is so high at Starbucks.  It is one of the few food businesses I would get into today.   

Starbucks thought they could bake their own pastries and tried it out in the Pacific Northwest, in their back yard, but they found out they couldn't quite get it done right.  They have also burned through many warehouse and delivery companies with their unusual oddities, what many call nonsense, all over the country too. They need to give serious thought to building their own warehouse and delivery company because they won't be able to find anyone half decent left that is naive enough to want to do this work for them anymore.

They really need to not give up on their own pastries either - as the OP shows.  They need to fail several times before they can get it right - they have a lot to learn in the bakery business.   They are forcing themselves  to do so by their own wants, needs and actions peculiar to them.  Being vertically integrate isn't all bad if you can pull it off, and for them, it is the one way to stay profitable enough to keep their PE ratio as high as it needs to be to justify their stock price multiple to investors.

Their cult following is what makes it all possible.  Cults are good as long as they stick around and many companies depend on them for their very high stock prices.  Buit it can be really bad if it all goes south.  Or......... there must be way more millionaires out there than people think.

My favorite, and easiest, way to become a millionaire is to stop eatingand drinking at Starbucks and invest the money in the S&P 500 instead.  A 21 year old Starbucks customer who spends the average ticket for 5 days a week at Starbucks will be a millionaire by 62 - if they buy the stock and not the product.  But that is true of so many products.  The tip of the day is to buy the company instead of the stuff they sell.  Let someone else make you rich by spending their hard earned money at the companies you own instead.  That is all it takes to get rich

If you are 21 and want to be  millionaire by 65, in today's money no less,  all you have to do is spend $45 a week on yourself...... rather than on someone else to make them rich.  That is all it takes - easy as pie and way easier than making bread:-)

Good luck to Starbucks in their quest to sell coffee and treats to millionaires - I wish them the very best - my retirement depends on it!

You already make your own bread and know how great and cheap that is so start making your own great coffee and breakfast pastry for 25 cents a day and invest all that bread and breakfast savings in yourself instead. 

Happy Baking and Brewing

gerhard's picture
gerhard

the analysis of their inventory system. I don't know anything about it but have been served dried poppy seed lemon loaf often enough that I don't bother anymore, the experience with the savoury side of the menu is worse. If you stay in they will try to correct the problem without argument but the frequency that I find issue with the product made me just a beverage (tall dark roast) consumer. The way I see it is that they are providing fast food quality and charging premium prices. 

Gerhard

dabrownman's picture
dabrownman

if they let the product get old and stale and still try to sell it..... then will just stop ordering.  When you pay the price they charge, you expect it to be be best   Another poor employee / management problem.  When fresh, their poppy seed lemon loaf is terrific, pretty hard ti mess it up really - and one of my favorites.  Still not worth the price they charge for it but Tartine's basic SD loaf isn't worth $9 either. Josey Baker's $4 for a slice of toast takes the cake though and makes Chad's loaf a relative bargain for sure!  Josey hardly has enough counter space for the (6) 4 slice toasters he has going all at once - very nice indeed:-)  The average ticket price at Starbucks is only $5 or so.