You think your neighborhood has a lot of Starbuckses, but “Starbucks is opening a store in China every 15 hours” according to the company’s China CEO, Belinda Wong:
China has become Starbucks’ second largest and fastest growing market, and one the company expects to eclipse the U.S. market one day. Starbucks already operates more than 3,000 stores in the country and [plans] 2,000 more by 2021.
Crazy!
One of those recently opened stores is this kind of mothership-looking thing in Shanghai, which spreads across 30,000 square feet and is called the Starbucks Reserve Roastery, a side-brand the company spun off in Seattle in 2014, presumably trying to siphon off some of that third-wave coffee money.
Our kindred souls over at SmartShanghai covered the opening of Shanghai’s Starbucks Reserve Roastery — now the largest Starbucks in the world! — with the appropriate shock and awe:
Starbucks unveiled to a massive, international media presence this morning the Starbucks Reserve Roastery Shanghai: a “new multi-sensory, fully immersive coffee experience” that also operates as the vortex and harnesser of supernatural cosmic forces that the Starbucks top brass hopes to utilize to rip a hole in the fabric of the space-time continuum, thereby collapsing our dimension into a theoretical “negative zone universe”, releasing untold world-ending Lovecraftian terrors onto humanity as we know it.
“You guys seen The Mist?” said Starbucks Executive CEO Howard Schultz this morning at the media conference.
“Kind of like The Mist. But like — The Mist meets the whole ‘third wave coffee’ thing.”
Read their full recap here. And discover more about Starbucks’ much-hyped challenger in the China market, Luckin Coffee, here.
Cover image: SmartShanghai
#coconut milk
#controversy
Coconut beverage producer Coconut Palm recently went viral for featuring muscular bros during a livestream on the brand’s official Douyin (Chinese TikTok) account. However, the male models only sold about 750 to 1,000 RMB (110-145 USD) worth of products. Read More
#Halloween
From Starbucks and KFC to the Japanese convenience store chain Lawson, here are some unique Halloween treats in the Greater China market Read More
#tea shops
From community-based teahouses to tea-driven cocktail lounges, Chinese youth are modernizing tea culture and making it their own Read More
