Size matters. It can be a good thing or not, depending. This is a lesson all businesses have learned. It is one thing to serve an exceptional handcrafted food item in a limited number of locations with a dedicated staff. It is quite another to try to replicate that in hundreds to say nothing of thousands of locations.

In order to do the latter Starbucks will have to find a way to commercialize the product and thus, in all likelihood, remove some or most of what makes it artisanal. This does not mean that it won’t be good and something that finds commercial success, but it will not be the same as what the four locations serve today.

The magic question is always “can you maintain quality control at scale?” Not just with food, but pretty much with everything we sell.

I think this is a great idea and brings Starbucks into a richer market (if possible). Hopefully, they can find a way to manage the quality because if they can, it’s a winner.

It will be difficult for Starbucks to retain the qualities and uniqueness that make the product artisanal as they move from handcrafted to commercial. Hopefully they can hold on to enough characteristics to still offer a compelling and differentiated product that is appealing to shoppers.

Introducing an on-premise bakery is not an easy task. It requires remodeling in the kitchen. If I were going to do that, I would test it VERY slowly. Better to have Princi be the provider of freshly baked goods daily and DELIVERED to Starbucks regionally. There is a sufficiently dense concentration of Starbucks locations to have regional bakeries. It’s one way of making sure that quality and uniformity of product are maintained.

Everything that will ever be possible is already possible. Whether or not Starbucks and Princi access that possibility is another question. Baking gets down to tested and addictive recipes and natural, chemical-free ingredients. When you have people who have a baker’s soul (as distinct from having a job in a bakery) and you have those quality ingredients … it should work. However these recipes, if truly artisan, were probably originally designed for a large Italian family dinner, and don’t necessarily scale to huge vats with ingredients dumped in with a front-loader. That may be the concern as far as scalability goes. The spirit of your Italian grandmother’s hands have to be in there somehow. Know what I mean? Replicating recipes is one thing … replicating soul is quite another. It can be done. So why not have Princi bakery hubs, each serving several dozen Starbucks and being directly accessible by the public at the same time? Keep the process honest and don’t try to automate everything just to make more money. Does that work as… Read more »

In theory I like this. It gives Starbucks another identifiable food experience beyond coffee. The question that is being raised by fellow BrainTrust colleagues is the first thing that came to my mind. How do you scale this to all stores, big and small? (Small stores are more the concern.) I don’t know if every store can bake, but perhaps some stores can become distribution centers for the others that can’t.

Taking a localized, low volume, quality baked product to mass production is difficult, but on behalf of all of all those who appreciate the baked goods over the coffee, I hope they succeed.

Full disclosure – I am not a coffee drinker, but am a regular client of Starbucks for non-coffee products and services, including predictable internet access and great place to meet co-workers and friends in a convenient environment. What does it take to stay relevant, profitable and ultimately successful – innovation of course. Several have made good comments related to innovation already. Here are my thoughts: A lthough not a new idea, even at Starbucks when it comes to coffee, vertical integration of baked goods is an innovation of Starbucks current model. Starbucks already sells. and sources, a lot of baked goods. This gives them a chance to have even more “hands on experience” (all puns intended on a Friday) with the manufacturing, delivery, scaling, and customer experience with high quality baked products. Can artisinal be done at scale? I believe so as my local supermarket, Harris Teeter, seems to have done a nice job of it with bread themselves. It’s not exactly the same as the local one store french bakery, but its 90%+ at… Read more »

Starbucks has to create a food product equal to their coffee. It shouldn’t have taken this long. On the other hand, Starbucks’s greatest feat is replicating processes. No reason to believe they can’t do the same with a bakery.