Starbucks Reveal Their Six Big Plans for 2017
But what else is Starbucks going to introduce in the near future?
Increasing the quality of food: Starbucks global chief marketing officer, Sharon Rothstein, confirmed the company will introduce a a new breakfast menu in January, which will include sous vide egg bites and gluten-free breakfast sandwiches.
There will also be two new coffee beverages in the new year, which will include the return of the smoked butterscotch latte and the new Cascara Latte, made with the fruit of the coffee cherry.
The company will debut mobile payment with WeChat on Thursday and 'social gifting' next year. The company will also add more than 5,000 stores in China by 2021, increasing its current total of 2,500 stores in 118 cities in the country.
The company’s Teavana brand will debut bottled Teavana Craft Iced Teas in partnership with Anheuser-Busch. The first line of teas, including pineapple-berry blue herbal tea, peach green tea, mango black tea, and passion tango herbal tea will be available at retailers in the northeast of the United States in February with Starbucks stores getting them later in 2017 and full national availability in 2018.
More than $6 billion was loaded onto prepaid Starbucks Cards in the past year, and Starbucks global chief strategy officer, Matt Ryan, said U.S. company-owned stores just passed 8% of transactions being made through mobile order and pay.
Gerri Martin-Flickinger, Starbucks chief technology officer, debuted a conversational ordering system, called My Starbucks Barista. The artificial intelligence for the company's mobile app allows customers to place orders via voice command or messaging interface. The digital barista feature will first appear on iOS in limited beta early next year, and will become available to more iOS and Android users at a later date.
The Starbucks Rewards program now has 12 million members. Matt Ryan said the company is leveraging the data in the rewards program in order to enhance offers to customers and increase visits to the stores.
Ryan went on to say that in just the first few weeks of the personalised offers, the company found redemption of emailed offers through the app have doubled and the incremental revenue per redeeming customer is more than tripled. The company said the rewards program has a 94% retention rate.
