Starbucks CEO Wants to Take Over Your Grocery Store

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has spent much of the past few months fighting Washington policies. Finally, he seems to be taking a step back from convincing 100 other CEOs to curb campaign donations and taking out full page newspaper ads. For the first time in a while, he’s talking about Starbucks again. And how its future is not necessarily in coffee.
It’s in…groceries?
Schultz sat down with German newspaper Der Spiegel to talk coffee and global expansion. Interestingly, he had this to say about the future of Starbucks:

“I think we have an enormous opportunity to do a lot of things in the food and beverage industry. In the next 12 to 18 months, we will be unveiling new products and entirely new categories. I can’t tell you with specificity what it is, but we’re going to build a major multibillion-dollar business in the grocery industry for Starbucks, both domestically and around the world. I think people are going to be quite surprised over the next few years at what Starbucks is capable of doing.”

In our humble opinion, the food at Starbucks is well, both bad and overpriced. But Schultz isn’t talking about the stale doughnuts and soggy cheese plates in your local Starbucks. Rather, he plans to build out the Starbucks-branded products that are now sold in supermarkets.
For some time, Starbucks has sold pre-packaged, cloyingly sweet Frappuccinos in supermarkets and other venues — and more recently, they’ve added their do-it-yourself “VIA” coffee packets. For those of you too lazy to go to an actual Starbucks, or too busy to wait in line at one, essentially.
At the Starbucks shareholder meeting earlier this year, Schultz said he foresaw the grocery business eventually being as large as the Starbucks store business. As of now, that plan seems to be on track.