Starbucks Expands Olive Oil-Infused Coffee Line to U.S. Stores

After intro­duc­ing its line of olive oil-infused cof­fee drinks in Italy, Starbucks has announced it will launch its Oleato range across 550 loca­tions in the United States on March 27.

Patrons at select loca­tions in Chicago, New York City and Seattle can already sam­ple five new hot and cold bev­er­ages. Later, more cafés in Seattle and Los Angeles will serve Oleato.

According to interim chief exec­u­tive Howard Schultz, Oleato drinks are brewed using Nocellara del Belice extra vir­gin olive oil sourced from Partanna, Sicily.

Earlier this month, a spokesman for Starbucks told Olive Oil Times that the com­pany would also use Paratana olive oil to brew Oleato drinks at its loca­tions in the United States.

In a press release on its web­site, Starbucks said Partana extra vir­gin olive oil will also be avail­able to pur­chase at loca­tions serv­ing the bev­er­ages.

The deci­sion to blend two stal­warts of Italian food cul­ture – cof­fee and olive oil – came after the global cof­fee giant missed expec­ta­tions in its first-quar­ter earn­ings in February.

Analysts had antic­i­pated the Seattle-based com­pany to gen­er­ate $8.78 bil­lion in rev­enue, with the com­pany miss­ing the tar­get by $70 mil­lion. The rev­enue decline was mainly attrib­uted to lock­downs in China, which shut­tered more than 1,800 of its 6,090 stores.

“We posted [these] strong results despite chal­leng­ing global con­sumer and infla­tion­ary envi­ron­ments, a soft quar­ter for retail over­all and the unprece­dented, Covid-related head­winds that unfolded in China in Q1,” Schultz said.

Some ana­lysts see the part­ner­ship between Starbucks and Oleificio Asaro, its pro­ducer part­ner, as a nec­es­sary strat­egy for global brands com­pet­ing to keep cus­tomers in an increas­ingly com­pet­i­tive food ser­vice envi­ron­ment amid the back­drop of eco­nomic uncer­tainty.

Depending on how the bev­er­ages are received in the United States and Italy, the com­pany plans to intro­duce Oleato to spe­cific loca­tions in the United Kingdom, Japan and the Middle East later this year.

While Starbucks hopes that the unique com­bi­na­tion will pique cus­tomers’ inter­est world­wide, experts in Italy also expect the part­ner­ship to boost the inter­na­tional pro­file of the coun­try’s olive oils.

“Should the cof­fee-extra vir­gin olive oil mix achieve a high level of sat­is­fac­tion among con­sumers, then its pos­i­tive effect will be even more ampli­fied,” Denis Pantini, head of the agri­food busi­ness unit at Nomisma, a con­sult­ing firm, told Olive Oil Times ear­lier this month.

“For sure, it could win the inter­est of those who might still be hes­i­tant to con­sume a healthy prod­uct such as olive oil,” he con­cluded.

• Starbucks
• Business Wire