Starbucks Corp has opened a store in Seattle that combines a cafe with a coffee-roaster, as the chain boosts production of its Reserve line of premium coffee.
The Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room is a 1,394m2 facility that serves Reserve coffee, which is sourced in small batches and sells for more than US$20 per 0.45kg.
The store, which opened yesterday, lets Starbucks double its small-batch roasting capacity and expand the Reserve coffee presence to 1,500 locations from 800 worldwide.
Photo: Bloomberg
The world’s biggest coffee-shop operator is experimenting with new store formats, including smaller express stores in New York City and a three-story cafe in Bogota.
Chief executive officer Howard Schultz has said Starbucks is seeking to emulate the retail environments offered by Apple Inc and Nike Inc.
The Seattle facility provides a blueprint for other major urban markets, chief operating officer Troy Alstead said in an interview.
Photo: Bloomberg
“Our new store formats give us the ability to grow in the US and other parts of the world,” Alstead said. “That unique roastery experience gives customers an understanding of our heritage.”
The new Starbucks roaster features a menu of kale salads, fresh pastries, sandwiches and other items created by Tom Douglas, the Seattle chef and restaurateur.
The store also shares space with a new location of Serious Pie, the brick-oven pizzeria that Douglas created.
Starting next year, Starbucks plans to open 100 “Reserve-only” locations around the globe.
The company had been roasting its Reserve coffees at a facility south of Seattle, but decided to move the plant into a retail space in the city to “show how meticulous we are about bringing coffee to customers,” senior concept design manager Andre Kim said. “We wanted to create a theater of coffee.”
The shop includes a pneumatic piping system that delivers coffee beans from a large copper silo to a central coffee bar with seating for customers. There’s also a second coffee bar for brewing demonstrations and an area where guests can watch workers rip open bags of raw coffee beans and see them roasted.
“The point was to make it as transparent and approachable as possible,” Kim said.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) is expected to miss the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump on Monday, bucking a trend among high-profile US technology leaders. Huang is visiting East Asia this week, as he typically does around the time of the Lunar New Year, a person familiar with the situation said. He has never previously attended a US presidential inauguration, said the person, who asked not to be identified, because the plans have not been announced. That makes Nvidia an exception among the most valuable technology companies, most of which are sending cofounders or CEOs to the event. That includes
INDUSTRY LEADER: TSMC aims to continue outperforming the industry’s growth and makes 2025 another strong growth year, chairman and CEO C.C. Wei says Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), a major chip supplier to Nvidia Corp and Apple Inc, yesterday said it aims to grow revenue by about 25 percent this year, driven by robust demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That means TSMC would continue to outpace the foundry industry’s 10 percent annual growth this year based on the chipmaker’s estimate. The chipmaker expects revenue from AI-related chips to double this year, extending a three-fold increase last year. The growth would quicken over the next five years at a compound annual growth rate of 45 percent, fueled by strong demand for the high-performance computing
RSS