location of a new series of shops designed to offer a more “immersive” experience for coffee lovers, according to Starbucks. The
first such roastery, which opened in Seattle in 2014, is about half its
size, CNN reported. The Shanghai location is the world’s largest
Starbucks. It includes three coffee bars, one of which clocks in at 88
feet long — the chain’s longest to date. The coffee bars will serve
brews made from beans grown in China’s Pu’er in Yunnan Province, USA
Today reported. A two-story, 40-ton copper cask towers over the store,
refilling the coffee bars’ various silos.As a nod to the local beverage
of choice, it also includes a tea bar made from 3-D printed materials,
and an in-house bakery employing more than 30 Chinese bakers and chefs,
the company stated. The experience seems curated to keep people milling
about the store.
It is the first Starbucks location to integrate augmented reality, which refers to technology that combines real-world surroundings with
tech, in this case the customers’ smartphones. They can point their
phones at various spots around the cavernous room to learn about the
coffee-brewing process. China might seem like an odd place to open the
world’s biggest and arguably most flashy Starbucks, given the country’s
traditional warm beverage has long been tea, not coffee. And, in fact,
Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz said the company struggled when
it opened its first store in China in 1999.We had to educate and teach
many Chinese about what coffee was — the coffee ritual, what a latte
was,” Schultz told CNN. “So in the early years, we did not make money.”
But now, the company is expanding in China faster than frothed milk.
Since 2016, it has been on pace to open an average of one new store
there every day for five years, CNN reported. In 2021, the company plans
to have almost 5,000 stores across the country. For comparison, there
were more than 11,100 Starbucks in America in 2012.
