If I had a nickel for every time someone asked that question….well, I’d have a lot of nickels. The answer in short is that Starbucks will be the Starbucks of tea. And they should be. And we should embrace this. And they have officially begun to take their rightful place as the largest tea chain in the world.
In early 1999, the news broke that Starbucks had acquired Tazo, an Oregon-based specialty tea company. They have invested significantly in the development of the brand and in 2007 inked a deal for distribution of Tazo through Kraft to increase sales of its packaged tea and in late 2008, announced that through its existing partnership with Pepsi, it would increase distribution of its ready-to-drink Tazo products.
Also in the past year, Starbucks has undergone a corporate mid-life crisis and even closed all of its US stores for a few hours to retrain its staff. They have also announced the closing of a number of locations permanently, possibly showing a slowing in the specialty coffee boom that started in the early-nineties. I have little doubt that they have internally developed a chain tea room concept built around the Tazo brand, but regardless if that is ever realized, they already have begun making their existing retail locations mainstream tea havens.
This weekend, Starbucks rolled out a well thought out promotion on tea with a number of new tea concoctions, titled Tazo Tea Lattes and Tazo Tea Infusions. They have put up promotion signage at every store and spared no expense with marketing such as an insert in USA Today offering a coupon for a free cup of tea. If there is a Starbucks location near you (which there is a 99.282% probability there is), I strongly recommend you stop in and check out the action. I would encourage you to also post a reply to this blog with how many people you saw ordering tea versus coffee.
While some tea purists may wince at the creativity of their tea concoctions, don’t. They are doing a tremendous service to the tea industry as a whole and are putting our beloved beverage into the mainstream of American culture. I expect their success with this program will result in further product development and retail focus on tea. It will undeniably increase the number of tea consumers in the country. And for this reason, this should be viewed as an incredibly opportunity for all tea retailers as Starbucks has created a huge gateway to increasing our customer base.

Popularity: 100% [?]