Dare we say this about our hometown Lolita, growing up too fast before our eyes? That she's always trying on new and tossing aside new outfits like a petulant and moody teenager? And where does she get the money? We don't dare ask; we're afraid it might sneaking out the upstairs window for furtive encounters with strangers.
Only yesterday, driving up E. Madison, we thought we spotted Uncle Howie sitting in the window at Healeo, the hippie health food spot, ingesting something he no doubt found nutritious, but he was gone by the time we found parking. We wanted to ask him: when did he make the decision that Starbucks should stop being a coffee company and start being a candy store?
While we're at it, we'd like to know if anyone has kept track: how many Global Concept Officers Howie has recruited, hired, trained, motivated, and sent out into the world to certain death? Do you know if they were they slaughtered or eaten alive? Have any ever returned from that Global Heart of Darkness?
But the past is prologue. First, this item from the NY Times:
Starbucks is taking on the thriving market for yogurt, teaming up with French dairy powerhouse Danone to create a line of yogurts that will be sold in the coffee company's stores and in grocery stores.
Yogurt! Well, I never. What is this? Penance? No, opportunity. Danone's ceo calls it a new sales channel and says he admires Starbucks for the way it interacts with its customer base of "70 million visitors a week." (Actual number: more like 60 million a month, but still impressive.)
If you've visited a supermarket lately, you'll find far more of the cold case devoted to yogurt than to any other dairy product except milk itself. Danone is right: yogurt needs more elbow room, especially to make room for the new "Greek" styles. I might personally wish for healthy yogurt rather than chalky, plastic goo flavored with icky-sweet artificial blueberries, but that's just the food snob in me, wondering why so many of today's picky eaters think they can eat themselves thin.
The new Starbucks/Danone yogurts will be part of Evolution Fresh, the juice-bar concept that our Lolita picked up (for $50 million) last year.
But before the yogurt gets to the stores, it's time for an update on two other product lines. First, the now-ten-year-old autumnal beverage known as PSL. Stands for Pumpkin Spice Latte. The Wall Street Journal describes it thus: "The pumpkin-spice sauce (note, not syrup, like most Starbucks drinks) made with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg spices, combines with steamed milk, espresso, whipped cream and a pumpkin-spice topping. But no actual pumpkin in the Pumpkin Spice Latte."
Everywhere else in the world, it goes on sale tomorrow; in Belltown, today! To me, it tasted like a warm pudding & pie filling, with a vague cinnamon aftertaste; no character, no vibrancy. But the drink has legions of fans and followers; I'm happy to let them have it to themselves.
Far better is the outcome of Starbucks big bet ($100 million) on La Boulange, a 122-unit chain of California bakeries created by a young Frenchman, Pascal Rigo. No more dry slices of pound cake! No more cold, greasy croissants! What Rigo figured out was how to bake croissants and sweet rolls, then freeze them so they wouldn't need preservatives. The individual pastries are reheated onsite in convection ovens. And they're pretty amazing.
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