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Starbucks is planning to open thousands more coffee shops around the world and make them more inviting places to linger, even as competitors focus on speedy drive-through and mobile order options.
The Seattle-based beverage and food chain intends to add more than 2,000 stores globally in fiscal 2028, chief financial officer Cathy Smith said at an investor event on Thursday.
That would be more than three times the sum planned this year and mark a return to growth after Starbucks shuttered hundreds of poorly performing stores in September.
In the US, Starbucks planned to build 400 new company-run stores in 2028 and was considering opening up to 5,000 more afterwards, said chief operating officer Mike Grams. The stores would be mainly in the central, southern and north-eastern regions.
In those areas Starbucks has encountered fierce new competition from coffee chains, including drive-through businesses such as 7 Brew and Dutch Bros, which sell drinks through tiny structures that are cheap and quick to build.
Starbucks pioneered the idea of a coffee house as a “third place”, a cosy refuge away from home and work where people can congregate over a beverage. Executives reaffirmed that function was at the core of Starbucks’ identity.
More than 60 per cent of Starbucks customers still entered its cafés to place their order cups of coffee, chief executive Brian Niccol told investors and analysts.
“Our cafés are our point of differentiation,” he said. “It creates a halo . . . If you walk into a place and there’s nobody sitting in the seats, or it’s a soulless place, you don’t feel great about what you just ordered.”
Smith said newly built coffee houses will be “omnichannel”, serving drive-through, mobile, deliveries and in-café orders, except for urban neighbourhoods where drive-through is impractical.
But Starbucks executives shared a new building format the company is calling the Ristretto, the name of a type of espresso shot that means “narrow” or “restricted” in Italian. The design is smaller than a typical café but still contains comfortable seats and a coffee bar.
Smith, in her presentation, said new coffee house designs would aim to cut the average building costs by about a fifth.
Starbucks has nearly 23,000 stores outside of the US. The company said it could nearly double that figure to about 40,000 locations.
The company expects the largest increase to be in China, where it projects adding 15,000-20,000 locations to the 8,000 it currently operates there.
Starbucks in November agreed to sell a majority stake in its China business to Boyu Capital, a private equity group. The sale would mean that 90 per cent of overseas Starbucks shops would be operated by licensees, compared with 55 per cent today, said Brady Brewer, chief executive of Starbucks International.
Executives offered long-term guidance for the first time since Niccol arrived as chief executive in late 2024, outlining plans to increase revenue by at least 5 per cent in 2028, with two to three percentage points coming from new stores.
The company forecast operating profit margins of 13.5-15 per cent, less than the performance from before the Covid-19 pandemic. In first-quarter earnings released on Wednesday, the company reported an operating margin of 9 per cent.