Starbucked

by Taylor Clark

  Providing a world-class coffee snob with such a trea-sured memory is quite a feat, but the company doesn’t figure to repeat the accomplishment anytime soon. Over its years of expansion, Starbucks has jettisoned many of the quality-control standards that vaulted it to prominence in the first place. In the past, baristas crafted each espresso shot personally; Howard Schultz used to compare his employees to culinary artisans. Today, machines pull the shots. The company’s date-stamped paper bags of coffee beans gave way to plastic packages with indecipherable codes printed on the bottom to disguise the date of roasting. “When I first started working at Starbucks, a five-pound ‘bullet’ bag had a one-week sell-by date,” the Starbucks veteran Jana Oppenheimer, who now works for Portland’s Stumptown Coffee Roasters, told me. “Now, that same bag, which hasn’t advanced in technology at all, has nine months stamped on it.”

  So as the company’s prices continue climbing toward the stratosphere, the quality of its coffee isn’t keeping up. In a way, this is inevitable. “Look, when you have ten thousand stores to supply, how much quality coffee can you buy?” asked Alfred Peet. “There’s not that much good coffee in the world!” According to Peet’s reasoning, the vastness of the Starbucks empire makes it impossible to maintain the standards of times past. But, of course, Schultz is a firm believer in his company’s ability to achieve the impossible. He claims Starbucks hasn’t just maintained its quality levels but that the coffee is actually better now than ever. “I know we’re buying higher-quality coffee today than we ever have,” Schultz told me, offering a list of the areas where he thinks the company has improved. “The proprietary technology with which we roast the coffee in the plants, everything we do around freshness, blending, our standards, being able to age coffee now in the numbers that we are — there’s no doubt that the quality of the coffee has gotten better.” His marketing sense notwithstanding, Schultz likely does consider this statement absolutely true. “With Howard, I think it’s a sincere belief that despite all of the growth, the quality at Starbucks hasn’t gone down a bit over the years,” said Kevin Knox, Schultz’s former roasting expert. “They truly believe their own PR.”

  For years, gourmet coffee wonks have been engaged in a sort of tacit contest to see who can come up with the most acidic put-down of Starbucks’s coffee-roasting expertise. “In a company as large as Starbucks, you can find whatever you’re looking for,” Schultz’s former mentor Jerry Baldwin said, waiting a beat before adding, “except fresh coffee.” Of Starbucks’s drip brew, Peet said simply: “I detest it. The coffee talks to me. It says, ‘I wasn’t roasted too well.’ ” Many coffee novices have gotten in on the game too. “I accept that Starbucks coffee will taste burnt,” one Boston Herald writer quipped, “but if I’m handed a cup that’s actually on fire, I have the right to a free biscotti or a $20 bill, whichever is of greater value.” This last dig about the company’s beans is a common one. For as long as Starbucks has enjoyed the spotlight, people — customers included — have complained about its signature dark roast, nicknaming the company “Charbucks” and “Star-yucks.”

  To the coffee geeks, Starbucks’s ultra-dark beans and sugary concoctions are an affront to the art of coffee roasting. So-called third-wave roasters — quality-mad independents like Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland and Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago — want customers to think about their beans the way they would think of a fine wine, appreciating the coffee’s subtler characteristics. The practice of burying the flavor of the beans under hazelnut syrup and whole milk disturbs them the same way that mixing a few packets of Equal into a first-rate Bordeaux would offend an oenophile.

  But before we pile on the jabs, it’s important to understand what Starbucks is really trying to do with its coffee. The company didn’t build a forty-million-strong customer base by turning people into monocle-wearing, snifter-sipping dilettantes, nor does it aim to. Today, with its thousands of stores to supply and its forays into music and books to worry about, Starbucks wants to accomplish two coffee-related goals: keep people interested and turn out a consistent product.

  Starbucks’s focus on capturing the consumer’s attention traces back to the midnineties, when the colossal success of the Frappuccino amazed everyone, especially Schultz. Before, Schultz assumed Americans were snapping up Starbucks’s drinks because they hankered after a pure European coffee experience, but the Frappuccino’s popularity was evidence otherwise. Consumers just wanted luxury-priced caffeinated fun in their cups — what the coffee consultant Tim Castle calls “beverage entertainment.” Nobody cared that coffee aficionados sneered at the whipped cream and caramel they desired; people love sugar, and a beverage like the Toffee Nut Latte is a dessert they can order every morning. “You can look at Starbucks as a beverage theater, as opposed to a movie theater,” Castle said. “You come in for things that entertain you.” With this in mind, Starbucks unveils a slew of new drinks each season, many of them featuring flavors God surely never intended to see paired with coffee. As of a decade ago, no coffee drinker in history had ever looked down at his mug and said to himself, “You know what would make this so much better? Banana puree and coconut flakes!” Yet today we’ve witnessed not only the Banana Coconut Frappuccino, but also the Pumpkin Spice Latte, the Raspberry Mocha Chip Frappuccino, and the Eggnog Latte. Each is what Starbucks calls a “sophisticated coffee indulgence.”

  This widespread preference for sugary drinks raises an obvious question: if customers like sweet things, why would Starbucks deliberately produce bitter coffee? Indeed, Starbucks has made a fetish of its ultra-dark roast, even using it as a selling point. In a tour of the company’s roasting plant, the Starbucks coffee specialist Major Cohen once boasted to a Boston Herald reporter that “the black coffee beans are seconds from incinerating into cinders,” as if burning something to a carbonized crisp could only result in deliciousness. The dark roast is partly a product of tradition; Peet’s, the company’s spiritual forefather, still roasts quite dark as well. But some believe Starbucks has an ulterior motive in blackening its beans: the bitter coffee, they say, baits customers into buying milkier, higher-margin drinks. “I would guess they don’t want to sell just coffee,” explained Illy. “It’s too cheap. This aroma of burned stuff, they must do it on purpose, to make more money from syrup and milk. Otherwise, why would they do it?” Many have declared that Starbucks is “in the milk business,” and without a doubt, consumers are willing to pay a huge premium for hot milk — the more of it, the better. “When we at Peet’s finally joined the civilized world and came out with a twenty-ounce cup, that immediately became a third of our business,” Baldwin told me. “Do you know how much milk that is? I mean, one of those has more milk than I drink in a year.” Plus, customers still want to taste the coffee when they order an ounce of espresso in twenty ounces of milk, and nothing punches through better than dark-roasted beans.

  Consistency, Starbucks’s other major coffee priority, is nothing short of essential to the company’s appeal. With coffee, consumers want to know that what they’re buying will be decent; a bad cup of coffee can crack the fragile shell of modern contentment, destroying one’s day entirely. “People hate to gamble with this,” said Ward Barbee, the Fresh Cup publisher. “Americans are herd driven. We like everything to be the same. We know that if we go to another part of the country — Oh look! There’s a Starbucks! — you’re assured of getting the same thing.” Whether you’re in downtown Seattle, an office building in Dubai, or an airport in Japan, Schultz wants your cappuccino to taste exactly the same. Travelers in particular appreciate this focus on reliability. To the coffee drinker in unfamiliar territory, Starbucks looms like an oasis on the horizon; it means you’re assured of getting a consistent, passable cup.

  And nothing is better at producing a consistent product than a machine. The company’s transition from manual espresso machines to hyperefficient automatics, which pull precisely the same shot every time the barista hits a button, has been a quiet one. Understandably, Starb
ucks hasn’t been eager to contradict its claims about the importance of its “partners” by advertising that it has completely removed them from the drink-preparation process. But surprisingly, many coffee snobs applaud the new, bionic Starbucks. Since the company couldn’t possibly train every one of its 125,000 employees to pull a good shot, they say, mechanization ensures the consumer gets a steady “seven-out-of-ten” product, instead of a “nine” one day and a “three” the next. When I mentioned this assessment to Schultz, he looked pained. “I don’t know if that’s a good way of putting it,” he said. “We have to do everything we can to try to exceed the expectations of our customers. If waiting in line became such a burden, we had to find ways to accelerate that and be more efficient. And we believe one hundred percent that efficiency has not been compromised by quality.”

  That was an ill-timed slip — he obviously meant to say that quality has not been compromised by efficiency, not the other way around. But really, it doesn’t matter; reduced quality isn’t likely to sink Starbucks one inch. As its competitors know, the company’s sugary and consistent concoctions please the middlebrow, which is all that matters. “If you were to ask one hundred people in Portland at random what’s their favorite coffee shop, probably not more than a few would say Starbucks,” Jerome Conlon, the market research expert, told me. “But guess what?” He held up a Starbucks cup. “This is good enough.”

  The “Bitter Invention of Satan”

  Coffee fiends might fuss over the subtleties of a Kenya AA or a Sumatra Mandheling today, but for Europe’s earliest coffee drinkers, flavor and quality were beside the point; they first used coffee as a medicine — a cure-all wonder potion. A seventeenth-century Londoner, for example, would have come across an assortment of medical pamphlets claiming coffee cured everything from melancholy and measles to smallpox and the plague. And it wasn’t enough to merely drink the brew. Physicians administered coffee through a variety of methods far removed from the present-day “Starbucks Experience.” One technique, used to treat gastrointestinal distress, called for the patient to drink a mixture of coffee grounds, salad oil, melted butter, and honey, after which the physician would insert a yard-long whale bone called a provang down the victim’s throat and stir it around. That might sound archaic or plain crazy, but such things still happen today. One current homeopathic coffee booster is the pop singer Janet Jackson; in 1997, Jackson revealed to Newsweek that she had treated her chronic depression with a “coffee enema,” which she said helped “bring out the sad cells” in the liver.

  Despite its early fame as a universal remedy, coffee soon acquired precisely the opposite reputation — that of a poison. (Which maybe had something to do with widespread postprovang trauma.) This idea has lingered for the past three hundred years, even as coffee drinking became universal. The most common allegation against the bean was also the most subversive: that coffee caused impotence. * A group of London women played this charge to maximum effect in 1674, when they issued a public complaint about the continuing disappearance of Englishmen into coffee-houses. The petition, credited to “several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want,” declared that coffee had turned “the Ablest Performers in Christendom” suddenly limp. “To our unspeakable Grief,” they wrote, “we find of late a very sensible Decay of that true Old English Vigour; our Gallants being every way so Frenchified, that they are become meer Cock-sparrows, fluttering things that come on Sa sa, with a world of Fury, but are not able to stand to it, and in the very first Charge fall down flat before us.” (Since women were banned from London’s coffee-houses, this protest was more likely a deliberate low blow against men, so to speak, than a legitimate complaint.)

  Even scientific evidence of coffee’s harmlessness failed to fully redeem the beverage in the public mind. In the late eighteenth century, for instance, King Gustav III of Sweden concocted an ingenious experiment to test the toxicity of coffee and tea. Gustav commuted the death sentences of a pair of murderous twin brothers, ruling instead that they would serve life sentences as lab rats, with one twin drinking huge amounts of coffee each day and the other drinking the same amount of tea. The twin that died first, he reasoned, would be the one who had imbibed the more poisonous brew. Unfortunately, Gustav didn’t live to see the results: the tea drinker went first, at age eighty-three, followed by the coffee drinker, at eighty-eight — not bad, for the 1700s. Coffee also received a baptism of sorts, when Pope Clement VIII ignored calls from priests to ban this “bitter invention of Satan” and pronounced coffee not just acceptable for Catholic consumption, but “delicious” as well. Still, health concerns trickled down through the ages, with canny entrepreneurs taking full advantage. C. W. Post, the loony inventor of Grape-Nuts cereal, campaigned relentlessly against “coffee nerves” at the turn of the twentieth century, urging consumers to hop on the “road to Wellville” by replacing the brew with his powdered substitute, Postum. (Not that Post himself gave up the coffee habit.)

  Today, however, we worry not so much about coffee as we do about caffeine, the life-giving molecule that makes the drink go. On any given day in the United States, 80 percent of the population will consume some form of the drug, most commonly in coffee and soft drinks. For most of us, caffeine is even a part of our lives in the womb; in the developed world, the majority of babies are born with small amounts of it in their bloodstreams, from their mothers’ caffeine intake. In our modern, sleep-deprived world, we’ve come to rely on its invigorating powers for our very survival.

  Given the drug’s tyrannical sway over our physical and mental well-being, it should come as no surprise that many health activists regard caffeine (and by extension, coffee) as a biochemical villain that should be purged from our lives completely. * Of course, as Americans, we’re required to believe everything we like is killing us, yet caffeine still receives special scrutiny. Scientists and physicians conduct hundreds, if not thousands, of studies each year on caffeine’s effects, arriving at a bewildering — and often contradictory — array of conclusions: caffeine slightly decreases blood flow to the heart at high altitudes, yet it helps with endurance exercise; it boosts short-term memory, but it also causes tip-of-the-tongue moments of forgetfulness.

  With the constant flow of research results, caffeine scares are bound to pop up periodically. As one toxicologist put it to New Scientist magazine, “Somebody has published a paper linking coffee or caffeine with just about every disease known to man.” The charges generally don’t stick (obviously, since we’d all be dead by now if they were true), but a few were sufficiently terrifying to cause a dip in coffee consumption. The nastiest blow came in 1980, when a Food and Drug Administration researcher claimed to have found a connection between caffeine and birth defects in laboratory rats, putting a significant dent in coffee sales. (News reports neglected to mention that researchers had force-fed the rats the caffeine equivalent of two hundred cups of coffee all at once; subsequent studies with moderate doses cleared it of the birth defect charges.) It would seem that caffeine is, at the very least, a drug we should monitor closely and not devour with reckless abandon.

  The problem with this approach is that we actually have no clue how much caffeine we’re consuming. Here’s an illustration: next time you wander into a Starbucks, try to find out how much caffeine is in the drink you order — or any drink, for that matter. The baristas haven’t a clue, and the nutrition information pamphlets (which even show the iron and vitamin A content of every possible drink) never once mention caffeine. Then the information must be on the Starbucks Web site, right? But a search for the word caffeine on Starbucks.com yields zero matches. To find out the facts, you’d either have to call the company’s corporate headquarters or be pretty handy with search engines.

  And were you to scour the Internet for answers, the results might not buck up your spirits. The company’s official caffeine estimates state that each shot of espresso contains around 90 milligrams of caffeine, while a twelve-ounce drip coffee boasts 240 milli
grams. * But as a research team from the University of Florida discovered in 2003, these estimates don’t always line up with reality. When they tested the sixteen-ounce coffees they were served at a Gainesville Starbucks on several different dates, the caffeine numbers varied wildly: on one day, the cup contained 259 milligrams; on another, it contained more than double that — a tremendous 564 milligrams of high-grade stimulant.

  Bearing in mind findings like this, as well as the persistent health debate over the drug, Starbucks’s policy with regard to caffeine has been to pretend it doesn’t exist. Howard Schultz seldom lets the word caffeine pass his lips, and he has been curt with journalists who have asked about the issue, sometimes claiming to be totally unfamiliar with the idea that coffee could be harmful. One reason for this is obvious: Schultz has spent decades building up coffee as a beverage consisting primarily of passion and romance, with a touch of the human condition. What could be less romantic than a chemical called 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine?

  But the strategy is also puzzling, since caffeine’s presence in coffee is no secret; for most coffee lovers, it’s a major part of the drink’s allure. If consumers are harming themselves, they’re doing it willingly. So isn’t the appeal of caffeination too obvious to deny? In a memorable quote, a Starbucks roasting plant supervisor named Tom Walters offered another, more graphic version of this thought to National Geographic. “I’ve been asked not to make the connection between coffee and caffeine,” he said. “But we see a hell of a lot of caffeine around here. When you roast the beans, the caffeine forms a kind of fuzz on the roaster. So when we’re too busy to get a coffee break, some people just run a finger down the casing of the roaster and lick it, and get their jolt that way.” Put like this, the significance of caffeine is hard to ignore.