It just got more difficult to find a cup of coffee (and many other beverages) without Starbucks' imprint on it. The company vastly expanded its arrangement with an extension of its agreement with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, tripling the number of branded items made for Keurig single-serve coffee machines.

Starbucks saved analysts and journalists the trouble of evaluating the deal by calling it a "global single-serve coffee industry game changer" and a "win-win-win agreement for both companies and for premium coffee consumers around the world" in its press release.

Specifically, Starbucks will add new single-serve cup cartridges for Keurig machines under the Seattle's Best Coffee, Torrefazione Italia coffee, Teavana Teas and Starbucks Cocoa brands in addition to Starbucks branded coffees. Sales of Starbucks coffee K-Cup packs rose more than 75 percent in March compared with the prior year.Continue reading...

Starbucks is steering its brand to new heights and growing sales despite a number of global challenges, making its defensive pullback of a few years ago ever more of a distant memory.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz described for investors on Thursday advances ranging from an increased U.S. store count to solid customer response in Mumbai, and from a better-than-expected test of La Boulange bakery goods to rapid growth of its digital initiative.

He was bullish on about every count, even though slowing growth in China has hurt many other QSR chains and there were "unusual headwinds" in other markets such as the United States, he said, which was hurt by Super Storm Sandy.

Overall, Starbucks' fourth-quarter sales at same stores improved by 11 percent in China and the Asia-Pacific region, by 7 percent in the Americas and by 6 percent globally as a result of the company's aggressive international expansion and equally determined domestic growth initiatives, Shultz said.Continue reading...

Starbucks is facing increasing competition from all quarters, including Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's, so the giant of the coffee biz is hoping to increase its market share with innovative new products and brand extensions, with a major focus on mobile going forward.

On the brand extension front, the java giant just started selling its single-serve coffee and espresso maker Verismo online. The caffeinated masses are apparently into it. Cliff Burrows, president of the Americas for Starbucks, says that sales of the machine have “exceeded expectations.” Starbucks is now rolling the product out to 4,300 stores and should finish having them in place in the next few weeks.

“Innovation is so important to us,” Burrows told the Houston Chronicle. “In 2009 we introduced ready-brew instant coffee. This summer we introduced Refreshers, energy drinks made from green coffee extract. We make them hand-crafted, sell them in cans and as instant beverages. Our innovation is ongoing.”Continue reading...

Green Mountain Coffee is in a pot of trouble. And that's even before Starbucks introduces Verismo, its own single-serve brewing system for consumers that's rolling out in October (and already available on Verismo.com), to challenge the iconic K-Cup system by Green Mountain that features its Keurig pods. 

The brand has been a darling of consumers for several years, on a continued growth tear as K-Cups led a revolution in how Americans consume much of their coffee by making the single-serve system de rigeur in homes and offices. The company fed strong double-digit sales growth by continuing to proliferate the types of pods, to include "iced" drinks and juices as well as coffees and teas.

Green Mountain also had been a darling of investors seeking to cash in on a boom that, for the six years after the Vermont-based company acquired Keurig, managed to thrive without attracting the competitive interest of Starbucks.Continue reading...

Nestle appears to be right on trend with Nespresso, a single-cup espresso machine that is breaking out with its first U.S. television advertising breaking today. It'll have competition from a new single-cup espresso machine from Starbucks in the fall, under the Verismo brand, and from others.

But according to Larry Levin of SymphonyIRI, there's likely to be plenty of room for Nestle, Starbucks and more as the single-coffee-cup market continues to explode in America. Nine coffee and tea innovations, including six manufacturers of single-cup pods for Keurig and other machines, were among the most successful packaged-goods brands of last year as identified by Symphony IRI in its recently released 2011 New Product Pacesetters.Continue reading...

Talk about vertical integration! Starbucks is taking the concept to new heights — er, depths — with its announcement of the imminent introduction of its own machine to make single cups of coffee.

The product, named Verismo, will be launched soon and sold at some Starbucks stores as well as specialty retail locations right away and then more heavily marketed and sold in the fall. The machine was developed with Krueger, a German-based company, and it "combines Starbucks signature Espresso Roast and drink recipes with precise Swiss engineering and a patent-pending high pressure extraction capability," Starbucks said in a press release.

The move is yet another bid by Starbucks to broaden and deepen its franchise over the last couple of years. The company also today, in Amsterdam, was scheduled to open its first "concept shop" laboratory meant to imbue its retail outlets with more "local flavor." Inspired by concept stores in its hometown of Seattle, the new Amsterdam store features in-house-baked cookies, for instance, and will test other ideas. It's housed in an old bank vault in the city's historic Rembrandt square.Continue reading...