On a recent afternoon, innovation at Starbucks looked like a Grande Mocha Frappuccino®.

core/paragraph

It wasn’t the beverage itself that was so groundbreaking, but rather the way it was made. Typically, it takes a barista about 87 seconds and 16 steps to make the beverage. But this one took only 36 seconds and 13 steps, meaning the same, great-tasting beverage can be delivered faster to a customer while also providing a smoother experience for the barista.

The difference? A new proprietary Siren System that features a custom ice dispenser, milk-dispensing system and new, faster blenders all located within reach of a barista, reducing bending and heavy lifting. It also eliminates the need to move back and forth behind the service bar and eases congestion in a crowded, busy space.

core/gallery

It’s one of the tangible ways that the Starbucks Reinvention plan, <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2022/a-message-from-howard-schultz-the-next-chapter-of-starbucks-reinvention/">unveiled this summer</a>, is coming to life at the <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2021/starbucks-brews-up-a-recipe-for-making-retail-change-faster/">Tryer Center</a>, a 20,000 square foot engineering and innovation space on the first floor of the Starbucks Support Center, the company’s Seattle headquarters.

On Tuesday, during Starbucks Investor Day, the company is unveiling advancements in a host of areas, including coffee brewing technology, beverage and food productivity and digital experiences. The point of the Reinvention plan is a better Starbucks for the future, co-created with the input of all partners (employees) <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2022/reimagining-the-third-place-how-starbucks-is-evolving-its-store-experience/">to respond to the increasing demands and changing needs of customers</a>. For example, over the past few years, the number of cold beverages ordered has surpassed the number of hot drinks year-round. And, two in three drinks ordered have requested customizations such as extra espresso shots and flavorings.

In response, partners at Tryer are working to create a store that is both less stressful for retail partners and also more effortless and digitally connected for customers.

“There’s no better way or place to support the Starbucks Reinvention plan than here,” said Janice Waszak, the Tryer Center director. “We specifically built Tryer to help us rapidly innovate on big things and quickly bring them to market. The motto here is, ‘Idea to action in 100 days, or less.’”

Two dozen Seattle-area baristas with 173 years of collective store experience work at Tryer full-time, shoulder-to-shoulder with SSC partners creating and testing solutions.

“This model of co-creation and collaboration with store partners has been going on in Tryer since we opened the doors,” Waszak said. “It’s how we do our best work.”

core/heading

One key advancement is a more efficient cup of coffee. The Clover Vertica™, engineered for speed, will serve a freshly ground and brewed cup of coffee on demand in under 30 seconds. Each Clover Vertica is topped by six hoppers, which offer a variety of coffees all day, including decaf. And the brewers don’t require paper filters.

Currently, every 30 minutes, Starbucks store partners have to grind coffee beans, batch it in paper filters and brew. They throw away anything that’s unsold each half hour to meet quality and freshness standards. Starbucks serves more than 15 million brewed cups of coffee every month in the United States.

“This continual cycle of grind, batch, dump, do over is only one example of the repetitive work store partners do today that can be simplified,” said Amelia Landers, vice president, Business Strategy, Partner and Customer Solutions, who started at Starbucks more than 20 years ago as a barista in college.

The Clover Vertica brewers will begin rolling out to U.S. Starbucks stores within the next year.

Another labor-intensive task, one of the most painful that baristas shared, is producing cold brew coffee; it requires about 20 hours and 20 steps. Collectively, Starbucks spends about $50 million per year on labor to brew cold brew coffee.

The new Cold Pressed Technology, developed by Starbucks research and development team at Tryer, is a patented method of extracting coffee with low-pressure immersion, without even heating water. The result? Cold brew on demand, just four steps and available in a matter of seconds.

Beverage and food productivity

“Cold beverage builds are increasingly complex and time consuming, and the surge in volume has caused bottlenecks in Starbucks stores,” said John Culver, Starbucks group president, North America and chief operating officer.

In addition to being able to cut the time it takes to make a Frappuccino beverage by almost a third, the Siren System in early tests reduced the process for making a Grande Pink Drink from 52 seconds and 11 steps to just over 24 seconds and nine steps.

The Siren System will also help with food. Most breakfast sandwiches take approximately 65 to 85 seconds to individually warm in the ovens. Starbucks will now batch cook them instead and place them in a heated rack, or warming wall, next to the drive-thru window, which will help serve customers faster. The goal is to meaningfully reduce drive-thru and customer wait times.

The Reinvention plan also includes technology to make the customer experience at Starbucks more personalized and effortless, while also freeing up baristas to focus on creating more moments of connection.

Those advancements will include dedicated mobile order-only pickup lanes; a more personalized drive-thru experience that recognizes Starbucks Rewards customers and offers recommendations based on order histories; improved timing algorithms to create more accurate wait times on mobile orders; and effortless payment options where customers won’t have to pull out their credit card or even the Starbucks app.

“We are completely changing the experience for our partners. Better beverages, delivered more quickly, less strain on our partners,” Culver said. “With partners and coffee at our core, the Reinvention plan allows us to unlock opportunity and delivery growth for the future. Abundant growth.”

core/embed

At Starbucks Tryer Center, as part of the Reinvention plan, baristas and Starbucks Support Center teams create and test ideas to make stores more efficient.

Starbucks unveils innovations to smooth customer and barista experience

Stories to inspire and nurture the human spirit

Starbucks Stories

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2019/01/Photo_TBD-320x411_1-1.jpg

Starbucks Corporation

Recipe for reinvention: Starbucks unveils innovations for better customer, barista experiences

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2022/09/SBX20220913-Tryer-FeatureHorizontal2.jpg

https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2022/recipe-for-reinvention-starbucks-unveils-innovations-for-better-customer-barista-experiences/

twitter:card

twitter:description

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2022/09/SBX20220913-Tryer-FeatureHorizontal2-1024x498.jpg

twitter:image

twitter:title

The Tryer Center at Starbucks focuses on fast innovation, making day-to-day life easier for partners and elevating customer experiences, turning ideas into reality in as little as 100 days.

Traditional retailers now face a daunting array of challenges – from applying new and unfamiliar technologies, to meeting the rapidly evolving needs of customers and their employees, to navigating a retail landscape forever altered by a global pandemic.

Starbucks - whose employees are called “partners” - faces all those challenges and more. At the core of our response is the Tryer Center, an innovation laboratory designed to test innovations and then rapidly scale them on the frontlines of retail, where customer and partner loyalty must be earned every day. In Tryer, the emphasis is on fast innovation, making day-to-day life easier for partners and elevating customer experiences in as little as 100 days.

Named after a piece of coffee-roasting equipment (a “tryer”) used to test whether beans are fully roasted, <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/inside-the-tryer-center-the-starbucks-lab-where-anything-is-possible/">the Tryer Center</a> is a cross between a laboratory, a design firm, and a dot-com start-up. In a 20,000 square-foot space on the ground floor of the Starbucks Support Center (our Seattle headquarters), you’ll find cross-functional teams of Starbucks partners not only from the Support Center, but from retail stores, as well as senior leaders innovating on everything from products to processes to store designs. The Tryer Center’s moveable walls and working store components on wheels can all be arranged and rearranged in minutes. There’s even a working drive-through window. It is a place where we solve urgent problems, experiment with new technologies and pursue unconventional ideas, without fear of failure.

Hands-on innovation labs have long been common in technology companies, where if you fail to innovate you will soon fall hopelessly behind. Retail is now very much the same. So, we adapted the tech industry lab concept to help our retail company change faster. We believe this approach could be readily emulated to help all of retail change faster.

Wide range of practical innovations

The Tryer Center has hosted hundreds of projects over the past three years, scores of which have been successfully applied in Starbucks stores. Among them are a wide range of practical innovations that a hands-on center can create for the retail environment, including:

Product innovation. Offering new and exciting products has always been a key to engaging consumers. Tryer Center baristas are constantly creating new recipes for our Seattle-based partners to sample. Nitro Cold Brew was a particularly exciting new product that infuses nitrogen to produce a cold, creamy iced coffee without the need for ice. However, we knew roughly 15 percent of our U.S. company-operated stores had space constraints that would prevent the installation of Nitro Cold Brew equipment. A Tryer sprint team jumped on the problem to develop more flexible installation solutions in a simulated store. As a result, Nitro Cold Brew was soon available nationwide at Starbucks U.S. company-operated stores.

core/image

Starbucks is actively developing plant-based food items across our espresso, cold brew, refreshment and food platforms in response to rising customer demand and our company’s commitment to sustainability. In January 2020, a cross-functional team led by R&amp;D and Product built “Rev Kitchen” – a Tryer Center “pop up” experience that gave local partners the opportunity to order from a menu of meatless breakfast sandwiches, gluten-free oatmeal bites, a cauliflower cutlet wrap and other plant-based items, then provide feedback on product, packaging, presentation, preparation and the partner experience. In this way, Tryer Center experiences like Rev Kitchen can significantly compress the time required between product innovation, evaluation and in-store implementation.

Service innovation. COVID-19 social distancing mandates heavily impacted the traditional Starbucks Experience. Our stores have long provided a “third place” community for customers to be between home and work. The pandemic challenged us to honor that heritage while also demonstrating the courage to boldly re-imagine how we serve customers, navigating sudden change in customer needs and priorities, as well as evolving safety recommendations and regulations. To do this, Starbucks relied heavily on work by Tryer to rapidly roll out service models that would work in temporarily closed cafes, prioritizing health and safety for partners and customers.

Fortunately, we had a running start. In 2019, Starbucks operations, digital innovation and design teams worked at Tryer with baristas and store partners to rapidly design and test a new store format, optimized for mobile orders in dense, metro markets. An early prototype delivered a high volume of customer orders but did not give baristas enough space to work. It also limited their ability to interact personally with customers – a core component of the Starbucks Experience. The team embraced that feedback and immediately started over. In November 2019, our company opened the first-ever <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/new-starbucks-pickup-location-in-penn-plaza-opens-november-5/">Starbucks® Pickup store</a>, specifically designed for customers on-the-go, in New York City’s Penn Plaza, using the <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2020/how-to-pay-at-starbucks/">Starbucks® App</a> as the primary ordering and payment method for customers. This was a great leap forward in diversifying our store portfolio to provide experiences aligned with evolving customer needs. We will go on innovating to blend the traditional sit-and-stay cafe with on-the-go experiences.

Partner Experience. To support operations and design practical and seamless ways of working for stores, Tryer boasts a dedicated group of cross-functional partners, and a rotation of more than 20 partners from retail stores. The team’s efforts are focused on initiatives that improve the partner experience and reduce complexity. Designing partner-focused efforts in a simulated store environment unlock the ability for the company to quickly emulate and solve real-life challenges with practical and effective solutions as a result of collaboration between support center and store partners. Currently, Tryer’s test and learn approach is focused on several initiatives including store engine &amp; station layout redesigns, innovative store equipment and technology, and evolving operational roles and routines for Starbucks stores.

Crisis Response. In March 2020, soon after the burgeoning pandemic forced the temporary closure of ~4,000 company-operated Starbucks stores in the U.S. and Canada, Tryer partnered with our Operation Services team to quickly produce 18 videos that guided partners through the complete shutdown of all store equipment, a task they had never before been asked to complete. Subsequent Tryer Center videos supported store reopening efforts, with a focus on partner safety, to simplify the start-up process for partners. These videos were shot on a smartphone – embracing the Tryer Center’s scrappy style. Equipment engineers and facility team partners remotely supported video production through a Microsoft Teams live stream.

The Tryer Center shaped several other important responses to the COVID crisis:

core/list

Social Responsibility. Customers and talent alike are increasingly drawn to brands they perceive to be a force for good in the world. This is an expectation Starbucks strives to live up to in ways that go beyond what is expected. In that spirit, Starbucks and several other businesses, including Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente, joined forces with Jay Inslee, governor of Washington state, to establish the Washington State Vaccine Command and Coordination Center&nbsp;(WSVCCC), a public-private partnership to help with vaccine logistics.

In January 2021, a small team from Tryer jumped straight in, visiting early vaccination sites in Seattle and talking to health care workers to better understand how their operations were performing. They found that the pain points in the process were neither technical nor medical, but rather the logistics of people movement, communications, wayfinding and physical design of space – variables in which Starbucks excels at scale every day. Starbucks then used its Tryer Center <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2021/offering-to-serve-starbucks-joins-effort-to-help-speed-covid-19-vaccination-delivery/">to simulate vaccination sites</a> that could deliver optimum efficiency, throughput and patient experience.

The resulting insights helped accelerate the operations of several different models for vaccination including vaccination clinics, drive-through clinics and mobile pop-ups to reach people in rural and underserved areas.

Why the Tryer Center works

Mission focus. The Tryer Center is not about innovation for its own sake. We focus on developing and proving out practical ideas that are relevant to our partners, our customers, and our business.

Speed. We’ve gone from a long-cycle approach to innovation to one where our goal is to get from idea to action in just 100 days. That supercharges every project with a sense of urgency.

Hands on. Rather than relying on large teams working in silos, away from the settings where we actually serve customers, we now have small cross-functional teams of partners and leaders who come up with fresh ideas, try them out right away in the Tryer Center’s modular store setting, then rapidly improve on them until they are ready to implement in our stores.&nbsp;

Openness. Unlike many innovation labs, the Tryer Center is no walled garden. Its staff comes from all across the business, including baristas who split their time between the innovation hub and working behind the counter in stores. Partners around the world can also contribute via Springboard, a Starbucks innovation crowdsourcing website where they can vote on existing projects, make suggestions and offer up new ideas.

Fail safe. Every company says let’s fail fast to gain knowledge, but to do that, you have to create and maintain an environment in which it is psychologically safe for people to fail. The Tryer Center is a place where ideas are free to evolve and collide. This quickly reveals which ideas will actually work best in our stores.&nbsp;

The result? An innovation platform that can quickly overcome obstacles as they arise, while helping our global retail enterprise change even faster than today’s retail environment.

core/separator

Natarajan “Venkat” Venkatakrishnan is Starbucks vice president, Engineering - Equipment, Packaging, Processing and the Tryer Center.

Partners in green aprons working at lab tables

The Tryer Center at Starbucks focuses on fast innovation, making day-to-day life easier for partners and elevating customer experiences, turning ideas into reality in as little as 100 days.

Starbucks brews up a recipe for making retail change faster

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2021/10/SBX20211026-Tryer-Lab.jpg

https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2021/starbucks-brews-up-a-recipe-for-making-retail-change-faster/

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2021/10/SBX20211026-Tryer-Lab-1024x498.jpg

Tryer Center

Tryer Center - Starbucks Stories

Home

https://stories.starbucks.com/uploads/2019/01/Starbucks_Logo_Hi-res.jpg

https://stories.starbucks.com/tag/tryer-center/

English

Our aspiration is to be people positive—investing in humanity and the well-being of everyone we connect with, from our partners to coffee farmers to the customers in our stores and beyond.

People

Planet

Coffee is at our heart, inspiring our craft and driving innovation—in our drinks, our food, our stores and new ways we bring the Starbucks experience to you wherever you are.