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

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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

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Starbucks Corporation

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

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Over the weekend, Jon Liechty’s mom called with big news. She’d just gotten the COVID-19 vaccine, she told him, which meant she was closer to being able to finally meet her grandson. Liechty’s first child, Lennox, is now 8 months old but the pandemic has kept her from traveling from her home state to meet him. Now, that was about to change. She texted Liechty a photo of her getting the vaccine, her eyes teary with emotion.

Liechty was happy his mom had gotten a vaccine – but what he especially wanted to know was what her experience was like. How was her time in the post-vaccine observation area? At what point was she told about v-safe, the vaccination health checker app?

“She didn’t understand why I had all these questions about the process,” he said.

What he could not share with her then as it wasn’t public yet was that he was working around the clock leading a small, scrappy team from Starbucks to create models to support Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee and his health officials as they determine how to get vaccines into the arms of more people.

Starbucks chief executive officer Kevin Johnson reached out to Inslee earlier this month to offer the company’s support. Starbucks serves 100 million customers a week in 30,000 stores around the world. Could that expertise be useful in finding ways to move people more effectively through vaccination sites? Inslee said yes.

“This is a massive humanitarian effort that is going to take all of us working together,” Johnson said.

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On Monday afternoon, Inslee announced at a press conference the goal of increasing the number of vaccines given to people each day from around 15,000 to 45,000. While the state hasn’t been allocated that many doses yet, that’s expected to change in the months ahead. To help meet the goal of being able to deliver more vaccines, Inslee has formed the new Washington State Vaccine Command and Coordination Center, a statewide public-private partnership comprised of companies including Starbucks, Microsoft, Costco, Kaiser Permanente, other health care groups and government organizations.

“This is a massive effort and it takes everyone pulling on the rope to do this,” Inslee said during the press conference.

As part of the new group, Microsoft is lending its technology expertise and support while Costco is focused on vaccine delivery by pharmacies. Kaiser Permanente is responsible for planning and delivery of mass vaccine doses to providers.

Starbucks is focused on assisting with operational efficiency, developing models for vaccination centers that can be standardized and reproduced across the state and helping improve the patient experience.

“It’s the most streamlined Starbucks we’ll ever build,” said Liechty on Monday.&nbsp;&nbsp;

“It’s like a Starbucks with one product,” added Johnson.

The two were standing in a mock vaccine distribution site in the Starbucks <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/inside-the-tryer-center-the-starbucks-lab-where-anything-is-possible/">Tryer Center</a>, an experimental lab located in a 20,000 square foot space on the bottom floor of the company’s Seattle headquarters. It’s a place where Starbucks tests ideas for new store designs, workshops new beverages and improves systems, such as a Nitro Cold Brew dispenser that will fit in stores with limited space.

Johnson’s original idea for Tryer was to move “from idea to action in 100 days.” For the project to help triple the number of vaccines delivered to Washingtonians, it’s been less than 10 days.

‘Linked in the pursuit of doing good’

Shannon Garcia, senior vice president for U.S. operations, first heard a week and a half ago that Johnson was going to offer support to Inslee. She and her team quickly looked into how vaccination sites in Washington are currently operating. They also researched which states in the U.S. and which countries in the world are most effective at vaccinations, setting out to understand what makes them successful.

Soon after, she was on calls with Microsoft, the Washington State Department of Health and <a href="https://www.challengeseattle.com/">Challenge Seattle,</a> an alliance of chief executive officers working together to address local issues. &nbsp;

“We are linked in our pursuit of doing good,” said Garcia, who for the last year has been leading the retail crisis team, pulling together experts who could help stores adapt to COVID-19, prioritizing health and safety. “In some ways, this could be our highest calling. Our biggest hope is the ability to offer our expertise to truly nurture the human spirit in a way that pushes beyond coffee and food and get more accessibility to these vaccines.”

Garcia and her team all understand what is at stake. Nearly 24 million people in the United States have tested positive for COVID-19 and nearly 400,000 have died as of Monday afternoon.

Janice Waszak, director of the Tryer Center, was among those diagnosed early on in the pandemic after she became sick last March and had trouble breathing. “It was really terrifying not knowing what would happen,” she said. “Every time I hear about someone diagnosed my heart goes out to them.”

Although she and many other members of the team recognize this is an enormous challenge for Washington, and the country, with the need for all of us to try and find a way to contribute, she is proud to find a small way to serve, she said. “If our work can help more people get vaccines and stop COVID, it’s a big deal.”

On Saturday, several Starbucks partners spent the day at vaccination clinics to observe and talk to health workers about what is working and where the bottlenecks are in the process. The very next day, they created the mock vaccination station in the Tryer Center, building on what they’d learned.

The biggest problem to solve is actually the final step in vaccination. After getting a shot, people sit in an observation area for 15 minutes to be monitored for any adverse effects before they leave. But if the waiting area is full, the entire process grinds to a halt and no new people can be vaccinated.

Part of the bottleneck is that it’s self-monitored at most sites – and the person may not remember exactly what time they got the vaccine so they err on the side of staying a little longer. “People sit down and get on their phones and lose track of time,” Liechty said.

Some of the solutions the group working at Tryer came up with included giving people a slip that indicated the exact time they’d received their shot and having clocks placed prominently in waiting areas. Another idea is to send groups of people to the waiting area together as a socially distanced cohort that would be seated in the same row, then be dismissed together the same time. It’s similar to the idea of cars in line for a ferry.

Josh Kruger, operations manager at Tryer, said when the group observed a vaccine clinic, they saw one man in line for a vaccine FaceTiming with a relative asking her to translate a sign for him so he’d know where to go. The sign was in English and he spoke Mandarin. At Tryer, the group developed signs with symbols instead of words.

Monday, several groups of health workers rotated through to give their feedback on the flow of the mock vaccine site. One nurse mentioned that many arrive with a lot of anxiety because they don’t know what to expect. The group at Tryer had already devised a map to be given out with clear directions on what people can expect to happen.

When people arrive to be checked in for vaccines, if someone has a lot of questions, it can hold up the line. At Tryer, Starbucks partners proposed having two people at check-in stations: a “fast line” for those who just need to be registered and a “slow line” for those who might need answers.

The Starbucks team is working on three different models: vaccination clinics, drive-through clinics and mobile pop-ups to go to people in more rural or underserved areas.

Johnson said the team is approaching vaccination clinic designs as they would a barista working at a Starbucks bar, which involves &nbsp;asking the question: What do you need? “If you can shave off seconds or a minute, you can save on throughput and vaccinate more people,” he said.

With plans for more vaccination clinics to be opening around the state, including one on the Microsoft campus, Johnson wants to create standardized best practices that can be applied at all clinics and could scale up or down depending on need. Anything the company learns will be open source and available to anyone who might find it helpful.

And, just as when a customer places an order at Starbucks, Johnson wants to make sure those being vaccinated also feel cared for. “We understand we are not healthcare workers but we want to help provide a great human experience for those being vaccinated,” he said. “We want to provide comfort and care.”

Liechty hopes that with so many coming together to support this effort, this is the point where things start to turn around, where grandmothers, like his mom, can see their grandchildren and the economy could begin to safely reopen as more people are vaccinated. Nurses have told him they feel like they are playing defense. Some of the tools at Tryer, he hopes, will let them be on offense.

Johnson said most reports on COVID-19 begin with the number of new cases and the number of deaths. He hopes that soon reports will include the high numbers of people who have been vaccinated. “I hope we can help create some optimism in this time where we all really need it.”

Starbucks is using its expertise in serving customers quickly and efficiently to support Gov. Jay Inslee’s goal of safely deliverling more vaccines.

Starbucks joins effort to help speed COVID-19 vaccination delivery

Offering to serve: Starbucks joins effort to help speed COVID-19 vaccination delivery

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The coffee company is using its expertise in serving customers quickly and efficiently to support Washington State Gov. Jay Inslee’s goal of safely and equitably tripling the number of shots given per day for all Washington residents.

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It’s 7:15 a.m., a few days before Christmas, and Kevin Johnson is standing behind the counter at the Starbucks down the road from his Bellevue, Wash., home wearing a red apron.

A man steps forward. “Here you go,” the Starbucks chief executive officer says, holding out the coffee. “Have a good one.”

Johnson hangs out in his neighborhood Starbucks all the time, but today he is pitching in behind the counter for a couple of hours during the busy holiday season. For two hours, he’s a blur of activity, wiping tables and counters, chatting with regulars, offering hot chocolate samples, brewing coffee with the Clover machine and handing out orders.

“Mobile order for Jennifer?” Johnson calls. As he hands the woman her order, he smiles broadly, adding, “Enjoy your croissant. And your day.”

As Johnson hustles about, it’s clear there is something on his mind. He pauses periodically, taking it all in – the Starbucks partners greeting each customer who enters, the jazzy holiday music, the table of regulars reading newspapers, the handful of people scrolling on their smartphones as they wait at the end of the counter, the barista who calls, “Glenn, I’m starting on your Eggnog Latte” from behind the espresso machine.

A man in an Adidas track suit, presumably Glenn, looks up from his phone and smiles. 

“Every little thing matters,” Johnson says before picking up a tray of Cranberry Bliss samples and making his way around the store.

What’s on Johnson’s mind – what’s been heavily on his mind since he became ceo in April 2017 after the departure of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz – is a brain-bending swirl: the power and limits of technology, what it means to be human in a digital age and what all of that means for the future of Starbucks. 

The conundrum is this: With 31,000 stores worldwide and 400,000 partners serving 100 million customers a week, Johnson expected scale and complexity to be two of the company’s biggest challenges. As veteran of the tech industry, he also knows technology will figure heavily into the 49-year-old company’s success for the next 50 years. So, how does Starbucks balance the power of technology with the commitment to the company’s mission to nurture the human spirit? And can technology actually enhance the ability to lean into that mission?

Johnson’s more than three decades of experience at companies like IBM, Microsoft and Juniper Networks gave him a front-row seat for the explosive growth of digital devices, the creation of the mobile internet and the advent of cloud computing. It also perfectly prepared him to help usher Starbucks into a technology-rich second act.

There are now more than <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/02/05/smartphone-ownership-is-growing-rapidly-around-the-world-but-not-always-equally/">3 billion cell phone</a> users on the planet. Our lifestyles have changed dramatically in relationship to our mobile devices, and Johnson has noted the ways retailers have followed suit, leaning heavily into mobile, automation and digitization, sometimes even replacing brick-and-mortar experiences and human interactions entirely in the name of speed and convenience. Johnson has thought a lot about these changes and keeps going back to one word: experience.

For nearly 50 years, Starbucks has worked to create a special customer experience grounded in human connection -- the “romance” of coffee and hand-crafted beverages that all comes together in a comfortable third place, a place for community different than home or work, Johnson said.&nbsp; For the past five years, Starbucks has also continued to evolve in the form of elevating in-store experiences with mobile payment on the Starbucks app, now used by more than 17 million loyalty members; mobile ordering; drive -thru experiences and new beverage platforms such as nitro cold-brew. 

“In thinking about the two transformative elements of modern-day retail, it begins by creating unique and relevant experiences. If you can’t create a customer experience in your brick-and mortar store, an experience that goes beyond convenience, you’re just another node in the supply chain,” Johnson said. “And that in-store experience must then be extended to a digital mobile relationship.”

He strongly believes in the need to balance the need for convenience with the need for connection. The future winners in retail, he said, will be the businesses who do both well.

“I’ve seen firsthand the incredible power of technology and the positive impacts it has had on our world, whether it’s empowering people with information, enabling them to stay connected or creating business models,” Johnson said. “But it’s not until being here at Starbucks that I started to realize there’s another dimension to this.”

His time at Starbucks has given Johnson a different kind of front-row seat. As he spent hours and hours talking to partners and customers in stores all over the world and observing them interact, he saw the power in creating a warm, safe, welcoming environment and the positive impacts that could ripple out from even the tiniest moments of human interaction, such as acknowledging a customer when they walk in the door. He has also started to notice, with growing concern, that people seemed to be <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/">falling deeper and deeper into</a> their mobile devices.

“A few years ago, I was having dinner with my family at a restaurant and we looked at the table across from us, and there was a family of four sitting and having dinner together, and all four of them were looking down and engaged in their mobile devices, not talking to each other at all. They weren’t present in the moment and a light bulb kind of went off for me that day,” Johnson said. “After 32 years in tech, I was now in a business very much grounded around creating community in our stores that is grounded in human connection over coffee, which made me start to think about the world we live in today. A world that is supposedly more connected than ever, but in some ways, people seem to feel more isolated and lonely.”

Johnson believes it’s crucial to step back and examine these trends.

“This age of unparalleled digital connection has brought with it an age of <a href="https://fortune.com/2016/06/22/loneliness-is-a-modern-day-epidemic/">unprecedented human disconnection.</a> While technology has done many wonderful things, it’s also changed behaviors in a way where people don’t interact with one another nearly as much, which is unhealthy and I think is contributing to a global epidemic of human loneliness. I believe we are just beginning to see and understand the implications,” he said. “And I realize that serving 100 million customers a week at Starbucks means we have at least that many opportunities to enhance human connections and perhaps create that sense of community and a place where people feel more connected face-to-face with other people.”

Then came his “hold my coffee” moment. Starbucks would try to flip the script on the paradoxical relationship between humans and technology.

“Technology has done so much positive for the world, but it has contributed to some unhealthy outcomes as well. When it comes to enhancing human connection and enabling people to be present and feel a part of a community, I believe technology, if used in responsible and thoughtful ways, can also be the enabler of freeing up people to be more human and better serve humanity,” Johnson said.

He began talking to store managers and baristas about tasks that reduce the amount of time they have to really connect with each other and with customers in store – what was keeping them busy or isolated in the back room – and invited them to share their ideas about ways Starbucks could use technology to free up their time and allow them to focus more on connecting with customers. 

“Our partners know best what’s working, and they have great ideas about fixing what’s not,” Johnson said. “Everything we are doing is really to try to put them in the best position we can and to give them time back to connect more with each other and customers. That's what makes a job more rewarding.”

Johnson thought about how to best serve those customers who want to relax in the stores as well as the millions in a hurry who place mobile orders and hustle in to pick up their drinks. What parts of the Starbucks experience on both sides of the counter could be improved to create a better experience for both partners and customers? And how can the company offer brief but authentic moments of connection, even for customers on the run? And in a world where too often business success is measured by non-human factors, like productivity, operating income and revenue growth, how will Starbucks stay focused on the more important elements of its mission and values by staying human-centered in a way that’s good for business?

“At Starbucks, we have always believed that investing in our partners and creating the best possible experience for them leads directly to customer connection. Investments in the&nbsp;Starbucks partner experience is what creates that special customer experience, and that in turn drives our business success,” Johnson said. “I want to ensure we stay true to that approach. So we will pursue world-class technology, not just for the sake of technology, but in service of humanity and in support of our mission to inspire and nurture the human spirit one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.”

Is smartphoning the new smoking?

To help him think through answers to his questions, Johnson talked to disrupters and thought leaders from all over the company, including store partners. He’s also reached out to experts outside the company who have also been pondering human connection – people like Dr. Richard Davidson, a renowned neuroscientist who he met through a mutual friend. 

When Johnson invited Davidson to stop by Starbucks headquarters in Seattle for a chat three years ago, Davidson assumed it would be quick. Instead, the two spoke for more than an hour, and would have kept talking had Davidson not been on his way to the University of Washington to give a speech on how to cultivate well-being. Their conversation has been ongoing ever since.

“I was really inspired by his warm-hearted demeanor and his vision for the future of Starbucks,” said Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at University of Wisconsin–Madison and founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds. “It was obvious he’d been thinking a lot about these things.”

The two spoke about their careers, families and the increasingly complicated intersection of technology, humanity and well-being. They heartily agreed that one of the most dangerous parts about the relationships humans have built with their mobile devices is the idea that digital interactions are an acceptable substitution for real-life ones. 

“Human interaction is essential – as essential as food,” Davidson said. “We cannot thrive as human beings without connection.” 

With rates of loneliness, depression and suicide on the rise, Davidson believes our well-being, or the lack thereof, has become an urgent public health crisis not unlike when people started to realize the dangers of smoking. He said recent studies have shown <a href="https://www.newsmax.com/Health/health-news/lonliness-widespread-holidays/2018/12/19/id/895133/">76 percent of Americans</a> report moderate or significant levels of loneliness, and that <a href="https://www.webmd.com/balance/news/20180504/loneliness-rivals-obesity-smoking-as-health-risk">loneliness is a more reliable predictor of morbidity than obesity</a> two times over and has the same impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarette a day.

“The trends are very disturbing,” he said. “And there are relationships between things like distractibility and loneliness and the widespread availability of mobile devices. Loneliness is particularly interesting, because despite the fact that we are more connected than ever before in human history, rates of loneliness are skyrocketing. The problem is not the smart phone itself, but our relationship to the smart phone.”

Thinking like Johnson’s on how not to only combat loneliness but to use technology itself to help do that, he said, is a great place to start. 

“I love his vision,” he said. “To see an organization like Starbucks take something like this on is heartening to me. I think there’s so much good that can be done.”

Building a culture of humanity

The Tryer Center, <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/inside-the-tryer-center-the-starbucks-lab-where-anything-is-possible/">a space for innovation</a> on the first floor of the company’s headquarters in Seattle, has become an epicenter for exploring and experimenting with ways technology can make life better for the humans of Starbucks – partners and customers alike. The airy 20,000 square-foot space which, with its full-size store replica, cardboard drive-thru, 3D printers, equipment prototypes, movable walls, Post-It notes and neon signs, looks like a cross between a laboratory, a design firm and a dot-com startup.

Johnson encourages everyone at the company, from accountants to baristas to computer engineers, to participate. The key, Johnson said, is to think big but to work in small, agile, cross-functional teams. These teams move from idea to action in 100 days and learn and adapt along the way, versus rolling out more expensive and time-consuming pilot programs. Janice Waszak, director of the Tryer Center, leads the innovation happening there. 

“Everything we do at Tryer is in service of humans – of making ours the best jobs in retail, building connections with customers, and continuing to meet all requirements and challenges that come with our speed of service and customized beverages,” she said. “We’re looking at some of our company’s biggest, stickiest problems and trying to find ways to build win-win scenarios that help our partners and customers at the same time.” 

A scaled-down version of the Tryer Center went on the road to Chicago in September where 12,000 Starbucks managers and senior leaders gathered at the <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/top-10-moments-from-starbucks-leadership-experience-in-chicago/" target="_blank">Starbucks Leadership Experience in Chicago</a> to connect with each other and company leaders, attend workshops and envision the company’s future.

Over the course of a few days, hundreds sat down to sketch out their big ideas for the company. Waszak keeps all the sketches of ideas at Tryer to inspire the teams there.

Shalonda Jimenez, a district manager in Los Angeles, wants to see an after-hours mobile order and pickup window. Andy Minoie from Estero, Fla., dreamed up a real-time preview of customer orders so speedy baristas can get a jump-start on drinks. Jes Barrett of Whitby, Ontario in Canada, would like to welcome more automation to his store – not to take orders or make drinks, but for tasks like sweeping and mopping. Store managers Margo McCoy of Statesboro, Ga., and Adam Studer of Wauwatosa, Wisc., both had the same dream – an automated syrup dispensing gun similar to the one bartenders use for soda pop. 

“It was so nice to sit down with the partners in the Tryer Center and see my ideas take shape,” said McCoy. “As a long-term store manager [of 12 years], I have felt the shift in communication style and support for the field.&nbsp; I feel valued and heard, I love it.&nbsp;I think the Tryer center is really helping in this area.”

Waszak said store partners provide invaluable insight and ideas.

“There were lots of different hacks and wonderful ideas,” said Waszak. “Many of the ideas revolved around cleaning. We spend a lot of time in Tryer thinking about value-added work, and non-value-added work and how we can invent ways to free them from the latter. Cleaning is a great example of a non-value-added thing we ask partners to do, and a great place where some automation or technology could help solve some things.”

Waszak said using technology to find ways to simplify in-store tasks like cleaning, inventory or scheduling feels more important than ever because freeing partners up to connect with customers feels more urgent than ever.

“It’s more relevant than ever because of the state of retail today, but also the state of humanity overall. People are hungry for places that build human connection. It’s something that will never go out of style. I’m personally thrilled we’re going to continue to differentiate ourselves that way as a company in the future,” she said. “Everyone in the world is looking at ways to leverage technology, in particular AI and machine learning. That’s easy enough. What’s challenging, what requires true creativity, is how you do that in a way that stays true to the Starbucks mission and values of nurturing the human spirit.”

McCoy, the store manager, said she loves working for a company looking to support humanity with technology, and that changes like giving stores iPads and managers MacBooks and upgrades to the point-of-sale technology have already made her job easier.

 “I want Starbucks to thrive, and I think technology used as a vehicle to get us there can be a great goal,” McCoy said. “Anything that allows us to be more productive in the stores without taking away from the Starbucks experience is always welcome.&nbsp;As a nation and a world we are losing face-to-face interaction, so we need to be very protective and mindful of our impact in that arena.&nbsp;I tell my partners every day that our customers can get coffee anywhere, but our challenge is to create a fantastic experience each and every time. I think our human connection is what sets us apart from the retail crowd.” 

When people hear about technology and automation in the workplace, too often they can either zone out or start worrying their jobs are at risk. Johnson’s challenge is to help people understand that in his vision, it’s actually the opposite – he doesn’t want to replace people with robots, he wants to help them find ways to lean into their humanity.

It’s a vision that Johnson, Gerri Martin-Flickinger, Starbucks chief technology officer, and others have recently been evangelizing to the larger company. 

Martin-Flickinger, who studied artificial intelligence and machine learning in college, gave a lunchtime seminar in November to a standing-room-only crowd of Starbucks partners. Her goals, she said, were to demystify AI and machine learning, but also to make the topic more of a forethought for people at Starbucks headquarters, especially those outside her team. 

“We want to inspire you to walk out of here today thinking about AI and going, ‘Wow, I wonder how this could apply to my world,’” Martin-Flickinger said. “Not because we want you to go off and start programming machine learning algorithms, necessarily, but to start thinking about how this can change and enhance what you do every day. It’s all around us already.”

Martin-Flickinger believes AI is applicable to virtually every aspect of the business – technology, finance, legal, supply chain, marketing or retail stores. Whether AI is being used to help partners in stores and in departments across the Starbucks headquarters do their jobs better, to improve and radically personalize the customer experience or to simplify company operations, her team’s north star and Johnson’s vision are one and the same.

“We are working on technology that helps amplify the human connection,” she said. 

What, specifically, could that look like?&nbsp; With a technology initiative called Deep Brew, Starbucks is ideating and working on a broad suite of AI tools to help elevate every aspect of the business and the in-store and customer experience.&nbsp; 

AI will eventually help automate many aspects of store life, not as a fleet of sandwich-toasting, latte-making robots, but more like an invisible, super-smart sidekick to the humans wearing the green aprons. AI can help do the heavy lifting on processes like inventory, supply chain logistics and replenishment orders, saving partners time and making sure nobody runs out of Nitro Cold Brew or Banana Nut Bread. AI can help managers predict staffing needs and make schedules. AI can help anticipate equipment maintenance well before an oven or a blender goes on the fritz.

The kind of automation Johnson and Martin-Flickinger envision will be invisible to customers, except they may notice that Starbucks partners have more time to spend with them.&nbsp; 

Starbucks essentially is a company made up of 32,000 small businesses, each with its own ebb and flow and needs, Johnson said.

“Every store has its own personality. Every store has its own set of customers and its own set of characteristics, and AI can help us understand those individual store characteristics better,” he said. “If you try to run one algorithm for all stores, you'll make progress. That’s kind of what we’re doing now. But to really break through, you have to get down to the individual store level, and making sure we’re making it as easy as possible for each store manager to create the culture and the kind of human connection we aspire for where they are, because when we are able to do that – wow, we are at our best.” 

To help understand the unique needs of each store, Jon Francis, the company’s senior vice president of enterprise analytics, data science, research data and analytics, and his team have spent the past four years since he came to Starbucks analyzing the vast sea of data generated by the company and its customers. 

“We talk a lot about tenacity on our team. We’re trying to build a culture around perseverance and grit, because there’s so much potential in this but it doesn’t come overnight,” Francis said. “We’re trying to operate world-class tech, but we’re not a tech company. We’re not asking our data scientists to just go push the envelope to the bleeding edge. It’s always going to be bigger than that. It’s always going to be about more than just convenience and, ‘How do we sell more product?’ It’s about using these digital tools to elevate the analog human experience.”

Behind the counter and behind the scenes, each little boost from AI will help save time – time partners can then spend on the most important parts of Starbucks: customers and coffee. He believes these moments, even the smallest ones like saying hello to someone in an elevator, exchanging pleasantries with a fellow commuter or chatting with your barista as they prepare your latte, can be an antidote to loneliness and <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/07/26/744267015/want-to-feel-happier-today-try-talking-to-a-stranger" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">have a positive effect on our mood</a>.

For customers, AI can help provide a “radically personalized” and warm experience. Using AI in the Starbucks app or on the drive-thru menu will present customers with thoughtful, personalized choices based on their own preferences, but also on things like weather and time of day. With the explosive popularity of mobile ordering and delivery services, Starbucks is looking at how AI can help baristas make beverages in an order that takes the whole picture into account. For instance, if a store gets a digital order for four iced lattes but the customer is still 10 miles away, baristas might make other drinks first. 

Starbucks and its technology partners are currently working to develop a number of AI tools, some of which – like the drive-thru menu personalization options – will start rolling out as early as this year. Other concepts are still being explored, often literally from the ground up at the Tryer Center at Starbucks headquarters.

It’s the little things

All around the country, Starbucks partners are encouraged to meet customers where they are at. How that looks plays out in myriad different ways. 

When regular customer Catherine Miller, walks into her home store in Washington, D.C., each day, it means being greeted with a chorus of “Miss Cathy!” by the partners behind the counter. 

“On ‘Cheers,’ when Norm used to walk in and everyone would say, ‘Norm!’ – that’s the way it is here,” Miller said, beaming.

In Idaho Falls, Idaho, partners know that customer Sharalee Duplessis comes to Starbucks to “de-stress” from her intense job as a victims’ advocate, so they greet her warmly, then give her space to listen to her headphones and knit.

“I like how each of the people behind the counter recognize me, and talk to me, and treat me like I’m a human being,” Duplessis said. 

In Tulsa, Okla., Terry Kellam walked into a new Starbucks store to find a barista he’d known years earlier was the manager. 

“I had been going to a different store and came here when this one opened and Briana was like, ‘Hi! Your drink is an iced Americano!’ And I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s been like three years since I’ve seen you, and you still remember my drink?’” Kellam said. “It makes you feel great.”

Johnson feels strongly that, at a time when people can push a button on their phones and get everything from pants to pizza delivered to their doorstep, we cannot underestimate the power of moments and connections like these. 

At the end of his shift at his Bellevue neighborhood store, Johnson removes his red apron and sits for a moment before heading into his office. The Starbucks of the future – the one his 5-year-old grandson Camden will visit as an adult – will undoubtedly look different as the company and its customers continues to evolve. 

“But if we do it right, 50 years from now it will feel the same,” Johnson said. “We will use the best parts of technology to empower the best parts of our DNA.”

Beyond helping Starbucks partners find ways to more deeply connect with customers, Johnson and Davidson have been dreaming about another idea: what if, in turn, customers also were able to change how they interact with each other in the stores? 

Even staring down what he considers a public health crisis, the alarming statistics about the state of mental health in the world, Davidson, the neuroscientist, remains optimistic about our ability to balance things out – to <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_j_davidson_how_mindfulness_changes_the_emotional_life_of_our_brains_dec_2019">learn ways to change our relationship with technology and to cultivate well-being</a>.

“I have the conviction that if we spend even a short amount of time each day building better habits, as short a time as we spend brushing our teeth, this world would be a very different place,” he said.

Whether it’s being kind, making time for human connection or trying to build new habits, there’s strong scientific evidence that the little things add up, Davidson said. Given this, he can’t help but wonder – what would happen if even a portion of the 100 million customers a week at Starbucks decided to spend the minute or two while they waited for their order checking in with themselves or with the people around them?

“I really believe it’s possible to cultivate and scale well-being,” he said. “Kevin totally gets this. It’s one of the things I love about him.”

The worldwide statistics on mental health are sobering. Does Davidson really think one company speaking out about mental health and doubling down on human connection will make a difference?

&nbsp;“It can change the world,” Davidson said. “It can totally change the world.” 

AI for humanity: How Starbucks plans to use technology to nurture the human spirit - Starbucks Stories

AI for humanity: How Starbucks plans to use technology to nurture the human spirit

As many retailers lean into automation and replace human interactions with digital ones, Kevin Johnson is pursing another future – using technology to give baristas more time to connect with customers.

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How Starbucks plans to use technology to nurture the human spirit

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After 135 Starbucks partners submitted ideas on how to create greener stores, five were chosen to present to a panel of judges at the company’s new Tryer Center. The results? You may see some of them implemented at a store near you, part of ceo Kevin Johnson’s philosophy of taking an idea to action in 100 days.

On a recent afternoon, Ayako Wilson was standing next to a wooden pergola that hadn’t existed until the day before, in a center for innovation that hadn’t been built until a few months before, under a prototype for a solar panel that wasn’t real but could be, touting an idea that could change the future. 

And she was wearing really big sunglasses. 

Wilson was standing before a panel of judges in Starbucks’ Greener Stores Innovation Challenge – judges with the power to green-light – and fund -- partners’ ideas to help make Starbucks a more sustainable company.

Her proposal? Solar panels installed on the roofs of Starbucks to power the stores. “I was inspired by how farmers use solar panels in Japan,” said Wilson, a native of Japan and a Starbucks store manager in Burbank, Calif. 

At the end of the event, the panel of judges would vote on whether to approve – and fund – pilots for the ideas in a real-world setting. For Wilson’s team, the proposal was to fund solar panel installation at five Starbucks stores, with potentially more to be tested based on results.

Four other teams presented ideas such as a technology app that geolocates to help customers better understand what can be recycled or composted (including a way to contact local officials to advocate for more recycling infrastructure); reducing the carbon footprint by compacting trash created in stores, resulting in fewer trips by the garbage truck; making the operations of stores paperless; and a fee- or deposit-based reusable cup share program where customers can take their beverage home in a reusable cup and then return it on their next visit. 

The goal, said Kevin Johnson, Starbucks chief executive officer, as he kicked off the competition, is “How do we put a stake in the ground with a bolder vision around sustainability? How do we make stores more sustainable?”

The sustainability contest was designed to embrace a new way of working Starbucks is infusing throughout the company's culture.

“Idea to action in 100 days,” is the concept Johnson evangelizes. Have an idea, develop it and try and test it quickly. And then, you adapt, iterate and learn as you go. 

The physical embodiment of that philosophy is the newly opened <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/inside-the-tryer-center-the-starbucks-lab-where-anything-is-possible/">Tryer Center</a>, located on the ground floor of the Starbucks Support Center, the company’s Seattle headquarters. “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings,” says a sign outside the entrance of Tryer.

Inside the Tryer Center, the Starbucks lab where anything is possible

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Pass through the doors and you’ll see an open space with moveable walls, cardboard mock-ups of Starbucks stores, a 3-D printer, a space for fabricating and meeting and plentiful sticky notes for brainstorming. Tryer is home to idea development, iteration and dreams. The Tryer Center opened in November; some of the ideas born there are already being implemented in stores. 

It's in that spirit that the sustainability competition sprang from an idea by Suzanne Tedrow. She is the program manager for energy and sustainability at Starbucks. So, she spends a lot of her time working on how stores can become more sustainable; and who better to help to help think about that question than those who are in the stores every day? She decided to invite partners, both in the stores and at the Starbucks Support Center in Seattle, to submit their ideas via online portals. But then what? 

One day in December she was talking to Janice Waszak, director of the Tryer Center, about how the decision would be made about what might become reality. Waszak had an idea: What if it was done in a reality TV-style competition where judges voted on which ideas to fund? And what if they did it in the Tryer Center? 

“It’s a symbol of so much we are doing at Tryer,” said Waszak. “We’ve never done anything like this.” 

The five were flown to the SSC for four days last month and paired with a cross-functional team and a mentor who could help develop the ideas into a five-minute presentation to be given at the Greener Stores Innovation Challenge on the final day. 

A total of 135 ideas submitted, said Tedrow, who then grouped them into themes and socialized them with different business groups who helped assess how feasible they were and whether they’d make significant impact. Five were selected, including Wilson’s. Four other store managers were invited to participate based on their submissions or their engagement in the challenge: Alexa Stuck, from Littleton, Colo.; Gina Dullanty, of Ontario, Ore.; Anny Shepard, of Jacksonville, Fla.; and Haley Herrera, of Lacey, Wash.

The day before the challenge, as workers hustled to move Tryer’s walls to create a stage for the event, assemble walkways and position chairs, Wilson’s team cut and painted wood to build into a patio structure where the mock solar panel would be mounted. Other groups met in makeshift rooms working on PowerPoint presentations and putting together prototypes.

Solar panels are something Wilson, a 12-year partner, had been thinking about for a while, inspired by work her brother-in-law does for a non-profit bringing solar energy to places in the world without access to electricity. But figuring out how to take an idea and bring it to action in a feasible way that could potentially scale across thousands of stores is the real challenge.

Finding that magic formula is in Wilson’s DNA – or rather the DNA she married into. “Did I tell you my husband is a magician?” she asked during an interview. In addition to her husband, Greg Wilson, her in-laws, Mark and Nani Wilson, are pioneering magicians who created the first magic network television show in the 1960s. Now 90 and 88, until recently they taught magic at Los Angeles’ famed “Magic Castle,” an exclusive club for magicians and magic lovers.

When people learn that about her, they often ask her if she knows the secret to how the magic is done. It’s the wrong question, she said. Sometimes the secret of the trick is actually simple, but the way it’s executed, solving the problem of how to pull it off, that’s the hard part. That is where the magic actually happens.

“Problem solving is a key part of our house,” said Wilson. “How do we present things to people with a different perspective? That’s how we think.”

Recently, when her 3-year-old niece was visiting, Wilson noticed her looking at the recycling mark on a plastic bottle and the two of them talked about taking care of the environment. “We have to keep the Earth for kids,” Wilson said. “They have to have an Earth to live on.”

Wilson was inspired and knew that she wanted to be involved in helping sustainable solutions. But she needed a way to help pull it off. The Greener Stores Sustainability Challenge might provide the magic to make that happen. &nbsp;

On the day of the event, each of the groups took turns presenting their ideas to the standing room-only audience of several hundred, Starbucks ceo Johnson and the panel of judges: Roz Brewer, Starbucks chief operating officer; Andy Adams, senior vice president of store development; Hans Melotte, executive vice president of global supply chain; John Kelly, senior vice president of global public affairs and social impact; and Sheila Bonini, senior vice president of private sector engagement of the World Wildlife Fund.

After each presentation, the judges asked questions and then made their decisions. When Wilson and the solar team presented, they asked the judges to get up to look at the pergola and mock-up solar panel up close. Projected across the front of it were the words, “Part of something bigger.”

The competition “is an illustration of a cultural shift – and it’s happening in real time,” said Kelly, the judge. “We’re moving at a greater speed of urgency to resolve pain points for partners. Partners are on the front lines of doing the day to day work. This event at Tryer is a moment of listening intensely and then acting with urgency. It’s having the partners in the store coach and teach us.” 

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A more sustainable company, one reality TV-style competition at a time

Inside the Tryer Center, the Starbucks lab where anything is possible