Starbucks Heads to Italy With Luxury Roastery

The high-end Milan location will open in 2018.

March 01, 2017

SEATTLE – Starbucks is taking its time to craft Europe’s first high-end Roastery, the Seattle Times reports. Early in 2016, the company announced it would partner with Percassi, an Italian company, to open Italy’s first Starbucks store. However, the success of the Roastery in its hometown, coupled with other Roastery locations intended for New York City, Shanghai and Tokyo, halted those plans.

Starbucks now views opening a Roastery in Milan as a good first “quintessential experience in Italy,” said CEO and Chairman Howard Schultz. The 25,000-square-foot Milan Roastery will be located in a 100-year-old post office building. 

The Italian Roastery will feature Starbucks Reserve coffee beans, which it will roast onsite, and its premium, small-lot coffees brewed in coffee presses, pour-over and siphon methods. Food will be provided onsite by Princi, an Italian bakery business that Starbucks snapped up in 2016.

The Milan announcement highlights a shift in Starbucks’ focus from traditional stores to high-end locations. The company has stated its goal of opening between 20 and 30 Roasteries. At the Seattle Roastery, customers spend, on average, quadruple what they shell out at its traditional coffeehouse.

Starbucks will wait until after the Milan Roastery opens to map out its plans for other Italian locations. Historically, the company has opened between 10 and 12 units the first year in a new area.

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