Starbucks to Team Up with Coinstar

Gourmet coffee giant Starbucks and automated coin-counting company Coinstar Inc. have teamed up to test an automated coffee machine under the Starbucks Seattle's Best Coffee label.

A Coinstar spokeswoman, confirmed the partnership late yesterday but would give few details about the test, such as when it started or where the machines are. She said financial details have not been disclosed.

A description of a prototype machine, along with a picture, is included in a report published Wednesday by Eric Wold, an analyst for Merriman Curhan Ford. In the report, Wold said that the machine is located near an Albertson's store in Bellevue, Wash., which is where Coinstar is based.

Coinstar is known for its network of automated coin-counting machines in supermarkets, malls, airports and other public locations in the U.S. and some foreign countries. Starbucks has said it is interested in developing an automated coffee machine, and even published a picture of one at an analyst meeting several years ago.

The picture published in Wold's report shows a kiosk with the logo of Seattle's Best Coffee, a brand owned by Starbucks. Wold said the kiosk allows customers to purchase anything from a regular cup of coffee to specialized espresso drinks, with prices ranging from $1.30 to $2.55. Wold said he believes the kiosk could provide Starbucks with "the ability to penetrate additional third-party locations with both lower upfront capital costs and ongoing operating costs." Wold said if the prototype develops into an operating business, field service maintenance could likely be provided by Coinstar's existing coin-counting field service team.

Source: Dow Jones

Starbucks has sites on Bulgaria and Portugal

Starbucks plans to open coffee houses in Bulgaria and Portugal next year. The first Bulgarian store will open in the capital city of Sofia, and the first store in Portugal is expected to open in Lisbon, the Seattle-based coffee chain said on Wednesday.

The company did not specify when the stores will open in 2008. Starbucks will work with joint-venture partners in Greece and Spain that help run the company's coffee houses in several other European countries. Its Bulgaria stores will be operated with Athens-based Marinopoulos Group, Starbucks' partner for stores in Greece, Cyprus, Romania, Switzerland and Austria. The expansion into Portugal will fall under Starbucks' partnership with Madrid-based Grupo VIPS, which helps run stores in Spain and France.

Starbucks has more than 15,000 coffee shops worldwide, about 4,300 of them in 42 markets outside the United States.

Source: Dow Jones

Life Before Lattes

By TAYLOR CLARK
Published: December 16, 2007

Nearly a century ago, mankind discovered the secrets of the perfect cup of coffee.

These eternal truths revealed themselves not through ghostly messages in the steam of a Wisconsin secretary's cup of Yuban, but instead through a modern-day prophet of foodstuffs: Samuel Cate Prescott, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who, in the first decades of the twentieth century, was one of the world's top food scientists. Prescott liked to imagine a future in which scientific analysis would make foods not just safer but ideal. A contemporary Boston Daily Advertiser story on him even predicted that one day, thanks to his efforts, the "application of growth-producing rays will bring forth cows the size of brontosauri, roosters the size of pterodactyls."

In 1920, Prescott's talents attracted the attention of the National Coffee Roasters Association, a group that had long been searching for a novel way to boost sluggish coffee sales. After bankrolling a string of ineffective publicity campaigns, the roasters decided it was time for a shift in tactics; coffee, they concluded, needed "a college education." Thus inspired, they issued Prescott a challenge: their group would build and staff a state-of-the-art coffee research laboratory for him at MIT if he would devote himself to uncovering the scientifically exact principles for creating the ultimate coffee elixir. Prescott accepted the mission. Armed with the very latest in beaker and Bunsen burner technology, he set out to bring coffee's Platonic ideal down to earth.

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Specialty coffees become the new wine

Trend perks up sales of single-cup machines that use high-end beans and pre-packaged pods

Dec 15, 2007 04:30 AM

Vicky Sanderson
Special to The Star

Matthew Lee isn't surprised that Torontonians recently lined up to pay $220 for a pound of Esmerelda coffee beans, a coveted bean variety from Panama that's often described as having "notes" of jasmine and bergamot. It's reflective, he says, of coffee's elevated status as "the new wine."

"Over the last five years, people are really interested in specialty foods and drinks rather than the regular types that they have been used to," says Lee, who owns Manic Coffee (426 College St., 416-966-3888), a gourmet coffee shop that will begin offering brewing classes and coffee "tastings" in the new year.

Increasingly sophisticated coffee drinkers are developing highly particular tastes for favourite brews and blends. That trend is fuelling sales of single-cup coffee makers, which use either beans, ground coffee or pre-packaged pods.

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Gimme! Coffee

Some say the key to a successful operation is just having a good product while others expect that a well-hyped and deliciously packaged product is the goal. And while I do know a couple places that do thrive on just one of those criteria, obviously a business that masters both is going places.

In my opinion, Gimme! Coffee must be the Northeast poster child of such dual success. I've seen more plugs/ads/publicity for Gimme! coffee (they roast their own) and espresso (apparently they have some strong mastery) then any other nearby operation, and for seemingly good reason as I've heard nothing but positive things from lots of credible sources. The only negative thing I read was that they really like to roast dark, which could be good (if they know what they're doing) or bad (if they purvey nothing but charred oiliness).

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