Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ: SBUX) made a brilliant acquisition when it acquired Teavana. The leader in coffee managed to acquire one of the most prominent names in tea retailing. What Teavana did not really have going for it was that its stores were specialty retail shops mostly in shopping malls rather than also being tea-drinking destinations like Starbucks is for coffee.
Starbucks has launched its first Teavana tea bar in New York City and you can go ahead and take it to the bank that other openings are coming soon elsewhere.
The first such Teavana Fine Teas + Tea Bar is in New York City’s Upper East Side. The company said that this Tea Bar “will elevate the premium tea experience by delivering a carefully curated assortment of handcrafted tea beverages, premium loose leaf teas, tea-inspired food offerings and beautifully made tea merchandise, making the ritual of tea more elevated and accessible for customers.”
Here is why you can count on this trend going higher and faster, and why we opined right at the start that Starbucks scored a home run with this acquisition. Starbucks has said that the interest in tea is up 16% just in the last five years. There is too much money on the table for Starbucks not to go after this market.
If you do not believe our theory that more Teavana stores will be opening up elsewhere, maybe Howard Schultz’s own words are enough to convince you. The new tea bar experience was called one “which will expand to additional stores over the course of the next year.”
The new Teavana stores will also have a range of food items with an aim of complementing tea flavors. This will include pastries and breakfast items, salads, flatbreads and small plates. Also mentioned were macaroons, shortbreads and other desserts to complement tea flavors. It is too bad that the word scone was never used once.
Get ready for more Teavana locations to pop up here and there throughout America in the next year. There are thousands of Starbucks locations around the world, 18,000 or more of them, so a few hundred new Teavana stores in the coming years is not out of the question at all.
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