How Starbucks Became a Sugary Teen Emporium
Selling cold, sugary beverages to middle and high schoolers wasn’t exactly the original vision when Schultz opened his first coffeehouse, Il Giornale, modeled after Milan’s espresso bars, in 1985. But he eventually discovered that catering to the tastes of the American masses would require veering further and further away from that quaint concept. While the vast majority of customers today are adults, Starbucks Corp. also sells a whole lot of sugar and caffeine to tweens and teens. What was begun reluctantly has evolved into a concerted effort to court young people that permeates product development and marketing in a strategic effort to create lifelong customers. “That is very much a long-term game,” says Robert Byrne of market-research firm Technomic.
Chains such as McDonald’s Corp. have long drawn the ire of public-health advocates for using cartoonish mascots and cheap plastic toys to lure families with young children into consuming high-sugar, high-calorie foods. But Starbucks, which now has more US locations than the Golden Arches, has eschewed some of the more overt techniques and has aimed slightly older, allowing it to mostly bypass such criticism, even as it’s morphed from a coveted third space for upper-middle-class professionals into a teen emporium. In recent years, Starbucks executives boasted that Gen Z had the highest “brand love” for the coffee chain of any cohort. Greenlight, a debit card company for kids, mostly age 5 to 18, says Starbucks was the fifth-most popular destination for their cardholders last year, falling behind only Amazon.com, Target, Apple and McDonald’s. Starbucks gift cards are also the top food or restaurant cards for teens, ahead of both Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s, according to market-research group KidSay.
“It is unquestionably ‘the destination’ ” for kids between classes or after school, says Byrne. The habit has been handed down from parents shuttling children from school to soccer to wherever else and reinforced by social media as they get older. Then it gets bankrolled by parents when kids are allowed their first phone as young as age 9, often loaded with ordering apps, according to Technomic research. Dana Pellicano, Starbucks’ head of product experience, says parents “want to enable their kids to very easily load up a Starbucks gift card and empower their kids to go in and get something that they believe might be good afternoon fuel.”
Starbucks said it doesn’t share what percentage of its sales are attributable to customers under 18, but the menu is increasingly catering to Gen Z. Cold drinks, which are generally favored by younger customers, according to Starbucks, have consistently accounted for about 70% of the chain’s beverage sales for at least the last three years. “The younger you go, the colder the beverage,” then-Chief Marketing Officer Brady Brewer said in 2022 of the larger industry trend (he’s now the company’s head of international).
As the cold-beverage arms race has heated up in recent years, Starbucks has faced increased competition. Boba tea cafes populate strip malls and city corners, burger spots like Jack in the Box peddle iced churro Creamaccinos, and culty brands including Celsius energy drinks are all the rage at CVS and Target (the latter of which also houses more than 1,700 in-store Starbucks cafes). All that is probably why Starbucks’ newest offerings are only getting more frilly and far-out: brightly colored sparkling energy drinks, iced lavender cream oat milk matcha, neon concoctions with boba-tea-inspired pearls.