A few weeks ago Starbucks introduced a “La Boulange” of bakery items within their stores. For some time now Starbucks has attempted to crack into food items within their stores to mixed success amid reviews of slow cooking times, smelly stores and questionable quality and health content. La Boulange was a $100M Starbucks acquisition of the bakery chain last year and began rolling out to stores roughly two weeks ago.
Unfortunately, the addition of La Boulange food and branding has been jarring at best, and the food quality has appeared to take a fairly steep dive. Customers began noticing the branding (which had a different font and language set) and color scheme immediately, and reactions on social media were generally negative. Starbucks did a good job of preserving the core of the San Francisco brand, but what came across as a charming boutique for the metro city feels out of place in other regions.
Starbucks has done a great job of cultivating a warm, friendly atmosphere with a nudge toward efficiency and tech. Warm colors, cozy (but not too cozy) couches invite customers to come in, stay if they want to… but moreso encourage them to quickly get their coffee and leave. The structure Starbucks cultivates is fast food, but in an inviting atmosphere.
La Boulange brings a pink and black color scheme to the classic green and brown Starbucks design. This is odd by itself, since La Boulange has a blue and orange palette, and then adding the fancy serif font to Starbucks clean, san-serif fonts makes the whole experience feel jarring. In addition, the pink and green combination isn’t a pleasing one, and it turns the formerly warm atmosphere into a mishmash of conflicting colors.
The there’s the food itself. The immediate impact is that the food size has shrunk while the pricing has increased. With miniature flags and descriptions, everything looks and feels tiny. Comfort food transformed into formed loafs and miniature biscuits; giving the feel of heavily manipulated snack items. Also, it may be a training issue, but the staff within the stores are now telling customers that the bakery items “must be warmed, or they taste terrible”. Hearing that the food you’re buying is going to taste bad in any form isn’t really what anyone wants to hear… sure, it’s reasonable that some food needs to be warmed up to be digested, but you don’t generally apply that standard to bakery items.
For what it’s worth, from my personal experience the Croissant and Danish were big steps backward from the previous food Starbucks offered. Perhaps it’s simply an integration issue that will quickly work itself out over time. In the past Starbucks has generally stumbled on their food but quickly recovered; there’s no reason we shouldn’t expect this to improve rapidly. The branding merger is a more confusing problem; Starbucks has generally been very protective of their brand and this integration has been surprisingly clumsy.
Looming in the future is the merger of the Teavana brand, which is expected to be much smoother and a more natural fit into their offerings. In general adding the tea options will fit more easily into their menu and Teavana’s brand and coloring uses the same philosophy as Starbucks, so if anything the integration might fly too much under the radar. Time will tell.
