Starbucks
Starbucks is an American coffee company headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest coffee chain in the world by revenue and by store count, operating roughly 40,990 locations across 87 countries and reporting US$37.18 billion in revenue for its 2025 financial year.12
Its relationship to this wiki is awkward in a way worth stating up front.
It is why the rest of this wiki has an audience. Almost nobody arrives at a Geisha microlot or a Best of Panama auction result without first having been taught, by somebody, that coffee is a thing you go somewhere to buy and might have an opinion about. Starbucks did that teaching at planetary scale — in the United States from the 1980s, and in China from 1999, where it spent nine unprofitable years building the demand that Luckin Coffee now monetises (see Starbucks China).
It is almost invisible in the record this wiki keeps. This wiki is built out of farm names, altitudes, varieties, processing methods, harvest years and cup scores. For a company that buys around three percent of all the coffee grown on earth, the published trail of those specifics is close to empty. Starbucks publishes a rulebook — C.A.F.E. Practices — and not results.
Key facts
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 30 March 1971, Pike Place Market, Seattle |
| Founders | Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, Gordon Bowker |
| Name | after Starbuck, the chief mate in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick |
| Originally sold | roasted whole beans and equipment — not drinks |
| Headquarters | Starbucks Center, Seattle, Washington |
| Listed | NASDAQ, ticker SBUX, IPO 26 June 1992 |
| Chief executive | Brian Niccol, from August 2024 |
| Stores | approx. 40,990 in 87 countries (2025) |
| Employees | approx. 381,000 |
| Revenue | US$37.18 billion (fiscal 2025) |
| Sourcing standard | C.A.F.E. Practices — its own, not an independent certification |
Founding facts are agreed across four sources of different provenance: the company’s own timeline, Britannica, HistoryLink and the public encyclopedic record. Scale and financial figures are 2025 snapshots and go stale fast — see the to-verify note below on why none of them could be read off a Starbucks filing from this machine.
It started as a bean shop
The thing most people get wrong about Starbucks is the first decade. The three founders — two teachers and a writer — opened a shop at Pike Place Market on 30 March 1971 to sell roasted whole beans, not espresso. You could not buy a latte there. For roughly ten years it was a retailer and wholesaler of green and roasted coffee, in the mould of the small-batch roasters that this wiki files under Equator Coffees or Sey Coffee — just earlier, and in a city with no coffee culture to speak of.
The name comes from Moby-Dick: Starbuck is the first mate of the Pequod. It was chosen for its nautical, Pacific Northwest ring rather than for any coffee meaning.
To verify — when Starbucks first served a drink
HistoryLink, a Washington State history project, is the only source consulted here that dates the transition: it states that the early stores sold beans only for about a decade, that the first store serving brewed coffee opened in 1982, and that the first espresso bar opened in 1984.3 The page returned HTTP 403 when fetched and could not be read directly, and no second source consulted gives these dates. The direction — beans first, drinks later — is corroborated by Britannica and the encyclopedic record; the specific years 1982 and 1984 are single-sourced.
The Schultz turn
Howard Schultz is the reason Starbucks is a café chain rather than a regional roaster. He joined the company in a marketing role, travelled to Italy, and came back convinced that the espresso bar — a room you stand or sit in, with a person making your drink — was the product. The existing owners disagreed, so he left and started his own chain, Il Giornale.
In 1987 the founders sold Starbucks to a group of investors led by Schultz. He merged it with Il Giornale, kept the Starbucks name, and began the expansion that produced everything since. Starbucks went public on NASDAQ on 26 June 1992, raising roughly US$25 million — enough to double the store count within two years. Schultz served as chief executive from 1986 to 2000, again from 2008 to 2017, and a third time as interim chief executive from 2022 to 2023; the company is now run by Brian Niccol, appointed in August 2024.
The idea Schultz imported has a name inside the company: the “third place” — somewhere that is neither home nor work, which you are welcome to occupy. That is what the Starbucks China note describes the company selling in its loss-making Chinese decade, and it is the thing that is hardest to defend against a rival selling a cup for under ten yuan with no room attached.
To verify — the year Schultz joined
The research brief, citing the encyclopedic record and HistoryLink, gives 1982 as the year Howard Schultz joined Starbucks. Britannica, fetched via the same brief, says only “the mid-1980s.” Neither could be confirmed against a Starbucks corporate source from this machine. The 1987 buyout is well-supported across all sources; the join date is not settled, so 1982 is not stated as fact above.
What Starbucks means for specialty coffee
Coffee people often sort the modern industry into waves — commodity tinned coffee, then the café chains, then the origin-obsessed roasters this wiki mostly covers. Starbucks is the middle one, and it is the middle one everywhere at once.
The practical consequences show up all over this wiki:
- It normalised paying more. The gap between a diner coffee and a four-dollar drink is a much larger psychological jump than the gap between that drink and a Geisha pour-over. Premiumisation describes this ladder from the demand side; Illy occupies the rung just above.
- It runs a private sourcing standard. C.A.F.E. Practices — Coffee and Farmer Equity — is a 200-plus-point checklist covering pay, water, forest and record-keeping, audited by outside firms but written, owned and finally judged by Starbucks. It is not an independent certification like the Rainforest Alliance frog. It turns up on farms this wiki covers: Carmen Estate in Panama holds it alongside Rainforest Alliance certification.
- It does origin development. Its Farmer Support Centers give free agronomy advice to growers; the first in Asia opened in Pu’er, Yunnan, in 2012, and is the main reason Chinese arabica has an international reputation at all.
- It is absent from the auction record. Nothing consulted here shows Starbucks bidding at Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence or any comparable green-coffee auction, and no Q Grader-verified score is published for a Starbucks lot. Its premium format — Starbucks Reserve roasteries and bars — sells room, ritual and brew method rather than named lots with numbers attached.
That last point is the one to hold onto. Starbucks buys about three percent of the world’s coffee from more than 400,000 farmers in more than 30 countries — its own figure, confirmed on the C.A.F.E. Practices note4 — and publishes no farm names, no altitudes, no varieties, no processing methods and no scores for any of it. It shapes more farm behaviour than every competition in this wiki combined, entirely off the record.
To verify — the 2015 Nicaraguan Laurina lot
The Laurina note in this wiki records a claim, from a single blog, that Starbucks sold a limited Nicaraguan Laurina lot in 2015 and that this raised the low-caffeine variety’s profile.5 Nothing in the sources consulted for this note corroborates it. If true it would be the only named single-variety specialty lot attributable to Starbucks anywhere in this wiki, which is exactly why it should not be repeated until a second source confirms it.
What the research on this topic did not find
The research brief behind this note was asked for the things this wiki normally records — competition results, cupping scores, prices, buyers, altitudes, processing — and found none of them, because those fields describe a coffee lot and “Starbucks” is a company. That absence is not a gap in the research; it is the finding. A reader looking for a Starbucks entry in an auction results table will not find one.
To verify — every scale figure here is second-hand
Starbucks’ own corporate domains blocked automated access: the official company timeline PDF, the
about.starbucks.comabout page and the corporate newsroom all returned HTTP 403,67 as did Britannica and HistoryLink.8 The store count, country count, employee count, revenue and CEO above therefore come from the public encyclopedic record and a financial data aggregator, which agree with each other on revenue, exchange, CEO and IPO date but are not primary filings. Separately, the Starbucks China note records an unresolved conflict in the same numbers: Starbucks China’s own site claims 8,000 mainland stores where the encyclopedic record gives roughly 6,975. Treat all counts as approximate and dated.
Related
- Starbucks Reserve — its premium sub-brand: the roasteries, bars and small-batch coffees
- Peet’s Coffee · Alfred Peet — where Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl and Gordon Bowker learned to roast, and the man who taught them; the company Baldwin kept when he sold Starbucks in 1987
- Howard Schultz — the executive who turned it from a bean shop into a café chain
- Starbucks China — the mainland arm, its largest market outside the US, now passing to majority private-equity control
- C.A.F.E. Practices — the company’s own sourcing rulebook, in full
- Conservation International — the NGO that co-wrote that rulebook with Starbucks in 2004
- Luckin Coffee · Cotti Coffee · 7Fresh Coffee · China coffee market — the price war it is losing in China
- Illy · Premiumisation — the rung above it, and the ladder both sit on
- Rainforest Alliance · B Corporation certification · Sustainable Agriculture Network — the independent schemes C.A.F.E. Practices is not
- Carmen Estate — a Panamanian farm carrying the C.A.F.E. Practices mark
- Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence · Coffee scoring · Cupping · Q Grader — the published-results world Starbucks stays out of
- Equator Coffees · Sey Coffee · Proud Mary Coffee — roasters of the kind Starbucks was for its first decade
- Laurina · Geisha
Official links
- Official site — Starbucks Corporation
- Official site — Starbucks corporate (About Us and newsroom)
- Official site — Starbucks Investor Relations