The end of the Starbucks era – 03/11/2023 – Cozinha Bruta

Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee: it sells American culture.

Therefore, the failure of Brazilian network operators is not surprising. They blamed the pandemic and the abstract “Brazil cost”. The hypothesis of their own incompetence, nor the loss of relevance of the brand, did not occur to them.

We’ve had a robust coffee culture (pun intended) for 200 years. Starbucks offers us coffee with milk, literally and figuratively – something weak, without competitiveness.

The network founded in Seattle had fundamental importance in preaching the coffee gospel. He changed habits and taught coffee rudiments to millions of people in several countries, including Brazil.

When Starbucks began to expand in 1987, the coffee it drank in the United States spent all day in a heated glass teapot. Thin, light thing, made with inferior grains and roasted until they turn into charcoal.

This is still the standard American coffee, so bad that they serve it for free in roadside cafes. Starbucks won over the urban consumer with better beans and a supposedly cosmopolitan approach.

I spent a few months in California in 1992. At that time, both there and here, Italy invaded supermarkets in an unprecedented way: durum wheat pasta, canned tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, olive oils and preserves fascinated consumers accustomed to local junk.

It was cool to behave like an Italian, from a strictly food point of view. Drinking coffee is essential in this routine.

In Berkeley, near San Francisco, there was (and still is) a place called Caffè Strada. The staff of Italian students served the foreigners their country’s traditional fare: espresso, cappuccino, caffè macchiato, etc.

A degree of miscegenation was already noticeable. Strada sold, for example, a certain espresso doppio: double espresso, a cup of tea filled with strong coffee, something unthinkable in Italy.

The ultimate representative of the same trend, Starbucks mixed Italian coffee culture with the American obsession with sweet drinks in gigantic waxed paper cups.

Buy half a liter of frappuccino with hazelnut, vanilla, caramel, anything that disguises the taste of coffee. Grab that bucket of flavored milk and drink it in the car, while solving office cucumbers in the traffic jam. It’s the American way.

When Starbucks arrived in Brazil in 2006, no one knew about Arabica, medium roast, yellow bourbon, microlot, hario or French press. Roasted and poorly drawn espresso predominated.

Here too, Starbucks has raised the average coffee bar. And it was successful thanks to the incurable jealousy of the Brazilian, passionate about American franchises. It turns out that passions are fickle by nature.

Coffee has improved a lot in Brazil, but Starbucks hasn’t kept up.

What sealed the decline of the Brazilian operation, however, was easy internet anywhere. Starbucks stores serve American culture and Wi-Fi, a combination that has lost its shine and borogodó.

We have 4G and 5G. We have Minas Gerais cheese bread and cornmeal cake. We have delicious freshly brewed coffee. We don’t need Starbucks lattes anymore.

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