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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

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Winter Is Coming for Outdoor Dining, So Get Going With Off-Premises

In further proof that you can’t solve the current restaurant industry crisis by flipping a switch, Upserve released new data this week that shows many restaurants are still struggling with off-premises formats.

Upserve’s survey polled 421 players across different types of restaurants, including full-service/dine-in, fast casual, QSRs, and fine dining, among others. The big takeaway? More than half (64 percent) of restaurants feel “optimistic” about the future, but nearly half (47 percent) struggle with shifting their business models to online ordering and the formats that come with it.

We’ve seen this play out in real time for better and for worse throughout the last several months. Restaurants historically focused on dine-in service have had to pivot to delivery and curbside pickup, not to mention find affordable tech solutions that could enable online ordering. Businesses have struggled to master off-premises operations. They’ve gotten really creative with ad hoc tech stacks and worked much harder to communicate with their customers. And most all of them have seen a rise in off-premises orders. Upserve’s report said that as of July, its restaurant customers “have seen a 782.7% increase in Online Order sales volume growth.”

But Upserve also points out that autumn is practically upon us, and once colder weather comes, the option for outdoor seating will go away, not just for its own customers but for everyone. “It’s key that restaurants find an online ordering solution that works for their customers by the fall,” the report said.

The call to action for all restaurants right now is to get their off-premises strategies fine-tuned, streamlined, and operationally efficient, regardless of the trajectory of the pandemic or the future of indoor dining. Even if indoor dining returns in some form close to what we used to know, its chances of unseating off-premises at this point are slim to none.

Here’s Why Delivery Price Hikes By QSRs Could Spike Demand for Drive Thru

Admittedly, I brushed over news from earlier this week that some QSRs are raising their delivery prices more than 15 percent. But the more I’ve thought about it over the last few days, the more I wonder at two things: the chains’ motivations behind the price hikes and whether they’ll prompt more customers to order drive-thru and pickup to save a few bucks. 

Business Insider first wrote about the price hikes, noting that Chick-fil-A’s prices are 30 percent higher for delivery, while Starbucks and McDonald’s prices are about 20 percent higher. My own unscientific analysis compared the costs of McDonald’s double quarter pounder with cheese meal and found it to be $9.19 on Uber Eats versus $7.99 via McDonald’s own app. (Both prices are before taxes, delivery fees, and tip.)

That example is arguably not going to break the bank. But consider that since more people are staying home and ordering for the whole household, delivery orders are likely much bigger than a single meal, which could significantly raise the cost of dinner. 

Of course, part of the reason for these price hikes is that large chains, just like small restaurants, have to pay the third-party delivery piper when it comes to commission fees, which can go as high as 30 percent. Passing some of that burden on to the customer makes sense from a business perspective.

Question is, will customers want to shoulder that delivery burden when they could hop in the car, drive a couple miles, and collect their food via curbside pickup for cheaper? In many cases, probably not. For one thing, a lot of food from QSRs just doesn’t travel well and you typically wind up with soggy fries, watery soda, and lukewarm burgers. For another, we’re in economically uncertain times, y’all. 

Given all that, more customers will be motivated to order their fast food via pickup and drive thru, which may be part of these chains’ longer-term strategies in terms of price hikes. Restaurants make more money off pickup orders (no commission fees), and when orders are funneled through the business’s own digital properties, the customer data remains in-house. Over the last year we’ve seen an uptick in brands encouraging customers to order via in-house apps, while others are even launching their own full-stack delivery services. 

Price hike’s won’t take third-party delivery down, but if customers respond by choosing pickup, curbside, and drive-thru, the loss of business will be another swing of the hammer currently trying to crumble third-party delivery’s chances of profitability. 

Elsewhere in Restaurant Tech . . .

  • Iconic hot dog chain Nathan’s Famous has partnered with REEF to use the latter’s ghost kitchen network to fulfill more off-premises orders. The partnership is now in Manhattan, and Nathan’s has cities like LA, Portland, and Minneapolis on the horizon. 
  • Yum Brands’ digital sales hit an all time high of $3.5 billion in Q2 of 2020. The parent company of Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut notably said on the call that opening dining rooms was important but not “critical” to the company’s success. 
  • Sonic unveiled a new drive-thru design that’s further proof the drive-thru experience is also being reinvented. Contactless order and payment capabilities, expanded patio areas, and “lawn games” (?!) are all part of the new design.
  • Oakland this week became the latest city to approve a cap on commission fees third-party delivery services charge restaurants. The 15-percent cap is effective immediately and last until 90 days after the COVID-19 health emergency is over. Whenever that is. 

Denny’s Off-Premises Sales Have Almost Doubled Thanks to the Pandemic

Denny’s announced on its Q2 earnings call this week that average weekly sales for off-premises orders have almost doubled since the start of the pandemic, from $4,000/week in February to $7,900/week in July.

Like other restaurants that have historically been known for their in-dining room experiences, Denny’s found itself having to quickly pivot when the pandemic hit. Speaking on the call, John C. Miller, CEO of the Spartanburg, S.C.-based chain, outlined the ways in which his company has adapted to the changes.

Those efforts included continued focus on Denny’s long-established Denny’s on Demand platform, which allows guests to place online orders for pickup and delivery. (The chain’s menu is available through most of the major third-party delivery services.) Like others, it also added curbside pickup and, once stay-at-home restrictions began to loosen, converted areas of its parking lots and sidewalks into outdoor seating.

The reinvention of the restaurant menu is another common theme to emerge from this pandemic. And by reinvention, I mean pared down selections that allow kitchens to work more efficiently. Denny’s was no exception here, having streamlined its own menu to focus on its most popular items, and offering family-style bundles, as well.

If Denny’s story of off-premises orders saving the day sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the state of most major restaurant chains the U.S. right now. McDonald’s said it made 50 operating changes to get “pandemic ready,” many of them around digital ordering and off-premises orders. Starbucks, which saw one of its toughest quarters so far, is completely overhauling some traditional sit-down locations and turning them into to-go-centric stores. 

Denny’s itself has permanently closed some of its sit-down locations due to “unforeseeable business circumstances prompted by COVID-19.”

“This quarter has proven to be one of the most difficult quarters this country and especially the full-service restaurant industry has ever seen,” Miller said on the call. And there’s no telling what Q3 will look like, since the state of the restaurant industry changes practically every day and full recovery is dependent in part on the trajectory of the pandemic.

Black Box Intelligence: Full-Service Restaurant Sales Slumping, Off-Premises Still on the Rise

As the number of COVID-19 cases spikes in multiple states, full-service restaurant recovery has slowed, according to new data from Black Box Intelligence in a story by Nation’s Restaurant News.

Black Box, a Dallas, TX-based restaurant analytics firm, said as COVID-19 cases rise and new restrictions set in place (see California), dine-in sales at restaurants have decreased. 

Part of the reason for that is the number of restaurants actually open for dine-in service. “After a steady climb since the end of April, the percentage of restaurants existing in the pre-COVID era that are now open for dine-in has plateaued around 87% for the last three weeks,”said Black Box.

This shouldn’t surprise too much. In the last few weeks, major chains like McDonald’s have halted their reopening plans for dining rooms and some states have either reduced capacity or ordered in-house service to stop altogether. 

Also not surprising: off-premises sales are increasing for quick-service and fast-casual restaurants. Black Box said that while off-premises sales had been slowing as restaurants reopened, “that trend has now been reversed in the last three weeks.”

This new data comes on the same week Yelp released its latest Economic Average Report, which found that 60 percent of businesses that have closed are now shuttered permanently. 

None of that makes for a very positive outlook for many independent restaurants used to relying on dine-in service that don’t have the dollars of a major chain to invest in off-premises. Starbucks or Chipotle, for example, may have the bucks to pivot their models to new, to-go-friendly formats that ensure sales. The future is much less certain for your favorite mom-and-pop joint, though.

Whether sales at full-service restaurants gain momentum again depends a lot on the trajectory of the pandemic. Judging from the latest numbers around the latter, dining room sales will likely stay down for some time to come.

Chipotle’s High-Tech Drive-Thrus Will Steer the Brand’s Future Plans

Today, fast-casual brand Chipolte said it is celebrating the launch of its 100th Chipotlane, the chain’s version of a high-tech drive-thru, but there was much more to the announcement than marking that milestone. This latest Chipotlane comes at a time when the brand is shifting most of its focus to off-premises formats fueled by digital ordering. To that end, the chain said today that more than 60 percent of new stores it opens will focus on drive thru. We’re officially in the Chipotlane Era, folks.

Chipotlanes are built specifically to service customers placing orders digitally via the Chipotle app. A great piece from the RestaurantDive folks today notes that Chipotlane-equipped restaurants generally have sales that are 5–10 percent higher than other locations. In the same article, Scott Boatwright, Chipotle’s Chief Development Officer, said, “We’re really pivoting the entire portfolio to this Chipotlane concept.”

It doesn’t take a genius to understand why Chipotle is focused so intently on the drive-thru. Stay-at-home restrictions already pummeled the restaurant industry once, and there are many question marks around what this latest round of halted reopenings, and state-mandated shutdowns of restaurant dining rooms will do to business over the next few months.

But one thing that isn’t a question is the industry-wide shift to off-premises formats. It was already happening pre-pandmic, and in fact Chipotle recently had its best quarter ever for digital sales because it was already focused on building out more to-go-centric stores. Since then, Starbucks has said it is reformatting many of its traditional cafe-style stores to be to-go locations, and other major chains are likely to follow.

A big bonus of all this is that, for Chipotle at least, the shift to digital and off-premises is creating more jobs. In today’s announcement, the chain said it will hire as many as 10,000 new employees to assist with the fulfillment of these many Chipotlane orders to come.

NPD: As QSR Transactions Improve, Full-Service Restaurants Continue to Struggle

Consumer transactions at restaurants have seen some improvement in the last couple weeks compared to the early days of the pandemic, though not much of it has gone beyond the quick-service restaurant.

NPD released new data today that notes consumer transactions at major U.S. restaurant chains declined 10 percent compared to one year ago for the week ending July 5. That’s a slight uptick from the previous week’s decline of 14 percent. 

However, NPD notes that “all of the improvement in the week sources to major quick service restaurant chains, where customer transaction declines improved by 4 points from the prior week’s decline of 13 percent versus year ago.”

That QSRs are seeing the bulk of the improvements shouldn’t surprise. The QSR format is inherently designed to better serve off-premises orders than full-service dine-in restaurants. Even before the pandemic and shelter-in-place mandates upset the entire industry, QSRs were accelerating their efforts to offer more pickup, delivery, and drive-thru capabilities. Starbucks, for example, has said 80 percent of its orders were already to-go before the pandemic. And a large portion of Chipotle’s business has for more than a year now been dedicated to building out off-premises-friendly store formats and developing a robust digital ordering strategy. 

Chipotle is a good illustration of how much more quickly and nimbly many QSRs were able to act in the wake of the pandemic compared full-service restaurants. Once social distancing measures went into effect, the chain simply accelerated its existing efforts around off-premises and digital ordering. The result was that Chipotle recorded its highest quarter ever for digital sales in Q1 2020. 

The last few months have been a much harder haul for full-service restaurants. NPD reported this week that full service restaurants saw customer transactions down -30 percent compared to one year ago, which is a five-point decline from the previous week. 

Author and NPD food industry advisor David Portalatin said that “full-service performance remains largely at the mercy of governmental regulation and the persistence of the coronavirus. For many full-serves, making the pivot to off-premise is far more difficult.”

As of right now, many would-be restaurant customers are still wary of actually sitting down in a dining room to eat a meal. The current spike on coronavirus cases across the U.S. also complicates matters, since some states have had to halt or roll back their reopening plans.

These challenges aren’t going to let up anytime soon, unfortunately. In all likelihood, nobody will be dining out en masse until a vaccine is found and widely administered. By then, consumer behaviors may have shifted to off-premises orders so heavily many people may not want to eat out, at least not on a regular basis. That will present a whole new bucket of challenges for restaurants and restaurant tech companies alike.

Impossible Sausage Sandwiches Now Available at Starbucks and Burger King

Starbucks announced today that it has added the Impossible Breakfast Sandwich to its menu. The sandwich, which Starbucks says is now available at “the majority of Starbucks locations across the US,” features Impossible’s plant-based sausage.

This is the second move into breakfast for Impossible in as many weeks. Burger King, which launched the Impossible Croissan’wich earlier this year, announced last week it was going national with the item for a limited time.

Impossible is really starting to flex it plant-based muscles and it expands its heme-pire at just the right time. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused production shortages and raised new ethical concerns about eating meat, and during this time, sales of plant-based meats have taken off.

For its part, Starbucks has more than one plant-based partner on its dance card. While the company is launching an Impossible sandwich in the U.S., it has hooked up with Beyond for a breakfast sandwich in Canada, and Starbucks in China will be using Beyond meats as well.

Getting on the menu at Starbucks will certainly give Impossible’s brand a boost. And if people like Impossible, there are more options than ever for them to eat it at home. Impossible has, err, beefed up its retail pipeline over this year, and launched its own direct to consumer sales site earlier this month. Though the sausage only just debuted at CES this year (which feels like a lifetime ago), the Starbucks and Burger King partnerships show that it has scaled up production fairly quickly.

Now we’ll see if the Impossible breakfast sandwich rises and shines.

Starbucks to Close Some Sit-down Cafes to Focus on Pickup-only Locations

Starbucks is accelerating its plans to shift many of its stores to a takeout-only format, according to an article today from the Wall Street Journal. The coffee mega-chain will “close, renovate, or move” 400 traditional cafes in the U.S. and Canada over the next 18 months and open 40 to 50 pickup-only stores over the next year and a half.

While the pandemic has accelerated the pace towards this to-go model, the shift itself isn’t new for Starbucks. In 2019, the chain opened its first Starbucks Now stores featuring very limited seating, an automated pickup system, and a focus on digital orders. And in a letter from the end of May, company CEO Kevin Johnson said the company would be reformatting many stores to cater to off-premises orders as part of its “Bridge to the Future” reopening plan. 

Starbucks has also claimed that 80 percent of its orders were to-go before the pandemic, hence plans to shift its model towards off-premises formats. As the WSJ said, Starbucks “expects that portion to grow as the pandemic changes commutes and routines.”

The company is focusing on New York City, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and other “dense urban areas” for the shift to pickup-only locations. 

Starbucks is also probably leading what will be a widespread trend in the restaurant industry. Dining rooms may be reopening, but they’re doing so at reduced capacity, and many consumers are still wary about actually sitting down in a restaurant. As well, a study released this week by Washington State University’s Carson College of Business found that a number of consumers won’t go out to eat until there are improvements in testing and tracing COVID-19 cases. Others are skipping the dine-in experience until a vaccine is found.

All those factors make to-go ordering a more important strategy than ever for many restaurants. Yes, the jury is still out on how much off-premises orders can make up in lost sales. And no, not every restaurant has the money and resources to completely re-outfit their stores to be more to-go friendly. But Starbucks helped create the coffeeshop culture that, up until a few months ago, was as commonplace as the grocery store. Now it’s leading the rest of us towards a to-go culture that will soon be as much a part of daily life as its cafes once were.

Starbucks Speeds Up Its Plans to Make Stores More To-Go Centric

As if it weren’t to-go-friendly enough, coffee behemoth Starbucks announced this week it is speeding up the reformatting of many of its stores to cater to more off-premises orders. Yes, the move is in response to the impact COVID-19 has had on the restaurant industry. It’s also part of Starbucks’ ongoing “Bridge to the Future” reopening plan, which CEO Kevin Johnson outlined in a letter yesterday.

A huge part of that plan is to accelerate the pace of development for what Starbucks calls its “third place” — that is, stores that cater heavily to on-the-go customers and off-premises orders. That includes drive-thru locations, Starbucks Pickup stores, and more recent formats, such as curbside pickup.

Starbucks, which claims 80 percent of its orders before the pandemic were already “on the go,” had already been moving in this direction. But as Johnson suggested in his letter this week, the pandemic has changed consumer behaviors and habits and made many folks more amenable to off-premises formats and less excited about sitting down in brick-and-mortar locations. In keeping with that, Starbucks’ plans to transition its store formats “over a three- to five-year period will now occur over the next 12 to 18 months.”

That will include building out more drive-thrus, creating more pickup locations in dense urban areas, and relocating low-performing stores (e.g., those in malls) to locations where they can have a drive thru. Johnson added in his letter that customers will “soon see more curbside pickup options as well as delivery – all formats optimized for the current crisis and a future of changing consumer expectations for the third place across the U.S.”

This emphasis on the so-called third space isn’t unique to Starbucks, although no other restaurant chain out there is pursuing it quite as aggressively. Probably because few restaurant brands have as much money or reach as Starbucks, who said this week it has now regained roughly 60 to 65 percent of prior year comparable U.S. store sales, according to Johnson.

Other brands may be able to incorporate some of these “third place” initiatives into their own operations. Buffalo Wild Wings just launched its first to-go-only concept store in Atlanta, GA, while Shake Shack unveiled its own off-premises concept earlier this month.

More interesting, though, are what smaller chains are up to. For instance, Austin, TX-based chain Torchy’s Tacos has been retrofitting existing drive-thru windows at its stores and creating on-the-fly curbside pickup at other locations. When we spoke back in April, the brand’s Chief Marketing Officer, Scott Hudler, said the company had “MacGyver’d” a bunch of technologies together to run these off-premises operations smoothly. So far it seems to be working. 

Few will be able to accomplish a total overhaul of their store formats a la Starbucks. But plucking one or two elements for the coffee giant’s playbook, at least when it comes to making to-go orders more efficient, could make all the difference as the entire restaurant industry moves closer to that third place.

ConverseNow Raises $3.25M for Its AI-Driven Restaurant Ordering Platform

Restaurant tech startup ConverseNow announced this week it had raised a $3.25 million seed funding round for its platform that uses AI to automate the process of ordering food. The round was led by Bala Investments with participation from LiveOak Venture Partners, Tensility Venture Partners, Knoll Ventures, 2048 Ventures, Bridge Investments, and Delphi Display Systems’ CEO Ken Neeld. It brings ConverseNow’s total funding to date to $3.3 million. 

ConverseNow’s CEO Vinay Shukla says part of the Austin, TX-based company’s new funds will go towards improving the AI that powers its platform. 

That AI allows restaurants to automate and personalize the ordering process for customers. Restaurants can integrate it across multiple sales channels (drive-thru, mobile app, etc.) to increase things like order accuracy and make better personalized recommendations based on a customer’s order history and other data. The platform integrates with restaurant POS systems as well as back-of-house kitchen displays.

AI is a hot topic when it comes to speeding up service and improving order accuracy in the restaurant. McDonald’s put the conversation squarely in the spotlight last year when it acquired Dynamic Yield and installed the company’s AI tech in its drive-thrus. Starbucks has in the past claimed AI is “a very important part” of its overall strategy. And a survey from the end of 2019 found that 71 percent of customers are “amenable” to having more AI in their restaurant experience.

If the same survey were given now, that figure would probably be higher. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced most restaurants to pivot to off-premises orders, and even as dining rooms slowly reopen, states’ guidelines recommend keeping to-go meals a priority. That in turn will mean more people going to the drive-thru and ordering via off-premises channels such as websites, mobile apps, and even the good old-fashioned telephone.

The other plus of AI right now is its ability to increase contactless ordering and payments. In the restaurant tech stack, it’s the tools that can offer more seamless ways to provide these things that will provide the most value.  

ConverseNow said in the press release that its tech is already being used by “leading QSRs.” In addition to improving its AI platform, the company will also use the new funds to improve customer acquisition. 

Tim Horton’s Secures Investment to Expand Its Tech-Centric Coffee Model in China

Canadian coffee chain Tim Horton’s has secured an undisclosed amount of funding from Chinese tech company Tencent, according to AgFunder News. The company originally announced the news via a post on Weibo.

Tim Horton’s China unit will use the new funds to build up its digital assets and infrastructure as well as expand its number of locations in the Chinese market. Currently, it operates about 50 stores in that country and says the investment from Tencent will let the company hit its target number of 1,500 stores sooner than originally planned, though a specific time wasn’t named. 

Tim Horton’s first entered the Chinese coffee market in February of 2019. 

Digitizing the coffee market in China is a big business right now. Tim Horton’s faces competition from Luckin, which has always pursued a digital-first model that emphasizes mobile ordering, AI-powered self-service coffee terminals, and delivery. (Side note: Luckin is currently at the center of an accounting scandal that is raising questions about future growth.)

Starbucks is also a major competitor in China, having partnered with Alibaba’s food delivery platform Ele.me to grow its delivery footprint. Starbucks has also partnered with Alibaba’s Heme supermarkets to operate its own ghost kitchens, and launched its very first to-go-centric Express store in Beijing last year. 

Tim Horton’s new investment funds come at a time when all these companies will need to double down on their tech investments to make the coffee experience as to-go-centric as possible. The COVID-19 pandemic has placed things like contactless payment, delivery, and mobile orders into the center of future restaurant operations. Major chains that want to keep growing will need to spend more on these technologies in order to meet consumer demand for both convenience and safety, not only in China but in the rest of the world, too.

Starbucks Leans on Digital Orders and Modified Formats to Reopen 90% of Stores by June

Starbucks plans to reopen 90 percent of its U.S. stores by early June, the company said this week on its Q1 2020 earnings call. As expected, stores won’t immediately reopen nationwide and with the same sit-down cafe format in which they operated before the pandemic. Instead, the Seattle-based coffee giant will open gradually, with modified service that emphasizes pickup, delivery, and drive-thru. 

The company hinted at these plans a little less than two weeks ago, when company CEO Kevin Johnson sent a letter to employees explaining the chain’s recovery plan. As I wrote at the time, Starubucks is an international chain that is already navigating this recovery process in China, so it has some experience other U.S.-based chains may not. It is also ahead of the curve — a major leader, actually — in both off-premises formats and digital business. 

On this week’s call, Johnson spotlighted both of those things. He noted that “continued recovery in China strengthens our belief that these impacts [from COVID-19] are temporary” and that Starbucks expects to emerge with an even stronger business. “We are well positioned to leverage our digital assets and new operating formats like contactless pickup and curbside to expand service to customers,” he said.   

Only 30 stores will reopen their cafes, Starbucks COO Rosalind Brewer said during the call, and there will be no seating in those locations. “We will amplify delivery, we will have the Mobile Order & Pay channels open and then the addition of a new concept, the Entryway Handoff,” she said. Starbucks will monitor what happens in these stores before making the move to reopen other locations. 

For Starubucks, this slow reopening is less detrimental than it might be for a chain with a less robust off-premises strategy. Johnson noted on the call that 80 percent of customer occasions in U.S. stores were to-go before the pandemic even hit. “And so by augmenting the in-store experience with mobile ordering and contactless pickup, we can service significant volume of customers without having the cafe seating area actually opened,” he said. 

As states slowly begin to reopen their economies, bigger chains with similar store formats to Starbucks and existing digital strategies in place will likely operate with their own versions of this modified, to-go-centric format. Chipotle, which was already testing off-premises store formats pre-pandemic, has reported strong digital sales for the quarter. With more earnings calls set to happen over the next few days, we’ll get more intel into what other chains, such as McDonald’s, have in the works.

Smaller restaurants that can’t afford expensive mobile-order systems or accommodate drive-thru lanes can still look to some tech to help with the transition towards this new normal. While most independent businesses are more concerned with keeping the lights on right now, contactless customer service and digital payments will be two areas more restaurants will look to expand to in the coming months. 

Beyond Meat Debuts in China With Starbucks Partnership

Starbucks will add Beyond Meat products to its menus in China this week, marking the alt-meat company’s first foray into that country, according to AgFunder News. The partnership comes on the heels of a similar one Starbucks and Beyond debuted in Canada earlier this year.

For the China partnership, the coffee chain will add three dishes containing Beyond products: a lasagna, a Vietnamese-style noodle salad, and pesto pasta. Starbucks will simultaneously also add two new dishes to the menu using Hong Kong’s plant-based Omnipork product.

The push into China is part of Beyond’s overall growth plans that the company outlined at the end of February, including expanding manufacturing to Asia. At the time, Beyond CEO Ethan Brown said his company will “continue to focus on Asia with the goal of producing in the region before the end of 2020.”

The COVID-19 pandemic doesn’t appear to have stalled those plans. In fact, Brown flatly stated back in February that the spread of the novel coronavirus would not prevent Beyond from entering China in 2020. “It adjusts some of our plans, but I am not taking my foot off the gas,” he said.

China is the ultimate market to tackle as far as most alternative meat companies are concerned. It has the world’s largest population and is one of the world’s largest meat producers. And Beyond isn’t alone in its plans for expansion in that country. Chief competitor Impossible Foods also plans to expand into that market.

Starbucks, meanwhile, set a preliminary goal at the beginning of the year to become resource positive by 2030 when it comes to carbon, water, and waste. Offering more alternative meat products is part of that, as traditional livestock farming is an extremely resource-intensive endeavor.

Starbucks has over 4,300 stores in China. Most of those closed when the country went on lockdown to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus. The Seattle-based chain has reopened 95 percent of its locations.