Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

One definition of “overly ambitious” is attempting to write an article about the relationship between coffee and a pluralistic nation of over 1.1 billion people. Compounding this is the nature of India itself — where not only can you find evidence of just about everything, but for everything you find to be true you will [...]

Today’s Globe and Mail (Canada) surveyed the rise of coffee consumption among India’s growing middle class: reportonbusiness.com: Tea-drinking India warms to coffee house culture. We mentioned this trend a year ago, and today apparently one coffee company — Café Coffee Day — owns two-thirds of India’s coffee houses. This is a luxury that Starbucks doesn’t [...]

As with many countries where Starbucks hasn’t yet deployed their green mermaids in a D-Day-like marine invasion, Budapest, Hungary is still waiting for the wave: portfolio | The battle of cafés in Budapest – Eston. Budapest has long been rich with cafés, but according to the Hungarian online financial journal, Portfolio.hu, Starbucks may finally open [...]

Unable to keep pace with the cancerous growth of Starbucks Coffee, Caribou Coffee, the nation’s #2 coffee specialty chain, seems to have opted for better customer experience as a competitive advantage, according to today’s The Detroit News: Caribou Coffee aims to be No. 1 in experience. (This is consistent with their point-of-sale kiosks announcement we [...]

According to today’s Washington Post, Illy launched their first U.S. café last week: A Coffee Chain’s Stand-Up Effort on M St. – washingtonpost.com. Rather than taking the form of the Espressamente chain across Europe, Illy opted instead for a stand-up-service-only café inside a Washington, D.C. Marriott. Their quick-witted name for the place?: Caffe. Tweet

Yesterday I ran across an franchisor industry article touting the growth market for drive-thru coffee: Drive-Thru Coffee: Franchisors Compete for Quick, Convenient Delivery. Notable quotes from the article include, “This drive-thru coffee bar franchise was founded … to cater to coffee drinkers with busy lives,” and “As a drive-thru coffee bar, they cater to those [...]

In 1985, Java City started as a café on 18th & Capitol in Sacramento (back then my wife was a regular) that quickly grew to a number of retail outlets across northern California. However, over the past few years, Java City reconsidered their growth strategy as Starbucks grew everywhere like weeds: Java City closed numerous [...]

The news of Starbucks‘ death has been greatly exaggerated. That’s all I could think of when reading the media and blogosphere response over the past week to an executive memo written by Starbucks’ founder and corporate chairman, Howard Schultz (as reported here on Feb. 24). In the memo, the founder lamented the loss of Starbucks’ [...]

The bad business idea that suddenly becomes profitable because of volume, volume, volume is an old joke among many experienced entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. (“If we lose $1 a widget, just imagine the possibilities if we tripled our customers!”) But these days, when that “volume” comes from Chinese consumers, that conventional wisdom seems to have [...]

You can always count on the founder of a company to retain the passion of its original business concept — long after the recruited executive wonks have arrived, armed with hockey-stick charts and completely dissociated from the inconsequential “widgets” they’re peddling for maximum revenue and EBITDA growth. Starbucks founder and corporate chairman, Howard Schultz, is [...]