Starbucks trials compostable cups, strawless lids and a “seed to cup” traceability app feature

05 Apr 2019 --- Starbucks is doing away with the conventional mode of serving beverages and trialing “greener” compostable cups and strawless lids, alongside the development of a new app that allows customers to digitally trace their packaged coffee beans “from seed to cup.” Over the next year, the company hopes to dispatch these innovations in several markets worldwide.

Starbucks unveiled progress and planning reports on all these fronts at the company’s 2019 shareholder meeting. “It was at our shareholders meeting one year ago that we launched multi-year initiatives around greener cups and digitally traceable coffee,” says Kevin Johnson, President and CEO of Starbucks. “Today thanks to many valuable collaborations, we’re seeing significant, tangible progress toward a greener future.”

Recyclable and compostable cups for 2019
Starbucks’ customers in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and London helped in testing variations of the new coffee cup that will be both recyclable and compostable in those municipalities’ facilities. In 2016, the brand conveyed ambitions to double the recycled content of its cups by 2022.

The coffee giant will be selecting its final cup design from the NextGen Cup Challenge winners, announced earlier this month, in collaboration with the NextGen Consortium. The 12 winning entries – broadly categorized into designs for innovative cup liners, new materials and reusable cup service models – have been cited to have potential to turn the 250 billion fiber to-go cups used annually from waste into valuable material in the recycling system.

Starbucks partnered with the Consortium last spring, joining other prominent food and beverage industry leaders – McDonald’s, The Coca-Cola Company, Nestlé, Yum! Brands, Wendy’s and advisory partner the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

“When companies begin to rethink their plastic footprint, innovation, research and measurement are the key elements needed to set them on a path toward continuous improvement,” says Erin Simon, Director of Sustainability R&D at WWF.

Ergonomic strawless cups for conscious drinking
Starbucks will be providing new lightweight, recyclable strawless lids at all stores in the US and Canada within the next year. This is a key milestone as the company works to phase out plastic straws from its more than 30,000 stores worldwide by 2020, eliminating more than 1 billion straws a year – a goal that was announced last July.

The redesigned lids – having 9 percent less plastic than the lids-with-straws currently in circulation – will roll out this summer to Starbucks locations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and Toronto, while the rest of the US and Canada will receive them by early 2020. 

In addition, Starbucks is testing alternative materials for manufacturing straws, through exploring some of this month’s winning NextGen technologies that could potentially apply to straws. Plastic straws will continue to be available upon request.

Tracing coffee back to its roots
Now one year into a two-year digital traceability project, Starbucks says a future mobile app feature will enable users to follow the journey of purchased coffee beans through each step of farming, processing, trading and roasting.

With increasing consumer demand for transparency along the supply chain, IoT technologies such as QR codes and blockchain have come to the forefront. Brands can use such connective technologies to interact with consumers, a technique that has proven popular. Innova Market Insights has even pegged “Pack to the Future” as its number five packaging trend for 2019.

Starbucks has collaborated with Conservation International, which is conducting farmer interviews in Costa Rica, Rwanda and Colombia for the project. “We’re thrilled to be working with Starbucks and its suppliers on engaging coffee farmers in real, two-way dialogue on this topic,” says Bambi Semroc, Vice President of Sustainable Markets and Strategy at Conservation International.

“We are innovating to help connect coffee drinkers with coffee communities, with the goal to return more value to farmers by first listening to their stories, their knowledge and their needs,” she adds.