Starbucks Goes Instant

Much of the media reaction to Via, Starbucks' forthcoming instant-coffee product, has tended to characterize the introduction as an example of Starbucks slumming it, trying to attract or retain price-conscious consumers.  

"It's a bold move," says the Wall Street Journal, "that illustrates how Starbucks is adapting to a quickly changing coffee environment. Instant coffee has long been associated with low quality and mediocre taste."

And, says Rachael Granby of Seeking Alpha, Starbucks has introduced Via as "part of a continued effort to shake its expensive image."

But it seems more accurate to say that Starbucks isn't going lowbrow so much as it is taking instant coffee highbrow. That could be tough, especially in the United States.

The company has supposedly spent nearly 20 years trying to develop an instant coffee that doesn't taste like dirty dishwater. Whether it succeeded will become known next week, when Starbucks will introduce the product at various events around the country.

CEO Howard Schultz told the Journal that Via is "a transformational even in the history of the company," which is a bold statement about a $1 cup of coffee. (Packets of three will sell for $2.95.)

He said that he's pulled the old Folger's Crystals trick on guests in his home, serving Via without telling them what it was. In no case, he said, did anyone realize they were drinking instant coffee.

Schultz no doubt has the international market in mind, though he doesn't outright say so. In the United Kingdom, four-fifths of all coffee sales are instant. But then, they also eat kidney pie.

The American market will be a tougher nut to crack, as a marketing executive admitted to the Journal. The irony is that Starbucks is perhaps the primary reason that Americans have developed a taste for high-quality coffee and hence might look askance at an instant product, even from Starbucks.

In any case, for all the attention Via is getting and for all the fanfare Starbucks is creating around it, the product will in no sense be "transformational" for the company.