Starbucks debuts 2 iced lavender drinks for spring

Dive Brief:

Starbucks is adding two lavender-flavored, iced beverages to its menu in a spring-themed LTO starting Thursday. The drinks are available while supplies last.
The lavender flavor profile is not one of the three new impending beverage platforms referenced on Starbucks’ Q1 earnings call, Starbucks wrote in an email to Restaurant Dive.
The company didn’t clarify if the drinks — Iced Lavender Cream Oatmilk Matcha and Iced Lavender Oatmilk Latte — will become a recurrent seasonal LTO, like the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Starbucks said the beverages target Gen Z and millennial customers.

Dive Insight:

Starbucks’ cold beverages are the primary driver of its beverage sales, accounting for 75% of drink sales in Q3 2023. On the chain’s earnings call for Q1 of FY 2024, Starbucks Chief Marketing Officer Brady Brewer said the cold beverage category’s strength was a generational transition, rather than a trade-off between hot and cold drinks by individual consumers.

“That highly frequent millennial Gen Z customer is drinking cold coffee every day, just as people of different generations were drinking hot coffee to start their day every day,” Brewer said. “There are infinite customizations possible on the cold beverage platform. And what that means is that it's increasingly a beverage you can't get anywhere else. And so it has a staying power to it.”

In 2022, Starbucks began redesigning and remodeling its kitchens in a years-long process to better support cold drink personalization, as customizations generated over $1 billion in annual revenue. The lavender drinks add a bit of additional complexity to Starbucks’ suite of potential customizations. According to the press release, the new lavender beverages are made with a proprietary flavor powder.

“We found a powder to be the best expression of the subtle sweetness of lavender,” Patrick Penny, a lead beverage developer for the company, said in a statement. “It’s a concept we’ve been working on for some time now.” Workers had been asking for a lavender syrup for some time, according to the press release.

Alongside the growth of cold beverages as a category, Starbucks’ tea latte platforms, including chai and matcha drinks, were growing almost 30% year over year, according to a transcript of the company’s November 2, 2023 reinvention plan announcement.