Starbucks Corporation

Starbucks Corporation is the world's largest specialty coffee roaster, marketer, and retailer, operating 40,990 stores across 89 markets and generating $37.2 billion in revenue in fiscal 2025. The company runs the largest drive-thru coffee chain in America, the largest mobile-order-and-pay digital coffee business in America, and the largest café coffee business in America — three overlapping moats that together make Starbucks the default infrastructure for how a large share of the world buys its daily coffee.

This is a turnaround story wrapped in a restructuring, anchored by one of the most valuable consumer brands on the planet. In September 2024, Brian Niccol arrived as chairman and CEO from Chipotle, inheriting seven consecutive quarters of declining North American comparable store sales, a unionization wave, an underperforming China business, and a brand that had drifted from its coffeehouse roots into a mobile-order fulfillment utility. His response — the "Back to Starbucks" strategy — is an operational, cultural, and financial reset whose costs are largely sunk but whose benefits remain unproven.

The file turns on a single question: whether the Back to Starbucks plan can restore the unit economics and traffic momentum that once made this a compounder, or whether the restructuring merely marks a transition to a lower-growth, lower-margin, capital-heavier version of the business the market thought it owned.