Starbucks Corporation (SBUX) CFO: Food Is a Huge Opportunity

In the video below, Motley Fool CEO Tom Gardner sits down with Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) CFO Troy Alstead during a recent visit to Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) headquarters in Seattle. In this portion of the video, they discuss the big opportunity for enhancing the food offerings at Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) through the acquisition of La Boulange.

A full transcript follows the video.

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Troy Alstead: Food is a critical part of our business. It’s a long-standing, core part of that coffeehouse experience, and yet we’ve recognized we have opportunity to do more in food.

Food represents about one-third of our transactions in our stores across our system today, meaning of all the transactions, the rings through the register every single day in our stores, one-third have a food item on them. What that tells you is two-thirds don’t. That’s the opportunity. Of those two-thirds who don’t have food on them, we’ve already brought the customer in the door, we’ve acquired them, and we don’t have to pay to get them in. We know they want to be at a Starbucks Corporation (NASDAQ:SBUX) and they want to experience what we have to offer them, and many of them want food.

Our opportunity is to really innovate against the quality of the food, the appearance and how we merchandise it, how they engage with the food when they come in the store, how our partners inspire them to want the food that’s there, to create that opportunity for us to attach more food items on to those hundreds and hundreds of beverage transactions that we have for our average store every day.

We’ve made great progress over the last several years and slowly but surely elevating food, driving food as a quality of our business, growing it faster than our overall category ,and yet the La Boulange acquisition allows us in ways that we’ve been excited about for a long time now, to step-change that.  So over the next two to three to four years, I would fully expect within the store system, food with La Boulange as a catalyst, to be the No. 1 driver of comp growth as we go through the next few years.

The article Starbucks CFO: Food Is a Huge Opportunity originally appeared on Fool.com.

Tom Gardner owns shares of Starbucks. The Motley Fool recommends Starbucks. The Motley Fool owns shares of Starbucks.

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