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Food & Drink

Instantly confusing

Starbucks introduces its new instant coffee.

I still vividly remember gulping down my first cup of instant coffee. Attempting to make a strong cup, the coffee powder-to-boiled-water ratio wasn’t exactly balanced and I ended with a sludge-like liquid tasting too horrible to swallow. It wouldn’t surprise me if most other people had similar experiences.

Now Starbucks is releasing its own version of the instant mix, dubbed Via. And the whole campaign is confusing.

1. It promises to taste like the store’s fresh brew, without having to go to the store. Isn’t encouraging customers not to come to your store an odd sales pitch?

2. Via is being sold in single use packages running at $3.45 for a 3-pack and $11.95 for a 12-pack.

Just last week Starbucks announced it’s partnering up with Green Global USA’s Coalition for Resource Recovery for a pilot project to see if paper coffee cups and old corrugated cardboard can be recycled together. In Toronto, there are new recycling bins in the coffee shop that lets you recycle lids, cups and the cardboard sleeves that protect your hand from burning.

So isn’t releasing disposable instant coffee counterproductive?

Starbucks wants a part of the global instant coffee market which rings in $21 billion per year, but single use packages just adds to the waste the company’s already created. Recycling in stores – long overdue as it is – seems like a way to justify its new insta-coffee packages.

3. Doesn’t this mess with the store’s high-end image?

This isn’t the first time Starbucks went all low-brow to make a buck. In February ’08 they started serving breakfast sandwiches with a $1 cup of brew, risking the company’s “affordable luxury” image. Celebrities are frequently photographed carrying Starbucks cups, but chances you wouldn’t catch one with a cup of instant.

4. Reading all of this I can’t help but remember the 1998 flick You’ve Got Mail. In an e-mail Tom Hanks’ character sends Meg Ryan’s, he types:

“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.”

Could he say that about Via?

Next week, Starbucks announced it is having Via taste tests in stores. After trying their 100 per cent Arabica instant coffee, what’ll your taste buds say?

Give me my old coffee pot and travel mug any day – I don’t mind the five minute wait for some fresh brew.

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