MILAN – Defying the pandemic, Starbucks will open its first bakery café this month in South Korea in an attempt to achieve a new breakthrough in South Korea’s overcrowded coffee market, report local media. Starbucks Korea, the local unit of the US coffee giant, plans to open a bakery in Yangpyeong County, Gyeonggi Province, overlooking the Namhan River.
The new store, however, will bake fresh bread on site with dough from Shinsegae Food, the food manufacturing arm of South Korean retail giant Shinsegae Group, which owns 50 per cent of the South Korean Starbucks franchise through subsidiary E-mart
It will also feature a bar that serves the company’s tea brand Teavana. South Korea is one of the coffee giant’s largest markets.
Since opening in 1999, the American coffee chain today has more than 1,400 stores.
More than 70 per cent of Starbucks sales come from drinks, with food accounting for about 20 per cent of sales.
Starbucks has been introducing new baked goods every one or two months to persuade customers to buy more bread or cakes and bakery sales have been growing by more than 20 per cent annually.
