- Starbucks opened a new super-sized Roastery in Shanghai on Tuesday.
- The location is 30,000 square feet and serves gourmet, nitrogen-infused drinks and food baked in-house.
- The Roastery is a window into Starbucks’ future as the coffee chain attempts to bolster its premium image.
Starbucks has opened a stunning location in China that is 300 times bigger than the average coffee shop.
On Tuesday, Starbucks opened the 30,000-square-foot Starbucks Reserve Roastery Shanghai. The location has gourmet drinks – like nitrogen-infused teas – and an 88-foot-long, hand-crafted coffee bar.
Until now, Starbucks’ only open Roastery was in Seattle, Washington. The success of the Seattle Roastery, which opened in late 2014, demonstrated to Starbucks the potential for more upscale locations and provided a blueprint for the other Roasteries in the works around the world.
Here's what it's like to visit the Shanghai Roastery, the most over-the-top Starbucks in the world.
Starbucks is calling the Shanghai Roastery "the largest, most beautiful Starbucks location in the world."
It's nearly twice as largest as the current largest Starbucks, the Roastery in Seattle.
The location has three coffee bars, brewing up beverages you can't find anywhere else.
The longest bar is 88 feet long and handmade, making it the longest Starbucks coffee bar in the world.
The Roastery will serve more than 100 beverages, with a special focus on tea.
Beverages include teas infused with nitrogen and a drink produced by extracting flavor from individual tea leaves using steam.
Visitors can see coffee being roasted in a two-story, 40-ton cask.
In addition to beverages, the Roastery will also serve food made in-house.
Starbucks partnered with Italian bakery chain Princi in 2016, with plans to serve the food in Roastery locations and open more stand-alone Princis worldwide.
The Shanghai Roastery offers a window into the future of Starbucks.
The chain is aiming to use eye-popping, super-sized Roasteries to turn visiting Starbucks into an experience — not just an everyday occurrence.
Starbucks says it plans to open up to 30 Roasteries, with locations in Milan and New York slated to open in 2018, and in Tokyo and Chicago in 2019.
It makes sense that the second Roastery would open in China. The country is crucial to Starbucks' future.
Starbucks is opening a new store every 15 hours in China, with 3,000 stores across the country. There are more than 600 Starbucks locations in Shanghai alone.
