A Class War Over a Cup Of Coffee (Jerusalem Post, 25 Jun 2006, Page 18)

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A Class War Over a Cup Of Coffee
By JULIE BOSMAN
Jerusalem Post
25 Jun 2006

THREE big restaurant chains are revving up efforts to take on Starbucks, which has struck it rich by serving expensive coffee to people looking for a little bit of daily luxury.

But the chains — Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and Burger King — are not going after the Starbucks coffee snob; they’re going after the average Joe.

Burger King customers buying the new BK Joe coffee “don’t want it to be complicated, like a chai half-decaf whatever,” said Denny Marie Post, the senior vice president and “chief concept officer’’ for Burger King, a unit of Texas Pacific. “Our customer doesn’t have that kind of money, frankly, and doesn’t have that kind of profile. They just want it to be straightforward. This is not frou-frou coffee.”

They may not want the snob appeal of Starbucks, but the challengers certainly want a bigger slice of the booming $8.4 billion retail coffee market. And that is just the amount sold in coffee shops. Starbucks accounted for $6.1 billion of the total in 2005, up from $3.7 billion in 2003.

Since McDonald’s began promoting its premium coffee several months ago, the company says, its coffee sales have increased at a double-digit rate. Burger King said sales of BK Joe, which comes ... read more...