Starbucks goes all in on human baristas after years of slashing the size of its workforce

What makes a good barista? Extensive coffee knowledge? Intricate latte art? Spelling your name correctly?

According to Starbucks’ first ever global barista champion, Japan’s Nobuki — who beat 84,000 other contenders as he was crowned at the company’s Leadership Experience event in Las Vegas on Wednesday — the first step is a “sparkling smile.”

CEO Brian Niccol would agree. His plight to turn around the flagging company by hiring more in-store employees is centered on a bet that Starbucks is missing a human touch. The ex-Chipotle chief told the Financial Times, “We over-rotated on the idea of equipment and that replacing the humanity of service, and I think service is our point of difference.”

Ex (coffee) machina

Since taking the helm in September, Niccol has been heading a customer-service-focused “Back to Starbucks” strategy to return the world’s largest coffee chain to its coffeehouse roots. 

On Tuesday, he told Reuters that Starbucks is accelerating the rollout of its new “Green Apron” service model to all North American stores by the end of summer — announcing to the ~14,000 store managers at the Vegas event that “the biggest human capital investment in connection in the history of Starbucks is about to happen.” For many Starbucks workers, this can’t come soon enough.

Since 2022, the company has slashed its workforce, moving toward automated equipment for efficiency. Based on our calculations, the company had an average of 26.8 employees per US company-operated Starbucks store at the time. By the end of fiscal year 2024, that figure was 19.8.

But now, Starbucks is doing a U-turn on automation, having halted the use of its high-tech systems in April. Though analysts have raised concerns about the cost of the in-person push, baristas at high-footfall branches will be buzzed: a Bloomberg survey last year found that only one-third of US Starbucks workers said stores were consistently well staffed.