Coffee is the beverage behemoth in restaurants, accounting for 2.57 billion servings annually, per the NPD Group, and recent years have seen even fast food chains add specialty coffees to their menus. Flavors such as vanilla and mocha have proven particularly popular among major coffee introductions. Even in a troubled economy, the segment’s major player has seen little negative reaction to a price increase.
Starbucks implemented what it termed a “strategic price increase” in late 2009 and into the first months of 2010, but met with little consumer resistance; in fact, traffic into the coffee giant’s stores consistently improved throughout that time, likely due to the chain’s strategies behind these price increases. As William Blair & Co. noted in a September evaluation, “Starbucks’ methodology of strategically implementing price increases by market and by product and by size will minimize the potential for consumer pushback.”