Starbucks NFTs Sell Out In 18 Minutes As Secondary Price Soars

Think NFTs are meh? All very 2022? Well it might be time to wake up and smell the coffee. Virtually, of course.

It’s been more than a year since NFT sales soared — and then slumped faster than a caffeine comedown — but the Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks released its first paid collection of NFTs today, selling out all 2,000 Siren items in just 18 minutes.

Since then the secondary market has gone into overdrive, with one NFT trading for over $2,000 according to Nifty Gateway.

Starbucks dubbed its release ‘Siren Collection’, with 2,000 NFTs on offer valued at $100 a piecewith each called ‘Journey Stamps’, the fruition of a project that began late last year.

The company first launched its NFT and Web3 push in December, when it opened up a new membership program called Starbucks Odyssey.

An extension of the existing rewards program that offers customers perks like free drinks upgrades, Odyssey promises to deliver new benefits and “immersive coffee experiences that [customers] cannot get anywhere else”.

Rewards on offer can include anythign from virtual classes to exclusive access to merchandise, or even a trip to a Starbucks coffee grower for higher membership tiers. The only thing that appears to be missing? Free coffee.

In addition, purchasing an NFT gives members additional points that can be used to level up their tier.

“We are leveraging Web3 technology to reward and connect with our members in new ways, such as offering collectible, ownable digital stamps, a new digital community, and opening access to new benefits and immersive coffee experiences – both physically and digitally,” said Brady Brewer, Starbucks executive vice president and chief marketing officer, outlining the launch.

Starbucks Odyssey Launch

For today’s launch, members of Starbucks Odyssey were able to buy two stamps per person and, perhaps inevitably, some customers claimed to hit problems with site access, allegedly due to traffic volumes according to Coindesk.

The NFTs that members received for completing Journeys are also already available in the Nifty Gateway secondary market, which was trading at an average $442.55 by late morning, although the price is softening a little.

Previously, Starbucks had announced that NFTs would help it extend the concept of its well-known ‘third place’ philosophy and it is far from alone in issuing NFTs, with consumer brands like Taco Bell, NikeNKE
, Adidas and GameStopGME
among those to have launched their own collectible tokens.

In truth, Starbucks has come quite late to the game with its NFTs though Starbucks aficionados and crypto fans were out in force and according to Nifty Gateway currently 1,170 people own an NFT from the new collection.

Starbucks Reinvention Accelerates

The launch also comes as Starbucks under interim CEO and all-round coffee luminary Howard Schultz continues its Reinvention plan. Starbucks has introduced a “framework for accelerated earnings growth” over the next three years, underpinned by enhanced comparable store sales growth, increased store count growth, and continued margin expansion.

From fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2025, Starbucks said at its last investor call that it expects comparable store sales growth to be in the range of 7% to 9% annually, both globally and in the U.S., up from the previous range of 4% to 5%.

In China, Starbucks expects outsized comparable store sales performance in fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, and on Sept. 26 opened its 6,000th Chinese store. The company’s global store portfolio is expected to grow by roughly 7% net annually from fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2025.

This increase is driven largely by accelerated growth across the U.S. portfolio.

Globally, Starbucks expects to approach 45,000 stores by the end of 2025, and said it is well on track to reach approximately 55,000 stores by 2030.