It just got more difficult to find a cup of coffee (and many other beverages) without Starbucks' imprint on it. The company vastly expanded its arrangement with an extension of its agreement with Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, tripling the number of branded items made for Keurig single-serve coffee machines.

Starbucks saved analysts and journalists the trouble of evaluating the deal by calling it a "global single-serve coffee industry game changer" and a "win-win-win agreement for both companies and for premium coffee consumers around the world" in its press release.

Specifically, Starbucks will add new single-serve cup cartridges for Keurig machines under the Seattle's Best Coffee, Torrefazione Italia coffee, Teavana Teas and Starbucks Cocoa brands in addition to Starbucks branded coffees. Sales of Starbucks coffee K-Cup packs rose more than 75 percent in March compared with the prior year.Continue reading...

Whatever you're sipping these days, Starbucks wants to be the brand you're sipping.

As richly as Starbucks brand has made its name on coffee, selling and evoking the world of coffee-growing, -processing and -drinking, it's the tea universe — with a wide variety of ingredients and flavors and functional purposes — that strikes many as much more intriguing these days. So in announcing its purchase of the Teavana tea chain, the company's biggest-ever acquisition, Starbucks is betting as much on being able to exploit the lore and learning about tea as it is in selling the beverage itself. "We will do for tea what we did for coffee," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told the Wall Street Journal about the $620-million deal.Continue reading...

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