The flavor is just a brand signature. It’s a savvy one for a (inter)national brand because it lets them mask inconsistency, and a savvy one when selling lots o

The flavor is just a brand signature. It’s a savvy one for a (inter)national brand because it lets them mask inconsistency, and a savvy one when selling lots of latte-like drinks because it lets their signature carry through to those as well. No, it’s not subtle and delicate and classy, but those characteristics run counter to the McDonald’s-scale business that Starbuck’s pursued. They needed varying inputs to all taste roughly the same, in some menu of products that remixed a small core repertoire of ingredients in different ways. Subway sandwiches taste different and more bland than the ones from your local butcher counter because Subway needs to make a billion sandwiches that all taste similarly bland every day, every where, forever. Starbucks faces the same calculus. It’s nearly a 100 year old business model, it’s exhaustively documented, and it seems to work. If you don’t enjoy their flavor, you don’t need to. But neither convoluted personal theories nor taste snobbery aren’t necessary.