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Starbucks $10 pork-flavored coffee
- riffic 3y agoI mean bacon infused whatevers are not unheard of in desserts and cocktails.
- thereisnospork 3y agoStraight-up candied bacon can also be quite delicious.
- aleku 3y agoWell, they are now going to have a hard time proving they are Halal certified.
- theodric 3y agoThat's okay, there are no Muslim people in China! (Or at least that's the goal.)
- selimthegrim 3y agoWhat are they going to rebrand qingzhen as then
- karmasimida 3y agoMuslim in China is mainly in Xinjiang and Xi'an province. It is not difficult to find Halah food in China, just that Halah certified isn't a thing that most people/merchants care about.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoXi'an isn't a province, you probably mean Shaanxi (as opposed to Shanxi). Also Xinjiang doesn't have a Starbucks. Xi'an of course has a lot of them. Non-muslim Chinese love pork, it is by far the most commonly eaten meat in the country.
- sealeck 3y ago> Non-muslim Chinese love pork, it is by far the most commonly eaten meat in the country. In fact so much so that the meat has an outsized role in Chinese inflation. For example outbreaks of diseases among pigs can cause inflation to skyrocket and collapses in prices can bring similar problems. See e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/058df2fe-ae7a-4be8-93c6-ca9cb46d3184 https://www.ft.com/content/058df2fe-ae7a-4be8-93c6-ca9cb46d3... or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-03/china-economy-weak-pork-demand-for-lunar-new-year-highlights-deflation-woes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-03/china-eco...
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoChinese government has a pork reserve like the American government has an oil reserve.
- sealeck 3y agoI did not know that, that's really interesting!
- papertokyo 3y agoLike the Canadian government has a maple syrup reserve.
- crazygringo 3y agoThat's hilarious, but also not totally crazy. Doing ground coffee rubs on meats like steak or bacon or pork tenderloin is a thing. People eat bacon at breakfast and wash it down with black coffee. They're actually pretty complementary flavors, so it all comes down to the exact execution. It's actually the milkiness of the latte together with the pork that gives me pause. I think it would really come down to the "Dongpo pork sauce" that flavors it all, if it successfully ties them all together. I'm curious what its flavors consist of.
- strangattractor 3y agoI'm still holding out for coffee flavored bacon:)
- relbeek2 3y agosounds better than pumpkin spice bacon, and that's a thing.
- crazygringo 3y agoThat's basically the easiest thing ever to make yourself. You can google recipes for it, I'm not even joking. I can't vouch for the caffeine content though. Don't think you can replace your morning brew with it...
- hinkley 3y agoCoffee has a very penetrating aroma. I suspect putting coffee and bacon in the same container for a few hours to half a day would give you all the flavor you wanted with no caffeine.
- mobilemidget 3y agoThe flavour might not be crazy, as you write about the rubs and breakfasts. But paying 10 dollars for a coffee, is crazy in my opinion.
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- carmen_sandiego 3y ago> Its biggest competitor in the country famously has a cheese-flavored latte. Actually Starbucks has that too, you can get it in 7-11. It's not like it has a 'Cheesy' flavor though; more of a creamy dairy thing to it. 'Cheese' is a pretty common addition to dessert drinks in China and to my Western tastes is pretty good.
- idlewords 3y agoI would describe it to Americans as whipped cream cheese, with a little bit of salt. It tastes amazing.
- throwanem 3y agoCan't be worse than bacon vodka [1] - probably not as bad as you imagine, but I still tossed back the bottom half of the shot in a hurry and didn't ask for another. [1] https://www.blackrockspirits.com/bakon-vodka/ https://www.blackrockspirits.com/bakon-vodka/
- brnt 3y agoWait till they discover Starbucks has been selling coffee flavoured milkshakes all this time.
- standardUser 3y agoI'd drink it. Doesn't even sound that strange really. What shocks me is the cost. That's not PPP folks, that is $9.50 USD in a country that most Americans still think of as third-world and full of nothing but sweatshops.
- idlewords 3y agoI don't think that's how Americans see China? In any case, Starbucks in Asia is pretty upscale compared to the US. It serves a different (and wealthier) demographic.
- standardUser 3y agoThat's not how most American tech workers and urbanites see China. But I've had conversations, online and off, with people who have no idea how much China has transformed in the last ~25 years. They don't think about it, read about or generally care about it, so their perceptions aren't really updated.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt is weird since my first trip to china was actually 25 years ago (December 1999, so more accurately ~24.25 years ago), and they actually had Starbucks in Beijing back then (at Xidan, I think there was another in guomao somewhere but I didn't see it). Still a bit pricey (I think 35 RMB for a grande coffee frap), and it was the only place in Beijing that I saw any non-Russian foreigners at (but it was winter, not high tourist season for China back then). You'll see techies who think China is all open modern Shenzhen, and are surprised when they visit and Gmail doesn't work (at least, that was my experience hosting a computer science conference in Beijing in 2011).
- carmen_sandiego 3y agoChina has decoupled a lot more since then. If you visit now I would say paying for things smacks you in the face way before access to Google services does. Recently they've enabled foreign cards so you can pay for stuff in stores with WeChat but it's still something you need to set up. The uninitiated just come and assume they'll use Visa/MC.
- testfoobar 3y agoExcellent product localization. I'm truly surprised the pork/bacon craze of the past few decades in the US did not produce pork&bacon coffee. I feel like the beanie wearing SF/Portland/Seattle hipsters let us all down. My question to them today would be: What would you say...you do here?
- bobthepanda 3y agoHipster coffee is all about finding nice beans with notes, and process. There isn’t the most innovation in terms of additives unless you consider the glut of alternative milks. Frankly, I think the independents are happy to cede the “basically milkshake” segment of the market to Sbux.
- papertokyo 3y agoAustralian coffee snob here. I can confirm the emphasis of the specialty coffee industry (which I think you can conflate with 'hipster' coffee) is entirely on sourcing and roasting high-quality beans that have enjoyable and nuanced flavours on their own. The innovation in the last 15 years is largely around roasting and grinding technology (consistency, control over flavour extraction) as well as inventing cool brewing apparatus for every taste and aesthetic preference.
- okr 3y agoI did not drink coffee often. But i liked the coffee smell. I tasted it from a portafilter machine, that won me over. Beside that, over those 15 years, the cafe culture has developed a lot worldwide. Those hipster people make everything beautiful, financed by coffee.
- jerlam 3y agoI had a beer (an IPA of course) that had freshly grilled bacon in it. A whole strip of bacon, halfway in the beer and flopping over the rim. It was disgusting as you can imagine.
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- migf 3y agoI too have made coffee with hotdog water. You can drink it?
- quickthrower2 3y agoGotta keep the gimmicks coming. Or just train your baristas on an Italian espresso machine and use fresh roasted, lighter roasted beans. But the brand is gimmicks.
- jrockway 3y agoIt's a little bit of a gimmick. If you can't get fresh coffee to every location on earth, at least you can dilute the flavor with pork juice. That said, mixing stuff with coffee does have precedent. Espresso mixed with milk is something that no coffee snob would call an abomination. Maybe pork juice is an even better add-in than milk? You don't know until you try.
- brailsafe 3y agoTheir offerings could be reduced to charging quite a lot for dairy or dairy adjacent products, paired with generally the same F tier beans you'd get at any place that was started in the 90s, especially the Italian ones. The espresso machine probably doesn't make much of a difference, but what they use serves their purpose well.
- quickthrower2 3y agoGrinder and machine makes a difference. Starbucks use a fully automatic (grinds, doses, comoresses etc.). I don’t think state of the art there has caught up with the classic machine (when I say classic there are still a lot of computers etc innit!)
- brailsafe 3y agoI think they get what they can out of their beans, the blonde roast actually isn't so bad black, but it's just that their beans aren't generally suited to being drunk without some kind of fatty dairy adjacent product. You grind and prepare commodity cheap beans in the best way possible and you'll pretty much get a similar result.
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoUnrelated but can someone explain to me, on the way into the office the local Starbucks had a coffee with olive oil I think? Is this not as absurd & crazy as it sounds? What the heck is going on?
- swatcoder 3y agoThey mention that drink in the article, so it's not unrelated. And while I'm sure there's traditional culinary heritage that a Starbucks PR employee can point to as well, their olive oil coffee is just an upmarket answer to the popularity of butter coffees (most popularly branded as Bulletproof). Instead of just adopting that trend, they tried to lean into a more artisanal, cultured brand by highlighting its use of olive oil instead of butter.
- Izikiel43 3y agoSo, I tried the olive oil coffee once because why not? My conclusions: * It needed salt * I needed a piece of bread to dip in. By this, I mean that the olive oil used was very nice, but it felt like drinking warm olive oil, not coffee. The nice thing about the whole endeavor is that I now have a recurring purchase in Amazon for the olive oil they used in the coffee, so I consider that a win.
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- hindsightbias 3y agoWhile you're at SB, suggest a new UX or even new POS system. UX tip screen doesn't say what to do, and selection arrows are tiny. Then, you have to hit the green enter button at bottom of pad (no prompt, and it's not green anymore after 1000 uses). People keep pecking at the screen thinking it's touch. I hit the wrong button, so cashier tried to fix it and unplugged it. Boot time is 3 minutes. Of course, it locked up on the IP address screen so took another reboot.
- jorticka 3y agoWhat crazy thing will they think next? Pineapple on pizza?
- extraduder_ire 3y agoReminds me of the smbc comic about how "pumpkin spice" doesn't contain pumpkin, and could just as easily be called pork spice. Except this has actual pork flavour. https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/spice https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/spice
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- jojobas 3y ago* No coffee plants were harmed in making this drink.
- jakupovic 3y agoI wonder if it's halal?
- leobg 3y agoStill waiting for the mackerel ice cream.