Starbucks - statistics & facts
After its saturation of the North American market, Starbucks began setting its sights further afield. These days, the coffee shop chain can be found on every continent in the world apart from Antarctica. When establishing stores in other countries, Starbucks makes sure to cater to local tastes. In Japan, for example, it offers many matcha options, while in the UK it serves local breakfast items such as the sausage sandwich and, of course, English breakfast tea. As of 2025, the number of Starbucks stores worldwide exceeded 40,000, with international locations having slowly but surely overtaken North American locations. Overall, there were almost 23,000 international Starbucks stores that year.
Is Starbucks the biggest global food and drink services company?
In 2025, Starbucks' revenue peaked at over 37 billion U.S. dollars. Not only did the chain record its highest revenue that year, but it also had the second-highest brand value of any global restaurant company, at almost 39 billion U.S. dollars. Meanwhile, its main competitor in the food and drink services industry, McDonald's, came first in the ranking with a brand value of over 40 billion U.S. dollars. That said, Starbucks did place ahead of McDonald’s in a ranking of the global food and drink services companies with the highest sales.
Recent Starbucks controversies
After suing the union Starbucks Workers United for an Instagram post that expressed solidarity with Palestinians, the coffee chain found itself in the middle of debates over the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. However, Starbucks has since blamed misinformation on its views on the Israel-Hamas war and issued a statement condemning violence in the region. While this seems to have been the catalyst for the boycotting of Starbucks that year and onward, the bigger picture is more complicated. Among other reasons were disputes over employee pay and working conditions, which led to several strikes across multiple stores in the United States in 2025, and menu price increases. Although these back-to-back issues led to some fluctuations in Starbucks’ quarterly revenue in 2024, the company returned to steady annual revenue growth starting in the second quarter of the 2025 fiscal year.
Starbucks: online ordering and delivery
Consumers nowadays do not just want to go in-store to enjoy their favorite products, they also want them delivered to their doorstep. With the global revenue of the online meal delivery market expected to reach over 450 billion U.S. dollars in 2025, Starbucks, along with many other companies, has cultivated its online ordering and delivery systems. Alongside partnering with popular online food ordering and delivery platforms Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash, the chain has also developed the Starbucks app where consumers can pre-order and pay for items before pick-up. As long as there are no more boycotts or strikes, this digitalization, together with Starbucks’ strategies of market saturation and localization of products, is likely to keep the company on a trajectory of continued global growth.
