The chief executive of Starbucks UK has insisted the brand is “starting to regain its mojo”.
Mark Fox, who joined the coffee giant from Pizza Hut in January, told the Evening Standard the company had learned lessons from its rapid expansion in the 2000s.
He also said there brand was recovering from bad publicity over its tax arrangements.
He said a backlash had affected some locations but he insisted “when I look at the business now with eight quarters of growth I don’t see a damaged brand, I see a brand that is starting to regain its mojo.”
On the company’s future prospects, he said: “I think it’s about turning customers one by one, and that’s what I think we have to do. Every single partner needs to go out and help people understand what Starbucks is about.”
Fox said the company planned to open a further 100 sites a year but would not attempt to repeat the scale seen a decade ago.
He said: “Through that period of growth when we started building too many stores and were over-enthusiastic with our growth, I think that was the point in which we weren’t delivering operationally exactly what we needed to do through those late 2000s.
“There was also an assumption that we didn’t need to tell our story because it had already been told in the US, but the reality was there were those who had never been to the US and never consumed the brand, you need to tell them the story.”
