Starbucks Hires CTO, Investing in Workforce Tech and NFTs

Starbucks is gearing up to reveal and rollout new retail technology and the company has appointed a new chief technology officer to move some of the efforts along.

Deb Hall Lefevre joined Starbucks as executive vice president, chief technology officer on May 2, replacing Hans Melotte, who served as interim CTO for five months after Gerri Martin-Flickinger left after a six-year run with the retailer.

Lefevre now leads the tech function of Starbucks with the mission of ensuring stores run smoothly, while delivering digital partner and customer experiences. The former Couche-Tard/Circle K executive will have a lot on her plate, likely including “increasing personalization in the company’s mobile app for customers, as well as improvements to systems for employee training, scheduling and equipment maintenance, to free up baristas to spend more time with customers,” a Starbucks spokesperson told Reuters.

“We’re so eager to show off our pipeline of disruptive innovation that we’re moving our Investor Day up to September in Seattle from December in New York,” interim CEO Howard Schultz told analysts during the company’s Q2 2022 earnings call. “With significant innovation around technology and personalization we will reveal our industry game-changers that will further increase store productivity and efficiency. What you will see is the coming transformation and reimagination of the Starbucks customer and partner experiences.”

The coffee giant said it has identified over $200 million of investment that is incremental to investments Starbucks has already committed to in U.S. company-operated stores this year.

“These include further investments in training, wage and equipment and new investments in internal communication with our people, where we will launch a new partner app to communicate directly with all store partners,” Schultz said.

The new associate mobile app is expected to launch in August and intends to create one digital community for all 240,000 U.S. partners, extending collaboration sessions to support partners, plants, retail leaders and to every store with dedicated connection time over the next month.

Schultz also noted there will be a fair amount of investment in technology to do “everything” the company can to “upgrade the algorithms of labor scheduling.” There will also be upgrades in “the digital app itself to be able to provide customers with a more accurate method of when their beverage is going to be ready,” he noted.

“If you look at where we can really be much more efficient — we can provide our people with better training, better wages, better equipment behind the counters to give them the tools and resources, the self-confidence and self-esteem to do their job — we will lower attrition and our retention rate will be much greater,” Schultz claimed. “That alone is a significant level of ways in which we can take money out of the P&L and money out of the store economics.”