Howard Schultz and the Folly of the Starbucks Oleato

There is an account on Bluesky called Discontinued Foods that posts about, well, discontinued food products. It features such travesties as Yoplait Skittles yoghurt and Burger King’s veal sandwich. I expect it will eventually get around to covering the Starbucks Oleato.

The Oleato was an olive oil-infused line of drinks that Starbucks launched to much fanfare in 2023, under instruction from then-interim CEO Howard Schultz who apparently came up with the idea while on holiday in Italy. It sounded gross, reportedly was quite gross, and was abandoned less than a year after debuting in the United States.

Schultz, now retired from the Starbucks board and holding the honorary role of chairman emeritus, has left Seattle and moved to Miami. He no longer looms quite as large over the company, but his legacy—of growing the brand from a regional player to a multinational giant, of fighting against multiple unionising attempts with varying degrees of success—remains.

The Oleato is also his legacy, and it's quite a sad one. No one asked for it, nobody really liked it, and it was eventually quietly shelved. The Oleato, then, represents the last gasps of the strange hold Schultz wielded over the world's largest coffee chain.