NEW YORK — Starbucks, looking to the future as its CEO moves to other projects, plans to open 12,000 new locations within five years to boost its number of coffee shops worldwide by almost 50 percent.
The Seattle-based chain is also adding more food to its menu next year, including organic soups, gluten-free breakfast sandwiches and a wheat-free cooked egg product. And sometime in 2017, customers will be able to talk to the Starbucks app to order a latte or cookie instead of tapping their smartphones.
Starbucks outlined its five-year growth plans to investors on Wednesday, about a week after it announced that Howard Schultz, who has built Starbucks into a global brand with 25,000 locations since first joining the company more than 30 years ago, would step down as CEO in April. Starbucks has been facing increasing competition from Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s as those companies add more specialty coffee drinks to their menus.
About 5,000 of the 12,000 stores Starbucks plans to open by 2021 will be in China. The company said again that it expects China to eventually overtake the U.S. as its largest market, but didn’t say when it expects that to happen. Today there are about 2,500 stores in China and more than 13,000 in the U.S.
