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, it makes sure to cater to local tastes - in Japan, for example, Starbucks offers many matcha options, while in the UK, they offer local breakfast items such as the sausage sandwich and, of course, English breakfast tea. These days, the
exceeds 40,000 and the number of international stores has slowly but surely overtaken North American locations. In 2024, there were almost 22,000
.
Is Starbucks the biggest global food and drink services company?
In 2024,
Starbucks' revenue peaked at over 36 billion U.S. dollars. Not only did Starbucks record its highest revenue that year, but the chain also had the
second-highest brand value of any global restaurant company in 2025, 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 be the catalyst for the boycotting of Starbucks that year and onwards, the bigger picture is more complicated. Among other reasons are menu price increases and issues with employee pay and working conditions. For example, in 2025, Starbucks issued a new dress code policy without consulting the workers union, causing around 1,200 employees to go on strike, across roughly 100 stores in the United States. These back-to-back issues have resulted in some
fluctuations in Starbucks’ quarterly revenue, the most recent of which was seen in the first quarter of 2025, where it dropped to 8.8 billion U.S. dollars versus the 9.4 billion U.S. dollars seen in the same quarter of the previous 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 being estimated at over 425 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, 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 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, alongside Starbucks’ strategies of market saturation and localization of products, will set them on a trajectory for yet more global growth.
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