Brian Niccol: Starbucks Was Too Focused on Efficiency

According to Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, one of his first impressions of the coffee chain was that it had become too focused on efficiency. 

Speaking on The CEO Signal podcast, he said: “We got really focused on trying to be efficient and run it like a manufacturing facility, as opposed to recognising, no, this is actually a customer service experience, where we do great craft and create great drinks for people on time.”

This factory-style culture is something Brian has strived to change since taking the helm in 2024 through his ‘Back to Starbucks’ strategy, which aims to improve Starbucks’ brand image as a ‘third space’ for customers. 

He first developed this strategy after taking over from Laxman Narasimhan, who stepped down after just over a year in the role amid declining sales.

Back to Starbucks

Brian has cemented his reputation as a turnaround expert following stints at Chipotle and Taco Bell, by modernising brand marketing, adopting new technologies on a wider scale and reimagining the brands’ menus to help improve customer and employee experience. 

He is leading similar efforts at Starbucks through the ‘Back to Starbucks’ initiative, which is targeting common customer complaints, such as declining service quality and longer wait times. 

When Brian first took over the coffee chain, it had just had its worst comparable in-store sales period since COVID-19.

To improve the customer experience and increase profits, he has led refurbishment efforts across stores to enhance the in-store experience and encourage customers to stay, shrunk the menu and improved the use of technology to reduce congestion in-store. 

This includes voice ordering capabilities and AI tools such as Green Dot Assist, which Starbucks says: “act as a real‑time companion for coffeehouse partners”.

In October, the company recorded its first quarterly sales increase in almost two years, and continued to show stronger sales in Q1 2026, with global comparable store sales increasing by 4%. 

In an earnings call, Brian said of these results: “Our Q1 results demonstrate our ‘Back to Starbucks’ strategy is working and we believe we’re ahead of schedule. It’s great to see the sales momentum driven by more customers choosing Starbucks more often, and this is just the beginning.”

Cultural transformation at Starbucks

As Brian has worked to improve the customer experience at Starbucks, the company has also taken efforts to improve its employee culture. 

Much of this came through a wider simplification of the brand, with Brian sharing that a bloated menu was overcomplicating both the customer and employee experience.

He shares: “The feedback I heard was, we’ve made the job more complicated than necessary. 

“It was one of those things where it’s like, we got to get back to focusing decisions that actually show up in the store, and then you got to understand how those decisions actually are executed in the store.”

The company has also invested US$500mn to add more partners behind the bar and says it plans to hire internally for 90% of leadership roles. 

Brian said that changes such as these were shifting the way Starbucks employees view the company’s culture and its values – which he told the Wall Street Journal he noticed when reading through a Reddit thread about the Starbucks hiring process.

According to Brian, he saw a comment in the Reddit thread that read: “If you don’t like customer service, you’re probably not going to like working at Starbucks. We’re in that transition of getting people to understand that.”

“When I saw that in the Reddit thread, I was like, ‘OK, we’re making progress on what the standard of services that we want,” Brian said.