The news: Starbucks wants every store restocked within 24 hours of running low, CEO Brian Niccol told analysts on the company’s fiscal third-quarter earnings call in late July. About 60% of U.S. stores already get a truck that often, while the rest run on a roughly 72-hour cycle, according to a Bernstein note. Bernstein published it after analyst Danilo Gargiulo met with Niccol in June.
“I’d like to be able to replenish stores within 24 hours so that we're never out of stock,” Niccol said. “Also, hopefully, we can shrink the back of house and have then the right inventory at the right location at the right time.”
So, Starbucks is scaling daily deliveries and “testing a 24-hour operating clock” in its supply chain, Niccol said. The target follows two years of work on how the company feeds its stores, including a year spent on an AI inventory counting tool that it scrapped in May.
Starbucks tracks a metric it calls food availability, which it defines itself and has not published a formula for. That number sits “close to 99% today,” Niccol said, “about 10 points better than it was just a year ago.”
A daily truck is not the same as replenishment within 24 hours of running low, though. A store that sells out at 11 a.m. still waits for tomorrow’s delivery unless the ordering cycle moves too.
The backdrop: Starbucks first tried to fix stockouts with cameras. Through 2025, it rolled out a computer-vision tool, built with the Redmond, Washington, startup NomadGo, to every company-operated store in North America.
Baristas waved a store tablet at the fridge and the software counted the shelf. Inventory was “counted eight times more frequently, giving us real-time visibility and enabling faster, more precise replenishment,” Deb Hall Lefevre, then the company’s chief technology officer, said during the rollout.
But the tool lasted less than a year. Fortune reported in May, citing a February Reuters story, that Starbucks sources said the app often miscounted or mislabeled items, and failed to spot bottles sitting on the shelf.
By May, the company had pulled it across North America and put stores back on a manual count. Starbucks said only that it tests ideas in its coffeehouses and makes changes “to deliver a better, more consistent experience.”
Behind the stores sits a long pipeline. Starbucks buys green coffee and roasts it in its own U.S. plants. Green coffee accounts for 88% of its total purchase obligations, so it holds about two months of inventory and turns that inventory 5.3 times a year.
A 72-hour cadence works for beans and cups, but it is too slow for sandwiches, egg bites and anything else that goes stale.
What changed: The new plan works on the delivery cycle instead.
Daily delivery everywhere. Starbucks is expanding from roughly 60% of stores toward all of them.
A supply chain that runs at night. The “24-hour operating clock” test means warehouses and transport run around the clock instead of standard business hours.
A new Nashville office. Bloomberg reported in March that Starbucks will open the office to house sourcing teams, citing Nashville's central location and access to multiple U.S. regions.
Smaller back rooms. Faster resupply means each store holds less spare stock, which is what Niccol means by shrinking the back of house.
Part of the plan started earlier: in January 2025, Starbucks said it would cut roughly 30% of its beverage and food SKUs by the end of that fiscal year. The cut left fewer items to count, order and truck.
Food is the reason. Niccol said it is very hard to run an afternoon and food business without 24-hour replenishment, Food Business News reported. That is because what sells out by 10 a.m. stays gone all day and what does not sell spoils.
Store growth is the other reason. Starbucks sees room for up to 5,000 more U.S. locations, according to plans it laid out at its January investor day. And a store resupplied daily needs less room to store what it sells.
Comparable sales grew 7.9% globally last quarter, the fourth straight quarter of growth, while non-GAAP operating margin expanded 430 basis points to 14.4%.
The competition: Walmart kept its cameras and spent on the network underneath them. Twenty-three of its 42 regional distribution centers are being retrofitted, and 60% of its U.S. stores now receive part of their freight from automated distribution centers.
Walmart credits that automation, computer vision included, with holding inventory growth to 2.6% year over year, about half its sales growth.
Its computer vision runs in the stores, much as Starbucks’ did. That is because more than a million U.S. associates carry handhelds that map what is in the building and where it sits, CEO John Furner said.
The rest of the industry holds very different amounts of stock, and moves it at very different speeds:
Chipotle buys fresh and holds almost nothing, about $50 million of inventory across the company.
McDonald’s holds even less for its size, roughly $60 million, because franchisees own the stock.
Domino’s owns the middle of its chain instead, running its own commissaries, and turns inventory about 40 times a year.
Sysco and U.S. Foods, the two largest U.S. foodservice distributors, turn 13.1 and 19.5 times.
Starbucks, at 5.3 turns, is the slowest of them, and the only one that buys and roasts its own coffee.
7-Eleven Japan gets fresh food to its stores up to three times a day, through four separate temperature-controlled supply chains, and has run that way for decades.
The counter: Zero100 argued last November that 7-Eleven cannot copy its own Japanese playbook in the U.S. American stores sit too far apart, labor costs too much, and the routes do not pay for themselves, it said.
7-Eleven Japan did not reach that cadence by running more trucks, either. Several manufacturers’ goods ride on shared trucks and stores are clustered into one delivery area, per a Hitotsubashi University Business School case study. That keeps deliveries below 10 per store a day.
But Starbucks ships its own goods from its own warehouses, so it has no other manufacturers to pool with, and delivering more often mostly adds trips.
Cost is the other problem. Starbucks is partway through a $2 billion cost-efficiency program in procurement and technology. The program follows a roughly $1 billion restructuring that closed 627 stores in a single quarter and cut around 900 non-retail jobs.
Running warehouses and transport around the clock is a permanent operating cost with night-shift premiums attached, and Starbucks has not put a number on it.
There is also a reading in which the cameras were the right idea. A store ordering on a 72-hour cycle, after all, commits three days of stock at a time, with no chance to correct in between. Under that cadence an accurate count is worth more, not less, so the tool failed because it could not count, not because it came first.
My view: I cannot say the cameras failed because the trucks were too slow. Reuters reported that the tool miscounted, and that is an execution failure.
What I notice is the order Starbucks settled on. The menu cut and the daily trucks are running now, while new inventory software waits until fiscal 2027. So the company tried the cheap information fix first and is now buying the expensive physical one.
Availability is also the smaller prize, because it already sits close to 99% on a measure Starbucks defines itself. The larger prize is the back room: a store resupplied daily can hold less. A smaller footprint also changes what a Starbucks costs to open across the 5,000 locations the company still wants.
What’s next: New ordering, staffing and point-of-sale systems follow the trucks. “Fiscal 2027 will be an important modernization year with new inventory ordering, staffing and scheduling and point-of-sale systems,” Niccol said on the call.
Starbucks expects to be building about 400 U.S. stores a year by fiscal 2028. That gives the resupply changes two fiscal years to prove they work before the build rate peaks.
