Brewing Digital Change at Starbucks: Modernizing a Print-First Brand
Starbucks is known for its strong commitment to traditional brand standards, particularly its long-standing reliance on printed menus to maintain consistency across locations. As part of a pilot initiative, Starbucks partnered with our team to explore how digital menu boards could enhance speed, flexibility, and promotional effectiveness without compromising brand integrity. The goal was to test digital across a limited footprint, validating its ability to support both indoor and drive-thru environments while preserving the familiar Starbucks experience customers expect.Starbucks Digital menu pilot
SKILLS & SUbject Matter
PILOT DEPLOYMEnT STRATEGY • Digital Menu Systems
Personalization Strategy • Content Architecture
overview
For this initiative, I supported the end-to-end delivery of a digital menu pilot spanning 20 Starbucks locations, covering both indoor and drive-thru menu boards. My work centered on leading content architecture and content development efforts to support a wide range of business requirements, including personalization through app-integrated favorites, loyalty, and rewards, order confirmation and COD (customer order display) screens, weather-based promotional logic, dayparting strategies to prioritize specific food and beverage items, seasonal promotions and product launches, and suggestive sell add-ons informed by previous purchases and popular item pairings.
This engagement required balancing operational realities and the technical complexity of deploying digital experiences at scale within live restaurant environments. I provided program and project leadership across design, engineering, content, and operations teams, ensuring the pilot executed smoothly while generating actionable insights to inform future digital menu strategy and potential broader rollout.
My work included:
Program-managed the development and delivery of a 20-store digital menu pilot across indoor and drive-thru environments
Led content architecture and content development to support dynamic, rules-based menu behavior
Defined content strategies for personalization, including app-integrated favorites, loyalty messaging, rewards, and suggestive sell
Implemented logic for weather-based promotions and dayparting to prioritize relevant food and beverage items by time of day
Coordinated deployments with marketing campaign strategies to support seasonal promotions and product launches
Partnered closely with design, engineering, content, and operations teams to balance brand standards, technical constraints, and in-store realities
Managed timelines, dependencies, and risks across live restaurant environments with minimal tolerance for disruption
This pilot demonstrated how digital menus could enhance speed, flexibility, and promotional effectiveness within a brand historically rooted in print. By carefully translating Starbucks’ established visual standards into a dynamic digital system, the work validated how personalization, dayparting, and contextual promotions could be introduced without disrupting the customer experience or in-store operations. The initiative reinforced my ability to lead complex, brand-sensitive pilots in live restaurant environments and deliver insights that inform scalable digital transformation across large, operationally demanding networks.