How Starbucks is brewing new data driven business models

Since the first coffee house was opened in 1555, there has been a global market for coffee shops and significant business opportunities. To ensure sustained growth, local coffee shops now extend their offering to a chain across various cities and countries. A significant player in recent years is Starbucks.

Between 2001 and 2007, the number of stores grew from 4,000 to 16,000 stores while still maintaining a healthy profit margin. This use case shows one key element that has helped them stay ahead of competition all over the world by leveraging on open data.

A key source of internal data was the Starbucks mobile app. However, this internal dataset alone was not sufficient to gain insights and make critical decisions. Besides their focus (new customers) did not have the mobile app. Through a third-party company, open data on location of train and bus tops, population density in specific areas and city demographics was analysed and correlated with their internal data sets. With this information, Starbucks is now able to determine location for new coffee shops that will be profitable. They also use meteorological data in planning specific products to promote at different times of the year.

The scenario described above involved significant resources in planning, data gathering, sorting and cleaning before applying machine learning algorithms for prediction. Not all local coffee shops have the resources to employ dedicated teams for this task. The Advaneo market place provides a solution.

Easy to Use

Rather than spend months gathering and sorting through numerous data sets, companies now have the opportunity to get relevant data in a few clicks. These have been carefully categorised with verified end points to cut out unnecessary time spent in search that lead to dead ends.

Privacy and Security

All dataset provided on the market place have been checked for permissions and licenses. With one click you can check the permission required and limitations when using the dataset.

Correlation

We understand the need to correlate multiple data sets. Advaneo has categorised all the data set such that a simple keyword search or clicking dataset tags will show other datasets you might not have considered but may be relevant in solving your current challenges.

The scenario described above is not limited to coffee shops as all major grocery chains now employ similar models having inhouse data science teams. Leveraging on the open data provided on the Advaneo marketplace will lead to significant reduction in resources needed to have an in-house data science department as well as lead to new business insights in a shorter time scale.