Starbucks set to launch loyalty NFT

Coffee giant Starbucks will launch a loyalty-based NFT giving their customers access to exclusive experiences and perks.

The themes of these collections will be born of Starbucks artistic expressions, both heritage and newly created, as well as through world-class collaborations with other innovators and like-minded brands, the company said.

In a blog post on its site Brady Brewer, chief marketing officer at Starbucks said the company believes NFTs have broad potential to create an expanded, shared-ownership model for loyalty, the offering of unique experiences, community building, storytelling, and customer engagement.

He said, “While doing so also being a source of accretive business that can benefit a number of stakeholders in the process, while creating a new type of digital ecosystem to complement Starbucks current digital platform offering.”

Brewer said the over the 50-year history of the company it has amassed a wide variety of assets that it could digitalise and turn into NFTs.

“Such as our rich heritage of coffee art and storytelling, our nearly 27 million active Rewards members in the U.S., a long line of store designs and Starbucks card art, and other fun ways to bring digital communities and experiences to life in the digital realm,” he said.

“Starbucks also has a history of taking leading edge technology, innovating and making it accessible and approachable for mainstream audiences. Our history with loyalty, mobile payment, mobile ordering and Wi-Fi has taught us how to engage customers at scale to unlock opportunities.”

Brady explained that a Starbucks Digital Community Web3 platform has the potential to pioneer the combination of an approachable, widely accessible front-end, backed by the right blockchain technologies that are fast and inexpensive.

“Our approach to blockchain technology – while ultimately likely to be multi-chain or chain agnostic – will certainly start with collections backed by blockchains and infrastructure that is consistent with our multi-decade commitment to sustainability,” he said.

Starbucks will launch its Web3 department incrementally and start with its first NFT collection, membership and community later this year, based on coffee art and storytelling.

“It will come with a host of unique experiences and benefits, worthy of a genesis NFT collection from Starbucks. And this first collection will form the core digital community and backbone against which we hope to build future collections and collaborations – all building on the same new ecosystem,” Brewer added.