by Anonymous (Coffee Correspondent) – Email
Making waves in the coffee world this week is the new ‘Trenta’ size that Starbucks is introducing for their iced drinks. But before you green kool-aid fiends get excited – it’s currently only being released in 14 US states (states such as Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii, and similar warm climate states), with no plans to roll out the behemoth beverage in Canada. The aspect of this move that has folks all a-twitter is that the Trenta is a 31 oz cup – that’s 916 ml. The average adult human stomach, however, has only about a 900 ml capacity. Oh no, alert the presses: Starbucks is fuelling obesity, and we’re all going to die!
Not quite. Speaking as someone who has put in more than my fair share of hours with a green apron, everyone needs to calm down. The important thing to consider is that the Trenta size is only available for the iced beverages – iced tea or iced coffee (not fattaccinos or iced lattes). Iced tea and iced coffee are both brewed and prepared at more than double strength in order to accommodate melting ice. If the recipe is followed properly, about 1/3 of your beverage is ice (prior to the phenomenon known as melting, that is). So, if you’ve been following along, this means that the Trenta beverages will house just over 600 ml of liquid when first made.
Now, many customers are morons, and demand their beverage with light or even no ice. Because this robs the barista of their ability to follow a proper drink recipe (the drink components are measured with lines on the side of a shaker cup), these same customers inevitably end up complaining about the taste of their drink. The new Trenta size will enable employees to serve someone 600 ml of thirst-quenching liquid without compromising drink quality, thus making it the customer’s fault if they get a bad-tasting drink. Still think the Trenta is too much? It probably is. But is it worth going into a fit? No.
Here’s the fun part: Starbucks is guiding their employees to present this as a healthy choice. In a confidential in-store training memo, baristas are told to tell customers that, “When ordered unsweetened, a Trenta size Shaken Iced Tea or an Iced Brewed Coffee has five calories or less.” Yeah? So does the Venti size, idiots. If a customer has a concern about the high levels of caffeine, the employees are guided to sell the Passion tea – the only iced beverage available with no caffeine in it. What they don’t mention (and what employees probably don’t realize) is that the sweetener added by default to each drink also has caffeine, meaning customers with a caffeine intolerance should probably have water instead.
One final thing to note is that the blended beverages are not offered in this new size glass. Given the talking points baristas are provided with, a fair person would assume this would be because of health concerns: however, considering the fact that the frappuccinos are a loss-leader, being the most time-consuming and least cost-effective drink to make, we can pretty safely assume this is a money grab. Oh, wait, we can do more than just speculate: in the handy dandy training sheet for baristas, employees are told to offer two smaller-size beverages instead of one larger one. “Gee, I can’t make you a Trenta Mocha Frappuccino – but how about two Ventis instead?” You don’t need to be a regular customer to understand how pricey that would be – but hey, the green monster is being greased, so who cares?
