Starbucks global: the U.S. engine, and the one it sold
Unlike the Flame Index's private outlier, Starbucks discloses almost everything — quarterly comps split by transactions and ticket, market-level revenue for the U.S. and China, store counts by operating model, and a standing digital dashboard. The problem is the opposite one: in the third quarter of fiscal 2026 Starbucks handed its roughly 8,000 China coffeehouses to a Boyu Capital joint venture and converted them to licensed stores, so the China column stops mid-series and consolidated revenue falls while demand rises. Every cell below is tagged by basis so a structural break is never read as a trend.
Two engines — and they ran in opposite directions
Starbucks reports comparable store sales for the global system, North America, the U.S., International and — until the divestiture — China, each split into transactions and average ticket. Through fiscal 2026 the U.S. accelerated from flat to nearly eight points while China decelerated from seven to half a point.
Comparable store sales by quarter, U.S. versus China
Company-operated stores open 13 months or longer, excluding currency and Siren Retail. The China line terminates after Q2 FY2026 because the stores are no longer company-operated.
Q4 FY2025 ended 28 September 2025; Q1 FY2026 ended 28 December 2025; Q2 FY2026 ended 29 March 2026; Q3 FY2026 ended 28 June 2026. Starbucks rounded Q4 FY2025 and Q1 FY2026 comps to whole percentages in those releases and reported one decimal from Q2 FY2026 onward.
The last quarter both engines were reported
Q2 FY2026 is the final period in which China appears as a company-operated market with its own revenue, comps and store count. Prior-year figures are as stated in the same release.
| Market supplement | Q2 FY26 | Q2 FY25 |
|---|---|---|
| United States | ||
| Net revenues | $6,435.9M | $6,048.8M |
| Comparable store sales | +7.1% | −1.6% |
| Transactions | +4.3% | −4.3% |
| Average ticket | +2.7% | +2.9% |
| Store count | 16,944 | 17,122 |
| China | ||
| Net revenues | $799.8M | $739.7M |
| Comparable store sales | +0.5% | −0.1% |
| Transactions | +2.1% | +4.4% |
| Average ticket | −1.6% | −4.2% |
| Store count | 7,991 | 7,758 |
China's ticket has been negative in every quarter shown — the price war reaching the P&L. Its transaction growth is real but no longer enough to lift comps.
Why the U.S. turned
The sequence matters more than any single quarter. Starbucks went seven quarters without global comp growth before Q4 FY2025.
- Q4 FY2025 — global comps +1%, the first increase in seven quarters; U.S. flat, with ticket +1% offsetting transactions −1%.
- Q1 FY2026 — global and U.S. comps +4%, and U.S. comparable transaction growth for the first time in eight quarters.
- Q2 FY2026 — global +6.2%, U.S. +7.1%, transactions +4.3%. Loyalty relaunched in March as a three-tier program.
- Q3 FY2026 — global +7.9%, U.S. +7.9%, North America +8.1%; fourth straight quarter of comp growth and second of margin expansion.
A year of Green Apron Service labour investment sat in the base; the third quarter lapped it and added 430 basis points. Part of the jump is mix: the International segment's margin rose from 13.6% to 19.1% because the China stores left the company-operated base. Filed
The China break — read the revenue line carefully
Boyu Capital funds hold 60% of Starbucks China retail; Starbucks holds 40% and continues to own and license the brand and intellectual property. Around 8,000 company-operated coffeehouses moved to a licensed model in the third quarter of fiscal 2026.
Do not read the −1% revenue print as a demand signal, and do not extend the China comp line
Q3 FY2026 consolidated net revenues fell 1.4% to $9,322.7 million while global comps rose 7.9%. The two are not in conflict: 7,991 company-operated China stores became licensee stores inside the quarter, so their store revenue left the top line and returned only as product sales and royalties. The store-count table shows the mechanics — International company-operated stores fell by 7,971 and licensed stores rose by 8,160 in a single quarter, for net growth of 189. Any year-over-year revenue, company-operated store count or International margin comparison that straddles that boundary is measuring a transaction, not a business.
China comps, China transactions, China ticket and China market revenue are no longer disclosed after Q2 FY2026. Starbucks itself frames fiscal 2026 as company-operated China in the first half and a joint-venture licensee in the second. Treat 29 March 2026 as the terminal date of that series, not a data gap to interpolate.
What the deal changes, row by row
| Index row | Before Q3 FY26 | After | Consequence for the panel |
|---|---|---|---|
| China comps | Filed quarterly | Not disclosed | Series ends at +0.5%. No successor metric announced. |
| China market revenue | $799.8M in Q2 | Not disclosed | Reappears only inside licensed-store revenue and royalties. |
| China store count | 7,991 | Inside licensed total | Track it through the joint venture's own announcements from here. |
| Company-operated mix | 52% of stores | 33% of stores | A one-quarter step change. Never trend it across the break. |
| International margin | 13.6% (Q3 FY25) | 19.1% (Q3 FY26) | Mostly ownership mix. Not an operating improvement of that size. |
| Consolidated revenue growth | +8.8% in Q2 | −1.4% in Q3 | Structural. Guidance for FY2026 is roughly flat revenue for this reason. |
| Brand ownership | Wholly owned | Owned and licensed | Starbucks keeps the brand and IP and licenses them to the venture. |
| Deal valuation and royalty rate | Press reporting | Not in closing release | The closing release states the 60/40 split but no valuation or fee terms. |
| FY2028 EPS framework | Status-quo China | ≈$0.15 lower | The Investor Day framework assumed no joint venture and flagged the delta. |
The Investor Day framework also set out the licensing logic: China moves the International mix from roughly 55% licensed to about 90% licensed, lifting International segment margins to the high teens immediately and potentially above 20% by fiscal 2028.
Self-service and throughput — the headline section
Starbucks has no kiosk estate. Its self-service surface is the app, and its throughput problem is what happens when app orders, drive-thru orders and café orders collide at the same espresso bar. This is the part of the story that generalises to every unattended-retail operator.
Mobile order share and loyalty base, nine quarters
U.S. company-operated stores only, from the standing Starbucks Card, Loyalty & Mobile dashboard. Mobile order share sat at exactly 31% for six consecutive quarters before moving to 33%.
Rewards 90-day active members are U.S. only. The dashboard also reports Rewards member spend at 59% of tender dollars in Q3 FY2026, and Starbucks Card at 42% of transactions — a reminder that stored value, not just the app, is doing the self-service work.
The throughput stack, and what each piece is claimed to do
Every quantified figure here comes from Starbucks' own Investor Day disclosure or its quarterly releases. Where a number exists only in trade press it is labelled as such.
Smart Queue
- Sequences café, mobile, drive-thru and delivery orders against one production queue
- Underpins scheduled mobile ordering with five-minute pickup windows
Green Apron Service
- Labour, equipment and technology investment behind a fixed service routine
- Now live across all North America company-operated coffeehouses
Peak throughput
- Average order completion at peak across café and drive-thru coffeehouses
- Reported as an achieved level, not a standing target
NextGen POS
- Proprietary till built around the barista rather than the menu tree
- Aimed squarely at training time, the hidden throughput tax
Mastrena III
- Next-generation proprietary espresso machine, rollout beginning 2027
- A separate shot puller is planned for high-demand cold-beverage stores
Green Dot Assist
- Azure OpenAI assistant on in-store iPads, trained on Starbucks standards
- Piloted in 35 U.S. stores from June 2025; Starbucks describes it as Green Assist
Starbucks discloses mobile order share, loyalty actives, stored-value load and card share — but not drive-thru share of sales, not delivery mix, and nothing resembling a self-order kiosk count, because the format is not part of the coffeehouse model. Claims that mobile plus drive-thru exceed 70% of sales circulate widely but trace to third-party compilations, not to a Starbucks disclosure. Treat any drive-thru percentage on this page's peers the same way. Estimate territory
The comp set — Dunkin', Tim Hortons, Dutch Bros
Three very different disclosure regimes: Dunkin' is private inside Inspire Brands and appears only through the QSR 50, Tim Hortons is a reported segment of Restaurant Brands International, and Dutch Bros files as a standalone public company with the cleanest unit economics in the group.
FY2025 U.S. scorecard
| Brand | U.S. system sales | Avg sales / unit | Franchised or licensed | Company | Total units | Net unit change | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starbucks | $30.25B | $1.80M | 6,813 | 10,047 | 16,860 | −75 | QSR estimate |
| Dunkin' | $13.11B | $1.40M | 9,963 | 36 | 9,999 | +231 | Submitted |
| Dutch Bros | $2.22B | $2.12M | 325 | 811 | 1,136 | +154 | Submitted |
| Tim Hortons | not in ranking | — | — | — | — | — | Canada-weighted |
QSR 50 2026, ranking fiscal 2025 U.S. system-wide sales; figures were submitted by the companies between March and May 2026 except Starbucks, which QSR marks as its own estimate. Tim Hortons does not appear because its system is overwhelmingly Canadian — its segment reported 4,570 Canada-and-U.S. restaurants and US$2,003 million of system-wide sales in the June 2026 quarter alone.
Average unit volume, FY2025
Most recent reported comparable sales
The comp bars are not coterminous: Starbucks' figure is its fiscal quarter ended 28 June 2026; Dutch Bros, Tim Hortons and Luckin report calendar quarters ended 30 June 2026. Dunkin' publishes no comparable-sales figure at all. Dutch Bros is shown on both bases because its company-operated shops materially outperform its franchised system.
Where each brand actually earns it
Dutch Bros
- Company-operated same-shop sales +8.3%, transactions +3.4%, ticket +4.9%
- Systemwide same-shop +5.8%; revenue $550.9M, up 32.5%
- 48 new shops to 1,225 total; AUV $2.2M on a trailing-twelve-month basis
Tim Hortons
- Comparable sales +0.1%, Canada +0.1%
- System-wide sales US$2,003M, up 0.4%; net restaurant growth 1.1%
- 4,570 system restaurants at period end
Dunkin'
- Annual U.S. system sales and unit counts through the QSR 50 only
- Second-largest snack chain by U.S. system sales, and adding units fastest of the three
Starbucks U.S.
- U.S. comps +7.9%; North America segment revenue $7,395.1M, margin 13.6%
- 16,933 U.S. stores, down 2% year over year — growth is comp-led, not unit-led
- 41% of the global portfolio sits in the U.S.
Luckin — the unit blitz that reset China's price floor
Starbucks' China comps cannot be read without the competitor that added more stores in one quarter than Dutch Bros operates in total.
Footprint, most recent reported
Mixed geographies by design: Starbucks totals are global and U.S.; Luckin is global but overwhelmingly Chinese; Dunkin' is U.S.; Tim Hortons is its Canada-and-U.S. segment; Dutch Bros is U.S. Do not sum these bars.
Luckin, quarter ended 30 June 2026
| Metric | Q2 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Total net revenues | RMB15,885.6M | +28.5% |
| Gross merchandise value | RMB18.4B | +29.8% |
| GAAP operating income | RMB2,122.9M | +22.0% |
| GAAP operating margin | 13.4% | — |
| Non-GAAP operating margin | 15.1% | — |
| Same-store sales, self-operated | −5.3% | from +13.8% |
| Monthly transacting customers | 112.7M | +22.9% |
| Net new stores in quarter | 2,714 | +8.1% units |
| Total stores | 36,310 | 23,734 self-operated |
- 4.5× — Luckin's store count against Starbucks' last-reported China estate of 7,991. Computed here
- Of 2,714 net new stores, 2,668 were in China and Hong Kong; the United States took 8.
- Luckin's own same-store sales are now negative while revenue grows 28.5% — growth is coming entirely from units and customer count, the mirror image of Starbucks U.S.
The green-coffee whipsaw sits behind every margin line here
Arabica futures set an all-time high near $4.38 a pound in October 2025 as tariffs and crop concerns squeezed supply, and traded near $2.80 in mid-September 2026 as Brazilian shipments landed — a fall of roughly a third from the peak. Starbucks named elevated coffee pricing and tariffs among the causes of its Q1 FY2026 margin contraction, and Tim Hortons' revenue growth in the June 2026 quarter was attributed largely to commodity pass-through rather than demand. Commodity levels are market data, not company disclosure, and the peak-to-recent decline is our own arithmetic. Market data Computed here
Guidance and the fiscal 2028 framework
Starbucks raised fiscal 2026 guidance twice during the year and set a three-year framework at its January 2026 Investor Day.
What management has committed to
| Measure | FY2026 guidance | FY2028 framework |
|---|---|---|
| Global comparable store sales | 5.0% or greater | 3% or greater |
| U.S. comparable store sales | 5.0% or greater | 3% or greater |
| Consolidated net revenue | roughly flat year over year | 5% or greater growth |
| Contribution from new stores | not specified | 2%–3% of revenue |
| Non-GAAP operating margin | slightly improved year over year | 13.5%–15% |
| Non-GAAP EPS | $2.25–$2.45 | $3.35–$4.00 |
| Net new coffeehouses | 600–650 globally | more than 2,000 globally |
| Net new U.S. company-operated | not specified | approximately 400 |
- The fiscal 2026 comps and EPS guidance were raised from the ranges given at Investor Day, where EPS was framed at $2.15–$2.40 and global comps at 3% or better.
- Long-term ambition beyond the framework: management has said it believes it can earn back toward the 2019 margin level of 17%–18%.
- China under the joint venture is targeted at 15,000–20,000 coffeehouses over time, against roughly 8,000 today — but as a licensee, so unit growth reaches Starbucks through royalties rather than store revenue.
- Uplifts, at roughly $150,000 per store and typically completed overnight, replaced million-dollar remodels and are expected to add more than 25,000 U.S. café seats by the end of fiscal 2026.
What is not disclosed by anyone on this page
The rows a coffee index cannot fill, regardless of how many filings you read.
Blank by definition
- Drive-thru share of sales — not disclosed by Starbucks, Dutch Bros or Tim Hortons
- Delivery as a percentage of sales, on any basis
- Self-order kiosk counts or kiosk share of transactions
- China comps, ticket or store count after Q2 FY2026
- The Boyu joint venture's valuation and royalty terms, in the closing release
- Anything quarterly for Dunkin' — no comps, traffic, margin or digital mix
- Loyalty membership for Dunkin', Tim Hortons or Dutch Bros on a comparable basis
- Starbucks Rewards actives outside the United States
- Per-store labour hours, the real denominator behind every throughput claim
- Green Dot Assist's effect on service time or order accuracy
Where a figure exists only in trade press or third-party compilation it carries the estimate tag on this page and should not be charted against a filed cell. Mobile order share, Rewards actives, stored-value load and card share are the only recurring self-service metrics in the set that come straight from a company dashboard.