Starbucks will unveil its web3 initiative, which includes coffee-themed NFTs, at next month’s Investor Day event. The company earlier this year announced its plans to enter the web3 space, noting its NFTs wouldn’t just serve as digital collectibles, but would provide their owners with access to exclusive content and other perks.

At the time, Starbucks was light on details as to what its debut set of NFTs would look like, specific features they’d provide or even what blockchain it was building on. It said the plan was likely to be multichain or chain-agnostic, hinting at plans that weren’t yet finalized.

Overall, the coffee retailer kept its web3 news fairly high level, explaining simply that it believed digital collectibles could create an accretive business adjust to its stores and that more would be revealed later in 2022.

While some companies jumped on the NFT bandwagon without much thought as to how their investments would fit in with their larger business goals, Starbucks seems to be attempting a different approach. It sees the collectibles as an extension of customer loyalty. In fact, the company even brought in Adam Brotman, the architect of its Mobile Order & Pay system and the Starbucks app, to help serve as a special advisor on the project.

Mobile Order & Pay has been one of Starbucks’ biggest successes, in terms of tech innovations. The company was one of the first to introduce the concept of a digital wallet, even before Apple Pay became ubiquitous. And as broader mobile payment adoption has grown, Starbucks mobile ordering has, too. In the past quarter — Starbucks’ fiscal Q3 — mobile orders, delivery and drive-through combined drove 72% of Starbucks’ U.S. revenue. In addition, the mobile ordering sales mix grew to a record high of 47%, up 13% year-over-year, following COVID-driven changes in consumer behavior, the company said.

Starbucks founder and interim CEO Howard Schultz, who returned to the company in April, teased its forthcoming web3 initiative during this week’s earnings call with investors.

“We have been working on a very exciting new digital initiative that builds on our existing industry-leading digital platform in innovative new ways all centered around coffee and most importantly, loyalty, that we will reveal at Investor Day,” Schultz said.

The company had previously announced its plans to host its 2022 Investor Day in Seattle on September 13, 2022.

Schultz continued, “we believe this new digital web3-enabled initiative will allow us to build on the current Starbucks Rewards engagement model with its powerful spend to earn stars approach while also introducing new methods of emotionally engaging customers, expanding our digital third place community, and offering a broader set of rewards, including one-of-a-kind experiences that you can’t get anywhere else, integrating our digital Starbucks Rewards ecosystem with Starbucks-branded digital collectibles as both a reward and a community building element.

“This will create an entirely new set of digital network effects that will …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/starbucks-to-unveil-its-web3-based-rewards-program-next-month/