With such an incredible building, created and built in the nineties,
it had to have a design
that not only would compliment it but would be a surprise.
It had to be in stage for our partners to perform what they so do passionately,
everyday, is make the perfect drink and food for you to enjoy.
It's this beautiful iconic white building at the corner of Michigan and Erie.
It's filled with windows and filled with light and that's been a really
fantastic place to put our Chicago Roastery.
It's incredible. Right when you come to the front door me and my team
will be there to greet you and bring you right into our process.
They can look at the roasting progression in the glass jars and
they can move right over into the roaster and see the whole process
right in front of their eyes.
Some of the big moves were to bring people upwards. We want people to be curious
and so we had this vision of bringing the cask
which usually sits in the middle of the roasting area and bringing it to the storefront
and we thought it would be really fantastic idea to bring in the
midwest's first curved escalator and so you ascend and you come up the escalator
and you come up around the cask and it is actually the time
where you get the closest to the cask.
You get this really great experience of kind of winding around and
arriving to the second floor.
And so the cask became the centering element and so from there
we concepted the idea of the ceiling. If the cask is the sun,
the ceiling's the sun rays.
The ceiling's made of five green rings
and these colors are inspired by our connection to the agricultural plant of coffee.
The ceiling goes from light to dark from the cask to the very back
and it had this optical illusion that it's almost slanting upward.
These projects give us the unique opportunity to take things like roasting, process equipment and put them on display.
We're moving food from level two to level one with a conveyor used in processing plants.
We had cladding over this object and we stripped it off so you could see the inner workings.
It's like a Swiss watch but it's built in Pennsylvania.
Because of the verticality, we are utilizing a lot of different conveyance systems
to move coffee around.
The coffee gets loaded in the chainvey, it comes up and gets dropped into another system.
It kind of moves overhead and then comes back around into the green bean silos.
The pneumatic systems, they are sculptural in nature. We call them symphony piping
and you can hear the coffee rushing over head
and then satisfied you'll see it collected in the coffee silos
that are located behind each bar.
Each bar, they have to be beautiful
but also they have to be functional to support the programs.
So, what is the program, what is the equipment related to that program and how the bar needs to accommodate that.
If you think about the traffic that we're anticipating and the customers that are coming in the store,
it won't work if the operators aren't able to serve those customers.
And we have hundreds of vendors that we worked with to pull equipment
from all over the world, to able to customize the experience for our customers.
To me, I always take away, its the people.
I look at a waterproofing detail
and I'll remember a specific craftsman and the care
that he had to make sure that he knew that there would not be a leak.
It's that commitment that we found in these Chicago Tradesmen.
The electricians, the mechanical, all the specialty finishes.
It was refreshing.
I think you can simply credit what we got there to a
midwest work ethic.
I mean they were eager and they were proud and they were fully engaged
in all the work. Hands down with the strongest labor workforce
I've worked around in my career.
Overall, we wanted to tell the story of Starbucks as a stakeholder
in the agricultural world.
The muralist is incredible, you know customers are going to be able to
really appreciate it from far away.
But once they get up close and circulating through that stair
it's going to be absolutely amazing.
Even for us no matter how in-depth you are with the planning
to actually be in the space is still another level of surprise.
When we're talking about community we're going to the fourth floor.
We're learning about how Chicago's been in our history.
Its first place outside of the Pacific Northwest that we expanded into.
Everything today is about technology and you know to make
human connection cool again is also what this is about right,
as you come in the door because it's a beautiful space. But at the end of the day,
the coffee is, I'll call it an excuse, but it's a way to get people to come
and spend time together.
Right? Like just one human being with another one and that's to me what's cool.
It takes a small but powerful team to be able to create a project like this
and we capitalize on the diverse set of talents we have
it's incredibly satisfying to be here with our sixth global roastery.
We've been able to not only create a very beautiful project but
also be able to set the operations teams up for success
for the business we know we want to do here.