However you may feel about the brand and their on-again-off-again CEO, the modern popularity of specialty coffee owes a lot to Starbucks and Howard Schultz. The “Starbucks on every corner” phenomenon was a pretty boilerplate joke back in the late-90s and early-2000s (the best iteration of which appears in Best In Show) but there was a nugget of truth to it. Starbucks brought Italian-style coffee to the American mainstream, and—back when they still used real espresso machines—taught a generation of coffee pros the transferable barista skills that would seed the third wave coffee movement.
So yes, Starbucks and Schultz deserve their flowers, but also, they need to cool it a bit on their revisionist history. In a recent three-hour podcast interview, the former Starbucks CEO states, among other things, that he regrets not trademarking the term “cafe latte” after they “introduced [it] to America.”
As reported by Business Insider India, Schultz recently appeared on an episode of Acquired, a podcast that “tells the stories and strategies of great companies,” per their website. In the sprawling interview—and big thanks to Business Insider India for enduring the three-hour interview to extract the nuggets, because I’m not listening to all that—Schultz drops a few borderline bombshells on hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal, including that Starbucks originally didn’t roast for themselves but bought and repackaged Peet’s Coffee. He also claims that both espresso manufacturer Faema and Lavazza were asked to invest in Starbucks early on but declined. “Turned me down. They’ll deny it. That’s a fact,” Schultz states.
But the real galling part of the whole interview comes when Schultz states his regret for not trademarking the latte. “The other thing I didn’t do is we introduced caffè latte to America but we didn’t trademark it. We trademarked Frappuccino later on, but we didn’t trademark cafe latte. I wasn’t thinking; I missed it.”
Pushing aside the general sleaze of wanting to trademark something that you freely admit to not having created but simply imported, the stated American progenation of the latte is suspect at best. The latte in some form or another has been around for at least a hundred and fifty years. Claiming to be the first to do it in America in the [checks note] 1980s just feels wrong. Made linguistically popular in one geographic region? Sure… but introduced? That’s something different.
The history of the American usage of the term latte is far from settled, but it certainly begins before the ‘80s. One popular theory is that the drink traces back to Caffe Mediterraneum in the 1950s. The owner of the Berkeley, California coffee shop, Lino Meiorin, claims to have invented the latte and made it a “standard drink.” Such a claim is often refuted, not that “it is unlikely that Meiorin was the first to add a generous amount of milk to espresso or call such a drink a caffè latte.” If Meiorin wasn’t the first, then neither was the ‘Bucks.
There is an even older instance of the term latte used by an American. The essayist William Dean Howells is attributed with the first usage of the word all the way back in 1867 in his book Italian Journeys.
While it takes a certain billionaire form of hubris to claim ownership over something you didn’t invent and don’t own, verily there exists an alternate timeline version of our world in which Howard Schultz did, in fact, successfully trademark the term “cafe latte.” Can you even imagine? Having to pay a usage tax to Starbucks every time a cafe served a drink by such a name. Or maybe folks would circumvent this obviously stupid application of the law by calling their lattes by another name.
In this theoretical world we’re drinking a Hot Schultz. A Steaming Howie. Just don’t call it a latte, because that’ll cost extra.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
