Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Story Behind Your Cup of Coffee at World’s Largest Coffeehouse Chain: Brady Brewer

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

A cup of coffee can tell you more about the world than you think. It can tell you about the soil of North Sumatra, the history of a Seattle coffeehouse, the dreams of a farmer’s daughter. In this episode, Brady Brewer, ceo, Starbucks International, takes us inside the global coffee company and shares about the importance of local relationships and cultural roots. Gita and Brady discuss about misinformation, the importance on managing climate challenges and nurturing climate resistant coffee trees and the power of coffee - how coffeehouses can bring people together and once again become the beating heart of society. Coffee connects. Coffee is our culture. Coffee starts conversations. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #BradyBrewer______________________________________________________About the Guest:Brady Brewer is the CEO International of Starbucks. Since joining the company in 2001, he has held regional and global leadership roles in marketing, digital innovation, and operations based in the U.S. and Asia Pacific. As a certified Starbucks Coffee Master, he’s travelled to coffee farms in Costa Rica and Sumatra—an experience that deepened his passion for coffee and his commitment to building a sustainable future for coffee farming communities.About the Host:Gita is an Indonesian entrepreneur and educator. He is the founding partner of Ikhlas Capital and the chairman of Ancora Group. Currently, he is teaching at Stanford as a visiting scholar with Stanford's Precourt Institute for Energy.____________________________________________________The second year of Endgame Town Hall is coming soon!Get your tickets here:https://sgpp.me/endgametownhall-ticketsOr become part of this intellectual movement:https://sgpp.me/endgametownhall-partnershipCollaborations and partnerships:https://sgpp.me/contactus

Selfishly as Starbucks, we need a long-term supply of the world's best coffee. But that coffee business and that coffee industry is under threat from climate change, from many different things. And so helping farmers within these countries is also very important. So as global as a brand as we are, we're actually very local. And so our farmer support center in Indonesia works with farmers directly to do things like take soil samples of a farmer's soil to understand the composition of the soil. How is the nitrogen?

How are the various elements working in, how's the hydration of that specific plot of land? And then what types of things can be done to maximize the yield? When I was in the farms in Sumatra, I visited a village called Sea Barang Barang. We were actually going there to see coffee growing, but we were also watching. wanting to visit a clinic that Starbucks built in the area. The clinic offers free health care to the community. I asked about the clinic and the type of work they do. What are most of the cases they see?

And they said, oh, well, this is actually a maternal health clinic. Why maternal health? And they said, well, you know, the future of the farm depends on healthy children. And healthy children equals healthy future farmers. just so they had mapped all the future babies. And I was just thinking, this is incredible. Like, what a concept. Anything that you want to explain with respect to,

call it the boycott in the context of people's not having the right kind of understanding about what's happening? Yeah, I think in Indonesia, you're right. You know, we faced a boycott. we faced a lot of misinformation about Starbucks. And so that misinformation ultimately impacted our people. And I think that's the hardest thing for us to see. Hi, friends.

Today we're honored to have Brady Brewer, who is the CEO of Starbucks International, attending our podcast. Brady, thank you so much for grazing our show. Gita, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a real honor for me as well. Thank you. Thank you.

You grew up in a state of Washington. Washington, tell me a little bit about your upbringing in terms of the values that would have been infused into you by your parents and the ecosystem to the extent that you became so educated and so successful. And I think that would be a value to a lot of people in Southeast Asia. Sure. Well, I grew up here in the Seattle area. I was born in Los Angeles, California. My parents had grown up in L.A. They moved us to Seattle because they wanted to be closer to nature. And my father worked in a company that supported the tugboat industry. They were tugboats and they helped ships come into the harbor here in Seattle. And so he worked there for 35 years and

my mom was a nurse for 40 years. And so I grew up around them and my stepfather. And I think the things that they helped cultivate in me were a respect for family. humility, hard work, respect for nature, and a desire to have a calm mind, a fit body, and love in the home, I would say. You decided to go to University of Washington. Nothing against the Huskies, but they're just a great school and team. Why? Well, at the time there was something called an index number.

And if your grade point average was high enough and your average, your test scores, your standardized test scores were high enough, you got a number. And then the University of Washington would publish, we are accepting students above this number. And so one day when they published that number, you did simple math and you said, well, I guess I got into the University of Washington, which was a great honor. and it just involved sending a postcard into the university at the time. Now I have three kids and nearly 20 years old, 18 years old, and 16 years old. And I'm watching their process of going into college.

And it's very different, as you know. But I only applied to the University of Washington. If I hadn't had gotten in, I don't know what would have happened. But it all worked out and I felt very honored to go there. It worked out okay. Now, you kind of pivoted from a career standpoint. you were working in a computer company and then you pivoted to coffee. Why? I noticed you're enjoying a coffee presumably is also from my part of the world.

Yeah, you can see me sipping on this mug, but for the listeners, you know, when we sip coffee at Starbucks, it's like how you eat noodles in Japan, right? You slurp them. And in the U.S., normally you're told not to make noises when you eat, but when you drink coffee, one of the things you do is you slurp it like this. and what that does is it sprays the coffee across your palate and it aerates it into your nostrils through your mouth and so you smell and taste the coffee and all of the nuances of it. So I happen to be drinking coffee from Sumatra this morning as a matter of fact. Thank you so much. Is that characteristic of every employee of Starbucks in drinking coffee or that's just a Brady Brewer type of coffee drinking stuff?

Well, I would say at Starbucks, you're probably going to find that 9,999 out of 10,000 would probably be drinking coffee regularly. And a tradition at Starbucks is we actually start meetings with a coffee tasting. And so what this involves is it's about five minutes at the beginning of many meetings throughout the day. So you have to be a little bit careful about how you pace your caffeine throughout the day. But we have little tasting cups. and what we'll do is we'll start the meeting and someone will have selected a coffee and decided to speak about the coffee at the beginning of the meeting. And it's just a way for the meeting to get grounded, for people to feel centered, and then to remember why we're here. And so the steps involved in that is you select a coffee, you brew it usually in a French press.

You dose out in tasting cups for everyone what this coffee is and you smell it, then you slurp it, you describe the coffee and all of the nuanced flavors. and people who are really good at that fine flavor notes that you wouldn't imagine. Oh, that's toasted cedar. Or I'm getting hints of honeybell orange. And after you describe it, then usually people tell a short coffee story about why they selected this coffee. And I'm not kidding to say that sometimes people are in tears when they talk about the coffee. And so it's one of the most beautiful parts of our culture. And so very common to hear coffee slurping in meetings here.

Was that one of the main attractions for you to pivot from something else to doing coffee? Yeah, you asked a great question. Did she already know that? Yeah. Well, so here's a funny story. So my mom drank a lot of coffee growing up. She would always brew pots of coffee in the home, and I think she would drink the whole pot herself. My stepdad did not drink coffee.

My dad didn't really drink coffee. My older sister drank a lot of coffee, and she even worked at an espresso stand for a while, making coffee. but I watched how much coffee they consumed, and I'm like, I'm not so sure that's for me. I started working to your earlier question in the tech industry. And what led me to Starbucks is more the mission and values of the company than the coffee. And I discovered coffee in the process. And so for me, when you were saying what your listeners would want to know, particularly about a career, When I was in college, you know, I was learning about business.

I got a business degree from the University of Washington. I was learning about things like culture and mission and a company values, a company's values. But it was all abstract in my mind, the idea of a company culture. You could read it on a piece of paper, but I don't think I fully internalized what a company culture was. And so I went into the workforce and I worked at this great company called Vizio. drawing and diagramming software, which Microsoft later bought. But the company had a great culture, one where it felt like everyone was pulling in the same direction. We were on a mission, and the company's mission, it may sound funny, but it was to save people from having to write long documents and instead express it in a simple visual.

And so we were very passionate about that. And I just remember this feeling of camaraderie, teamwork, mission. We gave back to the community. And to me, it felt like, wow, coming out of college, if this is what the working world is like, I'm all in. And I felt what a culture was like, although at the time, if you had asked me, why is this place so special? I don't think I could have used those words. I would have probably said, I don't know, it's just fun. So I left that company after four years, and I went to another company that checked every box I thought I was supposed to want coming out of college.

It was pre-IPO. It was growing fast. It was the hot company that everyone wanted to work at. It was 135 people, but they were hiring like 50 people a week. The product was cool. And so I said, well, this is it. I'm so lucky I get to do this again. I went to that company and it did check all those boxes.

But after a year and a half, something felt vacant in going to work. I just felt like I like the product. I love the people. I still have friends from that time. But something felt empty. And I didn't know what it was until about a year and a half in. I was like, I think I'm missing that culture, that sense of mission, the sense of values. it's not like the company I was at was absent of all of those things, but the company wasn't organized around it.

And so having grown up in the Seattle area, going to Pike Place Market, a very famous farmer's market in Seattle, seeing the Starbucks store, I was like, that seems like a company that has that feeling. So I wonder if I leave high tech, which shocked my family and friends, I'm going to go to a coffee company because I want that feeling again. and I applied to Starbucks and eventually got in in 2001, and I discovered very soon after I got here, I was like, oh, there's that feeling again. So that's how I made the transition. If you've done all right, but help me in translating that value proposition

onto a place like Southeast Asia or Indonesia. I mean, given the fact that you've got more than 40,000 stores around the world in more than 88 countries, do you see that value proposition as something that's that can be transplanted, that can be universalized, any place on earth? Well, what's amazing is, and again, I knew this feeling of Starbucks, this concept of a mission, concept of values when I came to Starbucks, but, you know, now I've been with a company 24 years, and if you ask me what brought you to Starbucks and what has kept you at Starbucks,

To me, it's the same answer you would get from probably 95% of people you would talk to about Starbucks. They would say, I came here and I've stayed here because of the mission and values. And I've worked all around the world with Starbucks, including in Asia for several years. And based out of Hong Kong and Japan, worked closely with Indonesia, went to Indonesia a lot. And what amazed me living abroad and working with Starbucks was the universal need for human connection. and the universal use of coffee and tea as a way to connect between people. You know, people around the world say, hey, we should get coffee. As human beings, we need a place to do that.

And coffee is an incredible catalyst to bring people together. And so for me, you know, in my personal life and in my life overall, I want to uplift people. I want to bring some joy to people's life, and I find Starbucks is an incredible platform to do that, and every one of our stores around the world, that's what they do. We're serving coffee, but really when you look around a store and you see what's happening, it's students studying together,

it's a couple gathering on a date, it's someone after work taking a break or in the middle of the work day, and it's people doing a job interview. So life is happening in, Starbucks stores around the world, but it's human connection. And we have not found a country yet that doesn't need a place for human connection or where tea or coffee isn't a great catalyst for bringing people together. So it's universal.

Brady, explain, I mean, given the fact that it's such a great medium of exchange, given the fact that it's such a universal medium of exchange and call it an icebreaker, let's coffee up or whatever. What are some of the challenges for you as a person, as a leader, and as an institution to localize the institutional spirit and substance of your great institution in a place like Southeast Asia? That's a great question. And, you know, when I went to go work in Hong Kong, I looked after the Asia-Pacific region. And so I had an opportunity to visit a lot of different countries very frequently.

And now in my current role, I see Starbucks around the world. And it's one of the things that always fascinates me and challenges me is what is truly global and what is local about Starbucks. And where is that line? I think what surprised me in coming into my international experiences at Starbucks is let's take Indonesia. in Indonesia, Starbucks is more local than it is global. And here's what I mean by that. Starbucks works with business partners around the world who know those countries better than we do.

So in Indonesia, Starbucks is actually owned and operated by a company called PTMAP. And PTMap is an Indonesian company. Our stores are built by Indonesian people. our stores are staffed by Indonesians. We serve a lot of Indonesian coffee in Indonesia, and our stores are maintained by Indonesians. And so when you think about, yes, Starbucks is a global brand,

but locally in Indonesia, it's Indonesian. And when we think about the experience itself for customers, what's around the world universal is that need to connect. So, you know, you're going to have a coffee house environment with seats and tables and hopefully some good music playing softly enough where people can hear each other talking and you're going to have smiling baristas who are helping serve the customer and connect with them. So that's universal.

That's Starbucks. I would say what's local then becomes a few things. One, the more local you go, the more food is a local need. And so the flavors, the food products that we serve in Indonesia would be different than India, which would be different than New York, which would be different than Tokyo. I've also found that customers go to Starbucks in different moments of the day and times of the day around the world. And so you have to adapt to that. So in the U.S., it's very much on the go in the morning.

You know, people want one-handed meals because the other hand is on a steering wheel of their car or they're walking down the sidewalk, a phone in one hand, their breakfast sandwich or their coffee in their other hand, and they're walking down the sidewalk. Whereas a lot of times in Asia, it's people sitting down in the store looking for a place. It's oftentimes in the afternoon or in the evening. And so we're in the U.S., we might sell a lot of breakfast sandwiches. In Indonesia, we sell cake.

We don't even sell cake in the U.S. So it really tries to... Guilty is charged. Is that you? Well, I'm a Schoen consumer. Okay. So we try and, you know, We are very local in terms of the ownership and operations and staffing and the building of the store is very much so.

Product-wise, we'll serve different beverages and different foods, but there is this common core around the world. I think what's really interesting and lesser known about Starbucks in some of the countries, particularly in a country like Indonesia, is we are also deeply embedded with farmers. And we work very closely with farmers. And so when we think about localizing, we also think, you know, here is a country that is producing coffee, very, very special coffee. How can we support the coffee farmers of the country that we're in? And, you know, one of our promises as a company is to ensure the future of coffee for all. And what that means is, you know, selfishly as Starbucks, we need a long-term supply of the world's best coffee. but that coffee business and that coffee industry is under threat from climate change from many

different things and so helping farmers within these countries is also very important so as global as a brand as we are we're actually very local talk about the the upside potential in terms of our ability to raise production and productivity Indonesia has a capacity to produce about 7 to 800,000 tons of coffee on a yearly basis. And you would have gotten lots of data points in terms of where our productivity is from a coffee farming standpoint. I mean, I can compare other staples to other countries in Southeast Asia and beyond where I think we could use a bit of a boost in productivity.

And what's your assessment in terms of the upside potential in our ability to jack out productivity. Well, I had a chance to see that firsthand in North Sumatra. I went to some coffee farms there and I have to tell you the journey to get there was long and a lot of windy roads. We flew into Medan and then drove from Medan to Lake Toba and then from Lake Toba out to areas like see Barong Barong and really got up close and personal and talked to the farmers, you know, and one of the things that amazed me that is so unique to Indonesia and unique to Sumatra in many ways is these are not large industrial farms. These are farms that are almost like the back garden, the backyard of some homes, right?

They've got maybe some mango trees. They've got various fruits that they're growing right next to a very small plot of coffee. and as a result of that, the farmers and the farming communities are these microplots of coffee and the farmers who bring in their beans to the mill each week, each month, I was there at the mill watching people bring in these small bags, I mean, you know, a couple kilos of coffee at a time, and trade those in for their money as part of their co-op. contrast that to

Brazil where you have these large very large farms so the level of expertise technology sophistication about coffee growing specifically and how to maximize yield there's a big difference there you know if you're a farmer who's just a fifth generation coffee farmer

where that's all you grow and you grow it on a large estate and you have the wherewithal financially and everything to get the kind of technology you need to maximize your yield, you're going to get a lot of different productivity out of those coffee trees than you would if it's just one of five different things you grow in a very small plot of land. And so our farmer's support center in Indonesia

works with farmers directly to do things like take soil samples of a farmer's soil to understand the composition of the soil, how is the nitrogen, how are the various elements working in how's the hydration of that specific plot of land and then what types of things can be done to maximize the yield and we have these sample plots of coffee trees at our farmer support center where you know there are no no kidding tripling quadrupling five times the yield from the same kinds of trees and doing so with you know organic farming methods sustainable farming methods so it's very much within the reach of these farmers to double, triple the yield of their coffee trees

just through different practices. And so we're working very closely with them to try and propagate that as much as possible. Is that something that you believe can be scaled in the near foreseeable future? Because, you know, if you can 3x, 4x or 5x your pre-existing productivity, that serves as a really good argument to scale up, right? I mean, I would think that the small scale of the farming of coffee in Indonesia would have been on the back of other staples surrounding that coffee farm being much better yielding. But if you can three to four and five X this, I mean, that presents a really solid argument for this to be scaled up. Is that something that can be done in a near foreseeable future, you think? is the mother of invention.

You know, with climate change, the coffee industry could be heavily impacted. And also with the urbanization of the world, you know, the reduction in the number of farms globally, farming climate change and other factors are putting a lot of pressure on this. And so not only can it scale, we have to find ways to make it scale. And coffee consumption is increasing around the world. And so, you know, supply and demand, we have to make sure those meet. And for a company like Starbucks, that is critical to our future is to say we must have a supply of high-quality coffee long into the future and to support the growth of coffee. And so I've been on trips to our farmer support centers, which we have around the world in each coffee-growing region.

And it's really open-source support for the farmers. So we provide free seedlings. We work on various hybrid coffee trees to try and find varietals that will thrive under different climate conditions, thrive in different soil, different farming methods to cultivate and grow coffee in ways that increase yield. And so what I've seen is it can scale. It's a function of getting that out to all the farmers, educating them. And of course, there's a piece of trust, too. if you're a farmer and you're depending on your crop and now a company is coming and saying hey we can help you triple your yield if i'm a farmer i'm like what's the catch oh do i have to

buy from you in the future or you know how's this going to work but really for starbucks this is open source we need a long-term supply of the world's best coffee and so we want to help farmers and are helping farmers without any expectation of anything coming back to us except coffee that we don't contractually obligate anyone to work with us after we help them. We really provide free seedlings, free seeds, and technology and know-how to farmers to help them increase their yield in a way that we can make its scale. Is there any other institution out there that close sources this thing, as opposed to you're being open-sourced about this?

And that's the first point. The second point is really, I mean, if you can two to three-x, agriculture makes up about 12 to 15% of the GDP, depending on which versions you look at. If you can 2 to 3x agricultural products in Indonesia, generally speaking, inclusive of coffee and others, this is massive. I mean, this could become a massive contribution to the GDP. Yeah, I'll tell you a story when I was in the farms in Sumatra. I visited a village called Si Barong Barang, and we were actually going there to see coffee growing,

but we were also wanting to visit a clinic that Starbucks built in the area, and the clinic offers free health care to the community. And there were a couple interesting things that happened. One was I asked about the clinic and the type of work they do, what are most of the cases they see, and they said, oh, well, this is actually a maternal health clinic. And I asked, okay, well, that's interesting. That's different than I expected. I thought it would just be a general health clinic.

Why maternal health? And they said, well, you know, the future of the farm depends on healthy children. And healthy children equals healthy future farmers. And so when Starbucks asked this farming community, how can we help? The village spoke and came back and said, we need healthy children. We need a maternal health clinic. And on the wall of this clinic in the building, back was a hand-drawn map of the entire area. It looked like, you know, veins and capillaries and

all over this map were colored dots. And then in the bottom right-hand corner of this giant hand-drawn map was a key that showed red dot equals first trimester of pregnancy, yellow dot equals second trimester. So they had mapped all the future babies. And then, and I was just thinking, this is incredible. Like, what a concept. So first experience was that. Like, okay, healthy children equals healthy future farms. Makes total sense. So then later in the day, we're walking through the farm and a bunch of kids show up. There was probably like 15 kids show up. Anything from nine years old to maybe 15. And I asked one of the kids who came up and said, hello. And she said, hello my name is grace and i was like hello grace nice to meet you uh and i was like what how did you

get here what's going on like where did you all show up from and these kids said we heard there were foreigners here from america and we wanted to practice our english and when i asked grace um i said you know so you came here to practice your english what else do you want to know and she said, you know, someday I would like to be clever like you. And I asked her, and I thought, well, okay, clever probably means like she's thinking, okay, well, you all somehow got here. You know, you're smart and successful. I want to be like that someday.

And so I asked her, I was like, well, what do you want to do someday? And she said, I want to go to Paris. and I was like Well you know what Grace I think you can get to Paris someday and she said yeah I want to be a flight attendant and I was like okay you know what

I bet you can be no problem you know and so don't let anyone tell you you can't do that because you can do it and so we had this wonderful conversation but I walked away from that thinking if we don't increase the yield for these farmers

to make farming something that feels like I want to do that. When you're a kid and you've seen the world, do you want to live that life of scraping by as a farmer? And somewhere in Aceh province, is that what you want to do? Or now that you've seen the world, do you want to do something else? So I felt very committed to how do we make the life of a farmer something that a young person looks at and wants to do?

How do we make their livelihood greater and sustainable? thrive as a farmer so that they say, you know what? I want to continue the farming tradition to my family. And I know I can support my family and have a successful life doing that. And so, you know, how can we do that as Starbucks? It's, you know, we want to sell more Sumatran coffee. There's only so much supply and we want to increase demand and the price will go up and that will make it all better, you know, a lot better for the farmers. We want to increase their yield. And so I think her story to me had a big impact on what we want to do and what I want to do for farmers of Sumatra.

This is a great story, Brady. I mean, it's really about the democratization of opportunities, right? And you've brought to light, you know, so many tens of thousands of students in the U.S. And, you know, I'm focusing a lot on education nowadays. I mean, you've done a great program in the U.S. where you send tens of thousands of your pre-existing employees to go to college, we're not asking for that. I mean, if you could, that would be great.

But I see your ability to play a big role in basically shining a light on many of these villagers in Siborong Borong and other parts of Indonesia, who hopefully would aspire to go beyond just being a flight attendant. And all it takes is that tiny opportunity to be educated. How do you see your role or your institution's role in doing that to many parts of the global south or many parts of the world? Yeah, we view education as central to what Starbucks does for our people. And we've established as a company these what we call our promises. You know, I mentioned earlier the promise that we have to farmers, which is to ensure the future of coffee for all. The promise we have to our people is that Starbucks will be a bridge to a better future.

And we've always believed, whether that's in Indonesia or North America or any country that we're in. And we're in 89 now, that that bridge to a better future is really multifold. One is there are countless stories of people coming in as a barista, you know, entry level, first job, shy, not so confident to make eye contact with the customer. You know, you hand a new barista, a tray of sample cups of coffee and say, hey, can you just go out into the cafe and offer these samples to customers and have them enjoy maybe their first sip of Sumatran coffee? and they will just tremble with like, I don't know if I can do that, be like, just do it, you know. And then you see that person a year later and they're just like confident, they're shining, they're sparkling, but, you know, able to communicate with customers. And then they become a shift supervisor where they're looking after others in the store. And then eventually maybe a store manager, district manager, regional director.

And we have countless stories around the world of people using Starbucks as a bridge. to career growth, professional growth. And it is not uncommon at Starbucks, and I'm included in this, where when you say, you know, how long have you been at Starbucks? And people say, well, I came because I thought it would be, like a step between this and what I wanted to do next.

And so, you know, I thought maybe I'd be at Starbucks for a year. They might say if they came in as a barista, I just needed a job, and Starbucks seemed like a fun place to be. So I came to Starbucks. Well, now how long have you been here? Not 13 years. Well, how did you? What happened? Same for me. You know, I say I came for four years and now I've been here for 24 years. So that bridge of professional development, personal growth is a huge piece of it. But then there's also education, as you said. And we've always felt like that's very important to provide people a platform for education. So you mentioned in North America, we have this program. card called the Starbucks College Achievement Program, which on the surface, some people really can't wrap their heads around and believe. And it is that if you are working at Starbucks, even part-time,

you can get a free four-year college degree from Arizona State University, which is a great university. There are no strings attached. You don't have to stay with Starbucks when you're done. It's 100% covered, and it's tuition paid up front. So you don't have to pay it yourself, And then we reimburse you. It's just a free four-year college degree. And, you know, there are executives at Starbucks that grew up through the stores, you know, started as a barista, came up into executive roles, having never gone to college. And there was a guy recently who said, like, oh, yeah, hey, I had a really busy weekend.

Oh, what did you do? He's like, oh, I had midterms. I'm like, midterms. What? And he's like, yeah, you know what? I never went to college. I'm like, I did not know that about you. He's like, yeah, I've always wanted to get my degree.

So anyway, free for your college degree. In Indonesia, we have a similar program. So, you know, the ability to ramp your education and use Starbucks as a platform to launch the next part of your life, whether that's at Starbucks or outside is a huge piece of our culture. I think it's going to, well, it certainly resonates to me personally, given the fact that 88% of the households in Indonesia are headed up by somebody without a college education. 93% of the electorate thereabout does not have a tertiary education. So it is in our interest to make sure that those percentages come down as quickly and as much as possible.

So any institution, any personality that could be helpful in getting more off the citizenry to get a tertiary education, I think would dofftail into our ability to increase productivity, move up the value chain, move out the global geopolitical order so that the story of Indonesia gets to be much more relevant than whatever it has been so long. I mean, you know, I'm not asking you to play that role today, but something to think about, because I think that's going to resonate and correlate with our ability to move up the value chain in a big way in the future. Yeah, we, you know, for us, we look at not only the ramp in our, in education of our own people, but how we can also reach those in the community. And again, it's like a virtuous cycle because just like our work with farmers, right? if we help farmers grow great coffee, that means we're going to have great coffee long into the future as the coffee market continues to grow. Similarly for us, we need a steady stream of people who want to work at Starbucks and grow with the company. And to do that requires an education. And so internally, it's a virtuous cycle because if we invest in our people, they're going to want to invest their time in Starbucks.

Their education also helps Starbucks. and then to think about the future and growing the community and education in the community, if we help the community, you know, there may be more predisposed to want to work with Starbucks as well. So it's a virtuous cycle in many ways. And again, in Indonesia, we work with the Pristazi, which is like a junior achievement in Indonesia. And what I found is, you know, with education, you could tell someone, well, you really need a college education. and to grow. But I think if you're a young person and you're hearing that,

it might feel like, well, I don't know if I want to just go check a box to say I've done it and spend a bunch of money or time doing that. When if you're just telling me I have to do it, then that doesn't feel like that compelling to me as a young person. Whereas I think organizations like, you know, Prestazi, what they help do is ask young people for their ideas. Like, okay, so what do you want to do to change the world? world. Well, I want to create this product. Great. How would you change? How would you create that

product? Well, I would want to do this, this, this. Okay, do you know how to do that? Not yet, but I need to learn how to do this. Okay, great. How are you going to learn how to do that? Well, I need to go figure that out. And so there's this also way to pull people back into education. I think another low-hanging fruit that you could be considering doing in places like Indonesia is baristas. Just do a bunch of barista competition. And from where I'm staying, I mean, it's the interest with respect to becoming a barista is not to be underestimated.

It's such a cool thing for a lot of people to get involved in stuff like that. And I think you can play a big role there. You know, we have hundreds of thousands of employees. We call them partners, partners around the world, hundreds of thousands. And as an opportunity, there are a couple things you can do as a a as a barista in your store. One is you can become a coffee master. And a coffee master is a test you can take. It requires a fair amount of studying. And what's that? You're a coffee master too, right? I am a coffee master indeed. And it takes a lot of studying. You have to really know your stuff about coffee,

but then you can take a test and you can pass, if you pass your coffee master test, at Starbucks, you also get a special black apron. instead of the green apron. And it's pretty coveted. And if I'm not mistaken, the pride in Indonesia for coffee and the desire to learn about coffee has led to 80%, 80%, 80% of our partners in Indonesia

being coffee masters. I think that's the highest in the world by a lot. I mean, I think in some countries it may be more like 10%. But there's such pride in coffee in Indonesia, the vast majority of our partners, our baristas in Indonesia, our coffee masters, which I think is wonderful. Once you're a coffee master, you can then enter, you know, in your store a competition to maybe see who's the best barista. Who's the best at coffee? And recently, as Starbucks,

we held our first global barista championship. And so what this means is that in 40,000 stores around the world, there was a competition to see who is the best. And then in a district level, where there are, you know, anywhere from eight to 12 stores in a district, there was a district competition, who's the best in the district? And then a region level, which might be 150 stores, who's the best in the region? And no kidding, in 89 countries, we had a competition between baristas to see who's the best in the world. And we recently had a global store manager conference in Las Vegas, in the United States, Las Vegas, Nevada, where the top baristas from Starbucks from around the world,

including Indonesia, came and competed in front of 14,000 peers in an arena. And George from Indonesia was a highlight. He was one of the top four or six in the world. Wow. And you look at these partners on the stage. They went from barista to on a stage in front of thousands of people having to tell a story about coffee, prepare the perfect coffee, create a beverage that they created themselves that will now go around the world, and to watch them in this like go into a cocoon and come out as this amazing,

person on a stage. A lot of these baristas had never, some had never been on a plane. Some had never left their country. For many, it was their first time to the U.S. And then you dropped them on a stage in front of 14,000 people. And it was remarkable. And hats off to George in Indonesia for July.

Hats off to George. Well, yeah. Well, it looks like he's heading up to Seattle sometime soon. Yes, exactly. I want to pick up, by the way, FYI, my wife is a registered coffee grader. So she is, she is hardcore on stuff like this. She can taste a bunch of coffees and she knows whether it's Robusta, arabica, this type of rabbiqa and whatever.

I can't do that, but. I want to pick up. It's a lot of people, when you talk about that, you know, for many people, coffee is coffee. and yet underneath to the point you're making about the grades, when I went to Sumatra, one of the things I wanted to see with my own eyes was, okay, I understand there's like all these different levels of coffee. When we say we have the world's finest coffee,

are we just saying that or is that, like, what's real about that? I want to see it with my own eyes. And to see the nethered, number of levels and visually you can tell the difference between a grade a one you know grade one two three ABC there's all these grades of quality of coffee and to see it with your own eyes there's a buyer for every coffee every level of coffee but that tip top of the of the pyramid quality of coffee of arabica coffee that's what we buy and to see that with your own eyes is is i think a lot of people would be amazed at the range of quality of coffee and then what it really means to buy that

you know grade a triple a kind of super high level coffee the highest quality coffee and what's amazing to me in sumatra is in order to have that highest quality coffee in the end that coffee is hand-sorted. There are women in a warehouse who are literally looking at every coffee bean that we buy and hand-picking out anything that is a cracked bean,

a bean that looks different, you know, miscolored, a bean that has a blemish on it, so that all that we're getting is triple-picked, you know, arabica, highest-quality coffee. And I don't think people fully appreciate that there is a person hand sorting every coffee bean from Indonesia to get only the highest quality coffee out. I mean, that is painstaking passion and dedication that I wish more people fully understood.

Yeah. Hey, I want to move on to the issue of sustainability. You've talked about, you know, being able to plant climate-resistant coffee trees, right? Explain in layman terms the difference between non-climate resistant and climate-resistant, and how does that translate into the carbon print? Just globally speaking, by way what you're doing with respect to all the 40,000 stores. Coffee grows on trees. And it grows, Arabica, so there's two types of coffee.

There's Robusta and Arabica. Arabica is high-quality, denser coffee beans that have a lot more flavor. And so we buy only Arabica coffee. But Arabica coffee only grows in a certain band of the world around the world at a certain climate. And that's pretty much from call it, well, it's between the Tropic of Canada, and the Tropic of Capricorn around the world. And so, you know, it's like the middle band, you know, a little bit extended from the equator all the way around the world.

So, you know, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, right through that area. So if you took Indonesia and you drew a line at the top of Indonesia and bottom of Indonesia and you wrapped that around the world, that's like the coffee growing belt of the world. So because of that, and... that Arabica has to grow at higher altitude, you think about, okay, if you want to buy Arabica coffee, you have to go to this narrow band of the earth and then go to a certain altitude. Pretty soon you're talking about very little land area that can grow this coffee. And so as global temperatures rise, essentially that coffee has to move further and further

up the mountain to have those growing conditions. but eventually that mountain's going to run out of altitude before the coffee can't grow anymore. And so we have to find trees that can withstand higher temperatures, maybe more drought-resistant trees. And so what we're doing in our farmer support centers is planting lots of different types of coffee trees to see what will grow. Well, maybe it's a hybrid between that varietal and that varietal. And so it's really, in many ways, highly modern but also ancient farming techniques of saying, what is the right kind of coffee tree that's going to grow in these kinds of conditions? And then as the climate changes too, there are also plant diseases like leaf rust.

And it's a spore. It's like a fungus that blows through the air. and it can attach itself to coffee trees and prevent the coffee tree from growing. And so that happened in Latin America and it destroyed tons of crops. And so we have to find trees that will thrive and grow despite those conditions. And so that's, you know, coffee-wise, how we're trying to prepare our trees, the trees of the world in a way that will thrive despite climate change conditions. But then, you know, in terms of sustainability, using less water is important, finding ways to create shade for the trees. You know, coffee doesn't have to grow in big open fields.

It can have shade. And that creates biodiversity, you know, organic farming techniques. These are all things we're doing to support that. You've got 40,000 outlets around the world in 89 countries. You get about 100 million customers swinging by on a monthly basis. You know, our platform is really on a mission to help democratize ideas. I see every one of your 40,000 outlets as a democratizer of ideas at the rate that people congregate, convene. And we're seeing conversations being polarized in many parts of the world.

Is there a little bit of a role that you can play in helping democratize ideas? Well, the coffee house was in many ways the birthplace of so many ideas of the world. I mean, this goes back centuries, if not thousands of years. The coffee house and the tradition of creating a place where people can come together to exchange ideas, to connect with one another. I really, really believe the world needs coffee houses more than ever. It's too easy for people to, whether it's on the internet or in their lives, stay within a certain frame or a zone or echo chamber of information.

And particularly as we look at the urbanization of the world, I've seen this in so many parts of the world. You know, the rural communities are getting squeezed because the opportunity are in the cities for the young people. So they move into the cities. But what happens is they've now lost that rural community center, the little town square, you know, the gathering place. And so they go to get their jobs in the city, but then what goes away is their connection

to other people. And so now they're in the big city, but, you know, a restaurant is different than a coffee house. A coffee house has a very low ticket to entry. You know, you can get a little cup of coffee and sit down for as long as you want. It's not a restaurant. We're not trying to turn the tables and move people through. You know, two people can sit down and have a conversation, and that is more important than ever. And I think, not just because I work at a coffee company, but I think history shows that coffee brings us together as people. It really does. And so I think the world needs that more than ever.

And a place like Starbucks, you can have a wealthy banker standing in line right next to a city street worker who's just come in from the heat and needs a cold drink. And then they're right next to a student and they're all waiting in the same line to place their order and then sit down in the store. So there are very few places that can mix people in that way. And so, you know, the world needs coffee houses and I think Starbucks more than ever. It just seems like an actual equalizer. When you have people from different backgrounds, different strata, coming into a store, lining up, queuing, you know, with equal opportunity, equal priority. And it just seems like, I mean, you're a great candidate in helping remedy this. you know,

polarization of conversations, right? At the rate that you get 100 million people in a month, that's like more than a billion in a year. Yes. It's scale.

It's like an eighth of the global population. Yeah, you've got to be able to do something about depolarizing conversations. Yeah, I think the polarization of people comes from lack of understanding. And I think lack of

empathy because of lack of understanding. And I heard this phrase once that it's hard to hate up close. You know, from a distance, you can apply an image or your perception of a group of people or people and say, well, they're, this, that, and the other thing. It's easy to put people in a box from a distance and say, I don't like them or I disagree with them. But up close, people, for the most part, want the same things in their life. You know, they want their family to be safe. They want their family to be healthy. They want to maybe do better than the previous generation

and grow something for their family and be better off than they were the generation before. And we're all more alike than we are different. And I think not to overstate what Starbucks can do, but you're right, when you put all those people into the same space and they're equal, because we're all just walking up to the same person, we're placing our order, and we all have a choice between the same seats,

and we can sit there and be next to each other, there aren't that many places left where that kind of interaction is facilitated. And so we view our stores as the stage for that to happen. You know, we create the stage and the catalyst of coffee and gathering for those types of conversations and interactions to happen, but, you know, we don't program it in terms of, hey, we see you sitting here and you there. Now we need you two to talk. We know we don't play our hand too heavily, but we do try and create the platform for that connection and understanding to take place in a place that's, as you said, democratized.

I want to pick up on this lack of understanding, right? anything that you want to explain with respect to call it the boycott in the context of people's not having the right kind of understanding about what's happening. Yeah. If you want to talk a little bit about this. Yeah, I think in Indonesia, you're right. You know, we faced a boycott. We faced a lot of misinformation about Starbucks. And what I would say is that at no point.

in our history, have we ever supported a military operation or government, and nor would we? And so to see that kind of misinformation where people assumed we had some role in global conflicts and supporting militaries is just completely untrue. And so it's very difficult, particularly as a person who has worked at Starbucks for a long time, to see that kind of misinformation spread in social media and then infect the populations of the world, you know, around our stores such that ultimately who suffered from that is our own people. And in Indonesia, that means our partners who are working in the stores who hear those things, feel those things, you know, have conflict with friends or family members who've heard things

that just aren't true. And that's very challenging for us. And so, you know, it's when people are upset about the way the world is and they see things happening in the world, I completely understand the desire to want to lash out and say, hey, this is wrong, this is unfair, and want to direct that at someone or something. And so I don't fault anyone for that. Unfortunately, in this case, Starbucks had nothing to do with it. And so that misinformation ultimately impacted our people. And I think that's the hardest thing for us to see. And so we're doing our best to not just tell people they're wrong because that often doesn't work.

We try and share the facts as best we can about who we are and what we stand for and who we've always tried to be. But really what we need to do is just focus on reminding people of who we are and our values and how we show up every day in the community. And Indonesia, in Indonesia, we've been doing that for over 20 years. And we've hired more than 20,000 people. in Indonesia. We've got about 600 stores in Indonesia that are owned and operated by Indonesians and supporting the farmers of Indonesia.

So we need to just keep reminding people of those things and we hope they'll understand that what they heard about Starbucks just wasn't true. Brady, we're almost out of time, but I want to ask you the last question. You know,

you talked about the importance of using your outlets more as a town square as opposed to a coliseum, where people go there to, you know, democratize ideas. One of the little missions that we try to advance here is to promote the culture reading. And I go to your place to read books, and I know a lot of people go there to read. Is there anything that you could do to help promote the culture reading better, if not not much better for a place like Indonesia where we actually do not read books as much as we should.

You know, we've tried different things like putting books in the stores, creating, you know, those like, what do they call it, the little give a book, take a book, free libraries. Sometimes that works for us. But what we've done that we've found to be successful is we've connected with other influential people on book clubs. virtual book clubs. So like in the U.S. right now, we're partnered with Oprah Winfrey and the Oprah Winfrey book club where Starbucks and Oprah are partnering to highlight, like, these are books we feel you would love. And partnering with her, who is just this global icon of a book club, helps promote the idea of reading. And so sometimes we'll direct people to books. We'll collaborate on a books publishing and promoting it and not to make money, but to just inspire people to read.

Because again, like you said, the coffee house is this amazing place to just sit down with a cup of coffee and read a book. It's delightful, especially with the warm breeze of Indonesia blowing through and you're sitting there with your iced coffee and your slice of cake, whatever one of that is. And you just slowly do that while you read your book. It couldn't be better. Well, count me in. If you... I think of doing a book club here. And we got to get you out here again to see Borong Borong and other places that might be of interest to you in Indonesia. I would love to.

Brady, thank you so much. It's been a blast talking to you, and I wish you all the best. Thank you so much. And I really appreciate and really value and feel honored to be a guest of yours here on the show and to represent Starbucks. And thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Friends, that was Brady Brewer, the CEO of Starbucks International. Thank you.