Want that coffee with olive oil? Starbucks thinks Italians will go for it.

February 27, 2023

Italians have rules about coffee. Cappuccino, for instance, is a morning drink, so don’t try ordering it for an afternoon pick-me-up. In most cafes, coffee is consumed standing at the counter; and variations in orders are few, usually involving only the amount of water and/or milk to be added, reports The New York Times.

Still, Starbucks—which breaks all those rules with its long menu of options served at any time of day—opened in Italy here in 2018 and has amassed a serious following. On Wednesday, February 22, the company bet on Italy once more with a combination of two ingredients at the heart of this country’s food pyramid: coffee and olive oil.

The new beverages, branded Oleato, debuted this week at an invitation-only dinner (co-hosted with the National Chamber of Italian Fashion) at the Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Milan on Tuesday, the first day of Fashion Week. Lizzo performed. Vogue’s top editor in America, Anna Wintour, attended.

On Wednesday, Oleato, which can mean oiled, oleate or greaseproof in Italian (and which is now trademarked by Starbucks), was introduced to the masses at the company’s flagship Italian venue in downtown Milan. Five olive oil-infused beverages were on the menu, including the golden foam espresso martini, which concluded the dinner.

In an online introduction, Howard Schultz, a longtime leader at Starbucks, promoted the new coffee line as a “transformational idea”—his own—which came to him while he was traveling through Italy last summer. He called it, glowingly, “a unique alchemy of two of nature’s most transcendent ingredients.”

“Italians have embraced Starbucks in a way that many did not see coming,” Schultz said in his introduction.

The steady line of customers waiting to be served at the Milan roastery on Tuesday suggested, at the very least, that adding olive oil to coffee may have generated some buzz. To be fair, people have been drinking coffee with butter for a while now.

Writing in La Stampa, the food critic Lorenzo Cresci gave the “Oleato golden foam cold brew” a vote of 6.5 out of 10 and said that, “overall, it can be appreciated.” He rated the caffè latte a 7, with “a strong flavor that leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth.” And he noted an orange flavor that dominated the Oleato iced cortado, giving it a 6.5.

Some olive oil producers are intrigued by the new horizons that could open from adding olive oil to coffee, “a very challenging innovation” that could relaunch olive oil’s image “especially among young people,” Anna Cane, president of the olive oil group of the Italian Association of the Edible Oil Industry, said in an email.

“On one hand, it’s good, because people are speaking about coffee. On the other, it takes away a slice of the market, because if you’re drinking that product, you’re not drinking espresso,” said Giorgio Caballini di Sassoferrato, the founder and president of a consortium that is trying to persuade UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to recognize espresso as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Traditional Italian espresso, he says, is “a culture, a ritual, a social tradition. It’s not a product, it’s a system,” in which class and financial status don’t count. For the most part, “rich or poor, people drink espresso in bars.” It typically costs between around one euro or just above; Starbucks is considerably pricier.

Coffee with olive oil, on the other hand, left Caballini di Sassoferrato “a bit perplexed,” he said.
Research contact: @nytimes

September 4, 2024

Sizzler is a bit of an anomaly: Despite having shrunk to a fraction of its former size and retreating primarily to the West Coast, it’s a brand that remains a ubiquitous cultural touchpoint—in movies and online, on South Park and Saturday Night Live. And even if you’ve never eaten at one, you probably know what it is.

This made it a dream client for Mike Perry, founder and chief creative officer of Tavern, which collaborated with the beloved yet beleaguered chain on a comprehensive brand refresh spanning from its website to its stores, reports Fast Company.

“This brand is weirdly working backwards—it exists within the mind, but not necessarily in the world or in the hand,” Perry says. “It’s the most fun to take the brand that has been beaten up for decades and restore it. It’s not fun to take the shiny one and push it a little further.”

Digging into Sizzler’s past

When it launched in 1958 in Culver City, California, Sizzler helped invent the casual dining chain restaurant. It had its ups and downs over the years, but for an eatery known as much for its endless salad bar (which accounts for 40% of its business) as its affordable steaks, a global pandemic was not a great development.

The chain filed for bankruptcy in September 2020 and has been building back since. Today there are 75 locations (down from 270 at Sizzler’s peak). Christopher Perkins—formerly of Anheuser-Busch InBev—joined in 2019, and is now president and CEO.

Perkins says the brand had lost its way, and he knew it needed more than just a new coat of paint. He aspired for Sizzler to become a brand not locked in the past, but rather one of Southern California’s regional landmarks, like In-N-Out Burger, or Wawa on the East Coast.

In addition to losing its way, Perkins discovered that Sizzler had also lost its history, quite literally—there was no robust archive of assets and other ephemera. So he began to do a bit of archaeology into the company’s past, at one point sending a marketing intern on missions to the brand’s storage facility to see what could be dug up.

Prior to launching Tavern, Perry had worked on the Budweiser account at Jones Knowles Ritchie, which is where he originally met Perkins. Once Tavern came on board the project, Perry and Perkins immersed themselves in all things Sizzler—from store walk-throughs to the corporate side of the business—and did a bit of brand excavation of their own, buying up everything they could find on eBay.

In the end, Tavern saw the solution to Perkins’s problem as a “modern heritage” approach.

“It’s the search for timelessness,” Perry says. “The real tension between modernity and heritage and finding that is taking the old and ultimately making it new—and making it new so that it can continue to work in the future …. If you’re always trying to balance that, that’s really where the good stuff starts to come out.”

A cast of characters

One archival find was a steak-shucking bull character rendered in a Hanna-Barbera-esque style, which they dubbed Ribby Ribeye.

“All great brands have characters,” Perry says. “[Ribby Ribeye] is exactly what embodies a famous Southern California brand from both the midcentury and today, and it seemed like a no-brainer to bring back.”

Tavern built out a supplementary cadre of characters representing the brand’s other best-known offerings—the cheese toast, the unlimited shrimp, a lobster tail; and Perry’s favorite, the Salad Barbarian, an amorphous blob on a plate representing all the goods available at the beloved bar.

For the brand’s fonts, Tavern again turned to the past. Perry says Sizzler had used cuts of Windsor and Caslon Black Swash from its beginning through the mid-’80s or so, and they felt very Southern Californian in design and aesthetic, so his team utilized Windsor EF-Extra, Emfatick NF (a take on Caslon Black Swash), and Block Berthold Heavy and Condensed. For a contemporary feel, all the elements are blended with modern messaging and photography.

Tavern was given a mandate not to mess with the logo, so the team only slightly messed with the logo. They essentially cleaned it up—ditching the black background and dialing it back to a single color; refining the type in minute ways, and flattening it out. They also slanted it at an angle to drive home the notion of the brand’s cattle-brand element.

The Sizzler glow-up

Of course, all of these aesthetic updates mirror larger—and perhaps more consequential—changes. Tavern also worked on the restaurant interiors, uniforms, the living “brand” of how workers talk and embody the restaurant (think Chick-fil-A and all those “my pleasures”), the plates, and more.

It’s safe to say that if you stepped inside any of the competition in the category—Outback, Chili’s, Applebee’s, etc.—in the absence of a logo, you’d probably have no definitive idea of where you were. They all tend to look more or less the same: dark environments, menus with food shot on dark backgrounds, which Perry says doesn’t exactly convey freshness or taste.

So, the team sought to separate Sizzler from the rest of the pack by resurrecting the brand’s ownable red color, aiming for a bright and friendly overall vibe. The new website is now live, and Perkins says the changes will be rolling out to physical restaurants in phases.

In many ways, the rebrand is an attempt to remind the world that Sizzler is an anomaly. It exists in a space between chain restaurant and steak house, not to mention past and present. As for the future, the team says the key to all that nostalgia not feeling dated is to maintain a constant understanding of what is culturally relevant today—and then looking to the brand’s heritage and seeing what resonates with it.

As always, time will tell. For now, Perry says, “[After working] on big brands, we get bored of the brand a lot faster than the consumer. And just frankly [with Sizzler] I’m not—and that’s what I think a successful rebrand is.”

Research contact: @FastCompany