Starbucks came to Stadium Status Group with a mission of finding a way to reinvigorate their whole bean coffee business to millennials, and what ensued is a project of which SSG is truly proud. Strategically, we needed to help them see beyond the corporation and pull back the curtain on Starbucks’ values. Knowing that art is a language millennials truly speak and love, we enlisted four highly-respected street artists to experience the full journey from bean to cup. 

The project kicked off by bringing Tristan Eaton to Sumatra to learn how coffee is grown and processed, and how these small lot farmers’ hard work and dedication ends up in your Starbucks cup. We traveled throughout Sumatra, meeting multi-generational farmers and documented first hand how Starbucks makes a difference in these peoples lives, and what goes into cultivating quality coffee for the worlds most ubiquitous beverage. At the end of the trip, Tristan painted a beautiful mural on the walls of a medical center that Starbucks built for local farmers to get healthcare. When we returned, Tristan took what he learned and painted a stunning work of art, which was then turned into limited edition coffee packaging, mugs, tumblers and many other items. Other artists included Ricardo Cavolo, who learned how coffee is roasted, and how much art there is to the science of coffee roasting. The series ended with Laolu Senbanjo learning how coffee is brewed, and how Starbucks views the human connection of their stores, their baristas and their overall mission. 

While the artists were learning and painting, SSG enlisted Aristotle Torres to produce and direct a four chapter video series to document what they were seeing, and Morgan Ione to photograph it all. These photos turned into one of Stadium Status Groups biggest undertakings, a coffee table book capturing the entire process, to be sold exclusively at Starbucks, the first book ever published by Starbucks.