If employees spend less time running around, executives said, maybe they will be happier working there

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Starbucks, the chain that made espresso ubiquitous in America, now faces daily crises in dispensing it. U.S. stores designed a decade ago struggle to meet today’s consumer demand. Cafes that once averaged 1,200 orders a day are now trying to make 1,500.

Many U.S. locations need to be overhauled, said Katie Young, who as senior vice president of global growth and development is in charge of figuring out what new cafes should look like. Having so much demand is a privilege for Starbucks, but also a problem, she said.

At the Tryer Center test lab at its Seattle headquarters recently, one barista demonstrated the time-consuming process of making a customized Iced Caramel Macchiato.

1. Lines the cup with caramel, then fills it with milk from a refrigerator below. 2. Walks to ice container and scoops cubes.

3. Adds espresso brewed at the hot bar. 4. Goes to cold bar to grab a blender.

5. Retrieves ingredients for cold foam from refrigerator. 6. Blends them and adds the foam to the drink.

7. Returns the blender to the sink. 8. Finishes the drink at the hot bar with extra caramel drizzle and a lid.

Baristas’ frustrations played into a unionization effort that began last year. Pro-union baristas at a Starbucks in Anderson, S.C., said workers want to make drinks and food for customers as quickly as possible, but the store’s layout and equipment often get in the way.

Post-it notes at a workshop with Starbucks employees

For more than a year, Starbucks has been testing how to overhaul operations to improve the experience for both employees and customers. If employees spend less time running around, executives said, maybe they will be happier working there.

“It’s the complexity of those cold beverages,” Howard Schultz, interim CEO, said in a recent interview. “We will fix that. We will design new stores from scratch.”

Since late 2018, Starbucks has used the Tryer Center to develop new beverages, equipment and cafe procedures. It began pairing baristas, beverage developers and engineers to figure out how to carve seconds off the time it takes to prepare coffee drinks, particularly complex cold ones.

Recently, Mr. Schultz was shown a prototype of a portable blender. It could whip foam faster than the blender currently in use, and closer to a store’s espresso machines. The machine could save baristas one trip across the cafe floor, executives said. “This is a big thing,” Mr. Schultz said.

Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne