Starbucks Unwrapped: Delving into the World of Factory-Made Bakery Delights

Brownie on wheels... how far does it come?

I'm up super early most mornings and usually zip off to Starbucks for 5:30 am. Yep, they are open early! Most of them. I grab my tea and unpack my office gear at a table and start happily blogging or writing or organizing my to-do list. Until the delivery guys come.

The Gordon Foods delivery trucks usually arrive shortly after the cafe opens and they trundle in mountains of boxes and oodles of milk jug crates. A lot of the delivery drivers like to leave the doors of the store open, because it's more convenient for them. But there can be loooonnnggg gaps while they are in the back, unloading things into the refrigerators, or in their truck, loading stuff up on the hand-cart... while I am sitting there, freezing my knees off.

Then come the boxes of soy milk, coconut milk, oat milk and yak milk (kidding on that last one).

A delivery of food boxes at Starbucks

Plus many, many boxes of baked goods. Croissants, breakfast sandwiches, brownies - all in cardboard boxes. 

Which got me thinking... as I sat there, shivering... exactly where do these tasty things come from?

It's quite unlikely that they come from a local bakery. If you walk into a Starbucks in Vancouver or London or Bangkok and order a double-chocolate brownie... odds are the brownie will look and taste identical. Sooo where do they come from?

I actually emailed Starbucks to ask them and got some standard boiler-plate email which basically said nothing. Apparently it's a proprietary secret. So I did some more digging...

Ready? Brace yourself. Cause it's not pretty.

Tracking the Brownie

There's my brownie!!
(Well, a demo version of it...)

Let's backtrack first... So there's that chocolate brownie sitting in the Starbucks display case. It used to be that Starbucks had several of each item displayed. So you might see 5 brownies sitting there, and 5 coffee cake slices, etc. But those days are gone, at least in our Starbucks. Nowadays, in order to reduce food waste, I only see a "demo" brownie in the display case (along with other single bakery items). And the breakfast sandwiches don't have demo models (can you imagine... that sitting out all day??).

That single brownie is for display purposes only. It is never sold but tossed at the end of the day. Apparently the food in the display case smells quite funky and sour by the end of the day soooo, no... you don't want to eat that brownie. (Newsweek article on barsitas cleaning out the display case - don't even get me started on this...)

So, you order your brownie, and the barista will reach into an under-the-counter cooler and pull it out. It is individually wrapped in plastic and she/he will then unwrap it, put it on a piece of paper and heat it in the oven for 20 seconds (ALWAYS get your brownie warmed up - sooooo much better) They will then toss that little piece of paper as they slip the brownie into a little paper bag for you (or a plate if you ask for it). Yes, I know... that's three disposable wrappers... ugh.

Baskets of individually wrapped sandwiches &
baked goods at Starbucks.

So how did the brownie get into the behind-the-counter cooler? Well, in the mornings (bright and early), the baristas re-fill the behind-the-counter coolers from the big freezers behind the scenes. They have yellow plastic trays and they will pull out all of the baked goods that they think they will need - 10 of this, 12 of this, 12 of that. Those yellow plastic trays might sit out for a bit, possibly thawing. And how did they get into the behind-the-scenes freezers? From those cardboard boxes that Gordon Foods delivers.

Now the trail gets murky... Gordon Foods gets them from somewhere. But where? This is where some internet research yielded the answer...

Your chocolate brownie, or breakfast sandwich or lemon loaf cake are all made in a massive factory by a Canadian company called Premium Brands. Where is this factory? Could be in Columbus (OH), Reno (NV) or Phoenix (AZ). Here in Canada... it could be Edmonton or Montreal. Does it matter? Not really... it's certainly NOT a 100 mile diet for most of us - unless you live in Edmonton or Montreal.

From a Premium Brands Factory to a Starbucks near You

So here's how it goes down... roughly... the chocolate brownie or egg breakfast sandwich gets cooked in this factory... 100s of them... 1000s of them... a whole long conga line of brownies and breakfast sandwiches. Which come toddling off the assembly line quick frozen and tucked into individual plastic wrappers. They come with an expiry date (6 months into the future - they are frozen after all) and are packed up in boxes. These boxes are bundled up and shipped off to Starbucks cafes around the country. Shipped via train, truck or plane? Don't know.

But the baked goods are frozen... so the expiry date is good, right? Well, as long as the temperature stays constant for the entire trip... as they get trundled from factory to loading dock and on to a truck... which has a good refrigeration system... and then unloaded or reloaded somewhere else (several times perhaps)... until finally, they arrive through the door with Gordon Foods.

A Starbucks breakfast sandwich in it's wrapper.
(From CNN)

Have those boxes remained frozen for the entire time? No idea. Maybe not a big deal for my chocolate brownie... maybe a bigger deal for your egg & sausage breakfast sandwich. Some Reddit folks have spotted entire boxes of baked goods tossed in the trash behind Starbucks. Perhaps they arrived thawed instead of frozen?

I will tell you this... those boxes sit on the floor at Starbucks for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how busy it is in the store. And then they go into a freezer... to be pulled out days, weeks, months (?) later and thawed, reheated and served to you.

What happens to the unsold, thawed items? Well, for my local Starbucks, they bag them up and donate them to a local youth shelter. The shelter coordinator hits all of the local Starbucks (we only have 6) in the early morning and picks the bags of food up. And here's hoping that the items are all distributed and eaten quickly.

Not just Starbucks

So, who, you are asking, is Premium Brands? They are a Vancouver-based business that has become the fastest-growing packaged foods supplier in North America. Over the years, they have quietly bought up all sorts of niche food suppliers... places like Piller's Meats in Ontario and Freybe Gourmet Foods. Premium Brands doesn't just supply Starbucks... they also supply The Keg and Boston Pizza...

Which makes me wonder... is ANY of the food that we buy in restaurants actually... you know... cooked from scratch in a restaurant? Or is it all just pre-made "somewhere" and all the restaurant does is heat it up, doll it up with some sauce or a sprig of parsley, and serve it to us?

Cause I'm going to bet that Tim Horton's does not mix up their donut batter in the store. Nor do they make their own breakfast sandwiches... they just assemble them for you. Everything in a Timmies breakfast sandwich was cooked long, long ago in a factory far far away... and shipped to your local coffee shop.

Ugh. That's the thing. Whenever you have a restaurant chain... where customers expect the same standards whether they are in Vancouver or Halifax... or if you have "fast food" or "convenience food"... you are looking at pre-cooked, prepared food.

It's not just Gordon Foods too... there is also Sysco Foods. I've seen their trucks delivering boxes of "food" to various businesses. Heck... I even stayed at a retreat centre in Edmonton once and had the most amazing "healthy" cookie with craisins and nuts. It was SO good! I asked the retreat director - "OMG! What is the recipe for these??!!" She replied "They're good, aren't they! They come from Sysco." No recipe. No home-cooked baking. All the retreat centre did was bake the pre-made cookie dough.

Sadness. No yummy cookie recipe. Sigh. And no yummy brownie recipe either. It makes me stop and think when I look at a restaurant menu... A steak is probably cooked onsite. Chicken fingers? Probably come in a box and are tossed in the deep fryer. Salad? Probably comes in a bag, pre-mixed.

We have sacrificed something with our fascination with speed and convenience... And let's not even mention the environmental cost... prepared food that is shipped hundreds (if not thousands) of kilometres. All that packaging. All that food waste. There is a high cost to convenience and speed.

Further Reading

Globe & Mail - The Canadian secret behind the sandwiches at Starbucks - The Globe and Mail

Financial Post - This Canadian food company is growing like crazy because of Starbucks grab-and-go breakfast sandwiches | Financial Post

The Daily Meal The Scary Reason Starbucks' Food Looks Identical No Matter Where You Are (thedailymeal.com)

Premium Brands - Wikipedia article

Fox News - Starbucks recall of pre-packaged food (from 2016)

Reddit - Starbucks food boxes thrown in dumpster

Fighting the Sugar Demon

Coke

Sugar... such an innocuous word. But sooo dangerous.

I've known for a while that sugar is my kryptonite, my nemesis... the thing that is, for me, the hardest to kick to the curb. And whenever I think I've vanquished sugar, it simply shape shifts and morphs into some other form that sneaks in under the radar. Kind of like whack-a-mole.

For years, I drank quite a bit of Coke. I started in university (back in the 80s) and only really overcame that addiction on 7 July 2009, when I drank my last can. Twenty-five years of addiction done! Hooray!!!

Wait... not so fast. Because sugar wasn't done with me yet... my new friend was now Starbucks hot chocolate. I mean... if you're going to go to Starbucks and sit there and use their wifi for hours, you need to buy something, right? And for me, it was hot chocolate... 

Starbucks hot chocolate

That started in the fall of 2009 and continued until the spring of 2019 when I drank my last hot chocolate (from Starbucks or anywhere). Hooray!!

I've now been hot chocolate free for over 850 days. Not that anyone's counting... And the trick, for me, in ending my hot chocolate addiction was to make an agreement with my partner that... if I had a hot chocolate, I would have to pay a $10 penalty to her! Right then... done with hot chocolate!

Wait... not so fast. Last summer, with the pandemic raging and Starbucks closed to visitors... I developed the habit of going for a hike on Saturdays and Sundays (a good thing) and then grabbing a Starbucks Double Fudge Chocolate Brownie to go (warmed up too, please). I'd take it to the park, sit by the pond, and eat it off of my camping plate (and camping fork), which I carried around in my day pack for just such an occasion. It started out as one brownie per weekend and then morphed into two brownies per weekend. And over the winter... it continued... even though I was no longer hiking! My new sugar addiction was born.

Starbucks brownie

On top of that... as this long gloomy winter of pandemic restrictions dragged on, my partner and I went down Junk Food Alley and started consuming copious amounts of chips and chocolate... with the occasional bag of Cheezies thrown in. My weight began to rise and I knew it was not a good idea... but when sugar has its teeth and claws into you... it's a bit of a beast.

Enter my new diagnosis of hypothyroidism... due to Hashimoto's thyroiditis... which is an auto-immune condition that attacks the thyroid. Charming. The auto-immune bit is the tricky part... trying to get a handle on that. There are a whole host of things that contribute to it... let's start with alcohol, caffeine, sugar and gluten. Just to name the Big 4.

Sigh... that includes beer... coffee... (and hot chocolate)... all yummy sugary treats and... things like bread, pizza dough, and... da-da-daaaaa... brownies. Actually... chocolate brownies tick three of those boxes. All I'd need was to add some rum extract to the brownie and it would hit all four.

Starbucks Gold Card

Sooo... caffeine is easy... don't drink coffee. Not really a tea drinker either so... check that one off the list. Done!

Alcohol... I do like a beer on the weekends... but I stopped three weekends ago and haven't looked back. Done!

Sugar... bugger. It's one thing to know, intellectually that sugar causes inflammation in the body and is NOT good for Hashimoto's sufferers... but putting that into practice has been a bit of a problem.

Here's what I've come up with, my latest Go Big or Go Home strategy... I've removed the Starbucks app from my phone so I can't use it to pay for brownies. And... I've given my partner my Starbucks rewards card so I can't get any rewards (or use them) if I pass by a Starbucks. It's kind of a variation on the "put your credit card in ice if you're dealing with credit card debt". Cause the thing is... you get rewards for buying things at Starbucks and I'm such a cheapskate that I won't stop there if I can't use the app or my card. Sooo... we'll see how this goes. So far, so good... as of this writing, I am two days brownie free. Sigh... a long road ahead but I'm hoping that eliminating this form of sugar... and being wary of all other forms... will help me get a handle on this auto immune nightmare.

Wish me luck!