MILAN — How about a little olive oil in your coffee?
That’s the new, not exactly traditional offering that Starbucks founder and interim CEO Howard Schultz has launched in Milan, the city that inspired his coffee house empire.
The coffee-olive oil concoction — echoing a keto-inspired trend of adding butter to coffee, with a sugary twist — has provoked amusement and curiosity among Italians.
Schultz dreamed up adding olive oil to coffee after visiting an olive oil producer in Sicily. He worked with an in-house coffee drink developer to come up with recipes for the drinks, dubbed “Oleato” — Italian for “oiled” — which were introduced with a Lizzo performance for an invitation-only crowd at the company’s Milan Roastery.
The olive oil coffees will be rolled out this spring in Southern California and later this year in Japan, the Middle East and Britain.
The Turin newspaper La Stampa taste-tested four of the beverages, giving them marks of 6.5 to 7.5 on a scale of 10. It said the only warm beverage on the menu, a version of caffe latte, “has a strong taste that leaves a pleasant taste in the mouth. Grade: 7.
“The sensation is that Oleato could be something to drink all year but most of all that it could be truly tasty in the summer,″ La Stampa said, noting that most of the drinks are served with ice.
Tourists who throng the Milan Roastery are being enticed to try the drinks through signs around the store and a menu insert advertising the five-drink assortment, which costs anywhere from the equivalent of $5.85 to a high of $14.85 for a martini version with vodka.
“It’s good,” said Benedicte Hagen, a Norwegian who recently moved to Milan to pursue a modeling career. “I’m not a big coffee fan. That’s why I like to try drinks like this.”
She was sipping the Oleato Golden Foam Cold Brew, which includes vanilla bean syrup, and said she couldn’t really taste the oil after asking the barista to add a shot of chocolate to make the drink even sweeter.
Kaya Cupial’s Oleato Iced Cortado came in a V-shaped glass and was garnished with an orange peel. It’s made with oat milk infused with olive oil, demerara syrup and a dash of orange bitters.
“It’s like normal coffee but with orange,” said the 26-year-old from Warsaw, Poland, who was traveling with friends who ordered the Golden Foam Cold Brew and a pair of ordinary cappuccinos. “It’s not strong.”
Schultz has pointed to the Milan coffee bar, which he discovered during a trip to Italy in 1983, as his inspiration for building the now-global chain.
But he waited until 2018 to bring Starbucks to Italy, aware he was treading sacred coffee ground. Italians typically take their coffee standing at a bar, chatting with friends or the barista for a few minutes, before continuing their day. It is not something to be nursed.
Since then, Starbucks has opened 20 stores in northern and central Italy.
