Today, we are sure that many people will think of Starbucks when they say let’s have a cup of coffee. No, this is not an advertisement because Starbucks is one of the most popular coffee shops in the world today and has been serving in our country for many years. Starbucks is an interesting brand because, just like Apple, some users love this brand, while others oppose all their products and make a lot of criticism.
Of course, how you drink your coffee is your choice, but the most interesting point about the brand is Starbucks cup sizes and names. Have you ever wondered why the names given to Starbucks cup sizes that are a little English, a little Italian, and which you can often confuse if you are not a regular, are like this? Let’s go back in time, to the days when Starbucks was first established, and see how many ml Starbucks cup sizes are, how it is pronounced, and where these names come from, in detail.
Starbucks was founded as a small coffee shop inside the market:
Founded by teacher Jerry Baldwin, history teacher Gordon Bowker, and author Zev Siegel, the first Starbucks was founded in 1971 as a small coffee shop in a marketplace called Pike Place Market. In 1982, Howard Schultz became a partner in the business. In 1985, Schultz founded a chain of coffee shops called II Giornale, similar to Italian coffee shops.
Starbucks’ founders transferred their shares after purchasing Peet’s Coffee and Tea store. Thus, Howard Schultz became the sole owner of Starbucks, and the II Giornale coffee shop chain now began to serve under the name Starbucks. The number of shops increased rapidly and opened abroad in 1996. The first Starbucks branch in our country was opened in 2003 on Bagdat Street, Istanbul.
The name Starbucks is inspired by the character of Starbuck in the novel Moby Dick by American author Herman Melville. The famous Starbucks logo is a mermaid. Today, there are hundreds of Starbucks branches in our country and tens of thousands of Starbucks branches in dozens of countries around the world.
Where does this Italian influence on Starbucks come from?
Neither the founders nor the sole owner of the Starbucks brand are Italian, but where does this Italian influence come from, which is noticeable even today? The answer is hidden in Howard Schultz’s trip to Italy. Schultz went on vacation to Italy in 1983. He was literally fascinated by the coffee shops he saw here.
Admiring Italian coffee shops, Howard Schultz opened the II Giornale coffee shop chain as soon as he returned to the USA. As the name suggests, these shops smelled of Italy. The same effect continued when it became the sole owner of the Starbucks brand and started to serve in stores under this name.
Before moving on to their names, let’s see how many ml Starbucks cup sizes are and how they are pronounced:
Not everyone may know, but Starbucks coffee shops have not three, but five different cup sizes. These; short, tall, grande, venti and trenta. Their pronunciation, meanings and dimensions are as follows;
- Short size: It reads as shorts and is 8 oz i.e. 236 ml. It is the smallest size cup.
- Tall size: Pronounced as Toll and is 12 oz (335 ml) in size. It is the smallest glass on the menu.
- Grande size: Pronounced as Girande and is 16 oz, or 473 ml. It means large in Italian, but it is a medium glass.
- Venti size: It is pronounced as Venti and is 20 oz or 591 ml in size. It means 20 in Italian, the vent for cold drinks is 24 oz, ie 710 ml.
- Trenta size: Pronounced as Tirenta and measures 31 oz 920 ml. It means 30 in Italian and is used for iced drinks.
Let’s get to the real issue: Where do the names of Starbucks cup sizes come from?
When Howard Schultz returned to the USA after his trip to Italy, he was impressed by the Italian coffee shops, II. Giornale opened a chain of coffee shops. Of course, these coffee shops were not just like Italy in terms of coffee making or design, they had to have Italian tunes on the menu. For this reason, small-sized glasses were called short, medium-sized glasses were called tall, and large-sized glasses were called grande, that is, large in Italian.
Good, but why is tall used for small glasses when it means tall in English? The answer to this question is hidden in a change made in the 90s. During this period, Starbucks introduced its venti size, the largest size glass to the market. The management, who thought it more appropriate to have three sizes on the menu, removed the short size from the menu and thus the smallest cup size remained tall.
Starbucks cup size names are actually the result of a successful marketing strategy:
Starbucks is one of the largest coffee shops in the world today, but it has not come so easily these days. More interestingly, he didn’t come to this day just by making good coffee. Starbucks is one of the brands with the most successful marketing strategies in the world. He made his name known to the whole world successfully, especially with Hollywood movies.
If you open any movie or TV series made in the USA today, you will definitely see someone who stops by a coffee shop on the way to work and buys coffee in a cardboard cup. Sometimes we don’t see any name in these coffee shops, sometimes we see the Starbucks brand. The interesting thing is that when we see coffee in a cardboard cup, even if we don’t see the brand anymore, Starbucks inevitably comes to mind.
Another successful marketing strategy of the Starbucks brand is the name of the cup size, which has even been the subject of this article. We are sure that if they were named small, medium, large in the correct order in Italian or English, none of us would have wondered about this, and there would be neither such an article nor countless humorous scenes that we see in both domestic and foreign films. So it’s not enough to do your job well, you have to get everyone talking about it.
Bonus: tolgrentiventi, it’s over!
Starbucks, one of the largest coffee shop chains in the world, answered questions such as how many ml are the cups, how they are pronounced, where their names come from, and we shared the details you need to know through the history of Starbucks. You can share your thoughts on the subject in the comments.
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