As a person who cares about food waste I think this is just downright fu*** up.

Each week starbucks prepares hot breakfast sandwiches and wraps to put into their food display for the sole purpose of showing the customers it’s options as oppose to let’s say, taking a picture. These food items sit in the food display for a day or two before being thrown out. The difference between you throwing away some old bread you didn’t get to eat and this is simple.

Sbux never meant to sell these items to customers, they are just for show. This is by design. Howard Schultz, Starbucks CEO, decided it’s much better to throw away food than to display pictures of it.

I asked a Starbucks employee at a Tampa, FL store how often they make these sandwiches for display. She said:

About ever 1-2 days because they get soggy and start to smell really bad.

Doing some simple guesstimate math here, lets say they make the sandwiches every other day:

3 days a week * 52 weeks (1 yr) * 6 sandwiches (average) * 11,100 starbucks locations in the US = 10.4 million sandwiches a year or 200,000 sandwiches each week in the US alone.

First they got caught wasting 6 million gallons of water a day, and now this. They learned nothing from their mistakes.

How do they get away with such carelessness?

(Full Disclosure: I own SBUX stock and feel let down by this)