Dive Brief:
- Starbucks’ new support office in Nashville, Tennessee, will cost the company $100 million and employ 2,000 workers, according to a Tuesday message from Chief Partner Officer Sara Kelly.
- The majority of Starbucks corporate roles will remain based in Seattle. The Nashville jobs will comprise of new roles, in-sourcing work from contractors and the relocation of some corporate teams.
- The Nashville office will support Starbucks’ growth in the Southern and Eastern United States, and put the company in closer proximity to key suppliers and “a deep and growing talent pool in the region,” according to Kelly’s message.
Dive Insight:
Starbucks’ Nashville headquarters won’t be complete until 2027, but the chain will start some operations in a temporary office building in May of this year, Kelly wrote. The regional office was first announced in March.
The Nashville office will house some teams currently located in Seattle. Starbucks’ emphasis on “supporting strong in-office cultures across our geographic footprint,” Kelly wrote, means intact teams will be based in the same locations. This week, Starbucks began informing workers in some of its tech division teams of their required move to Tennessee, Kelly said. Some technology teams will remain in Seattle, however.
The chain has been pushing for greater in-office presence by support center employees for years. Those RTO policies initially drew resistance from some corporate workers in 2023, but continued. In early 2025, the chain laid off more than 1,000 corporate workers and began requiring leadership to spend more time in-person. In October, Starbucks began requiring four days of in-office work from some corporate employees and said that new hires and internal lateral moves would be conditioned on workers’ physical presence in Seattle or Toronto, cities where it had major headquarters at the time.
According to its most recent 10-K, Starbucks employed about 9,000 workers in the U.S. in “corporate support, store development, roasting, manufacturing, warehousing, and distribution operations,” with another 5,000 support staff in international markets, in addition to more than 367,000 store-level employees worldwide. Those numbers, however, were disclosed the same week as a major wave of layoffs and store closures announced in September.
As southeastern markets have grown in importance for U.S. chains, more restaurant companies are opening secondary headquarters in the region, or shifting away from their homebases. In 2023, Subway opened a new headquarters in Miami, Florida, supplementing its existing Connecticut HQ. In-N-Out Burger is in the process of opening a Tennessee support center to aid its growth east of the Mississippi. In addition, New York-based Shake Shack is building a new flagship restaurant and corporate support center in Atlanta.
