What Starbucks' Protein Coffee Launch Looks Like From the Customer's Side
Starbucks' Protein Coffee is already all over TikTok. Some people are calling it the best thing the brand has done in years. Others are calling it flavorless ice water with a shot of espresso.
So which is it? We pulled 10 of those customer reaction videos and ran them through Imentiv AI to find out what they actually felt, not just what they said, by reading facial expressions, voice, and language together.
The actual study, inside imentiv.ai
Texture is the clear win
Four out of ten people brought it up unprompted, calling the drink smooth and creamy. A few specifically appreciated that it didn't leave the chalky protein aftertaste they were bracing for. Starbucks seems to have nailed the mouthfeel.
Every count here links to its own clips
Flavor is where it falls apart
The same number of people, three out of ten, complained about a lack of flavor and sweetness, and price came up just as often. One participant ran her own four-way taste test across the menu before landing here:
"Now the protein versions are more expensive, so does it taste good enough for me to buy again? No, especially when I can just leave my house prepared."
Nobody split the room more than the vanilla protein latte. It's the single most polarizing item in the whole study.
"Oh my God. This is amazing. Starbucks hit it out of the park with this one."
"I'm catching about zero vanilla here. It's not sweet. Tastes like ice water with a hint of coffee."
Same drink, same flavor, opposite experiences. And that's the point of building this from video instead of a survey: you're not reading our summary of what they said; you're one click from watching them say it.
Same drink, tracked to two different people
Most reactions are still undecided
Only 33% of participants gave a clear buy signal, and even that group split three ways: would buy, maybe, would not. Most people, 70%, didn't land on a clear answer at all. This crowd is still making up its mind.
Would buy, maybe, would not, unclear
Every quote here plays back to its clip
A few voices did more work
One participant built her own off-menu drink with the new protein cold foam, entirely on her own initiative. That's not a scripted reaction; that's someone actually invested. Another, Janeé, brought up Dutch Bros unprompted:
"Dutch Bros also have a protein latte and they have multiple sugar-free syrups and it's sweet."
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Starbucks isn't just being judged on its own terms here. It's being benchmarked against the competitor it's trying to fend off, in the same breath customers use to talk about its own drink.
You don't have to dig for this yourself
Everything above came from combing through clips one by one. With Imentiv AI, you can skip that part. Ask a real business question, something like "why would someone choose this over Dutch Bros" or "is the vanilla latte worth keeping on the menu", and it goes back through every frame, every segment, every person in the study to work out the answer.
Nothing gets skimmed, and nothing gets cherry-picked to fit a hunch. The answer comes back grounded in what people actually said and showed, with a line back to the exact clip it came from. That's the part built for the moment a team actually has to decide something, not just see what people felt, but get a straight answer to the question on the table.
So here's where it lands: Starbucks nailed the texture, hasn't settled the flavor question, and is asking people to pay a premium for something they can make at home.
And this was a small sample: just a post-launch product testing analysis of 10 clips.
Imentiv AI can run the same read across hundreds of videos at once, analyzing face, voice, and language for every person, frame by frame, segment by segment, consistently every time.
Want this kind of read on your next launch (pre/during/post)? Imentiv AI runs it at whatever scale you need.
About Imentiv AI
Imentiv AI is a multimodal emotion recognition platform that helps teams understand how people actually feel, not just what they click or say. It reads facial expressions, voice, and language together across video, audio, image, and text, turning raw customer reactions into insights teams can act on. Founded in 2023, Imentiv AI has its headquarters in Cupertino, California, United States, serving businesses across the US and beyond.
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