Shipping Container Starbucks Tukwila

Starbucks, the most well-known coffee brand in the world, has long been interested in environmentalism, sustainability, and other forms of corporate responsibility. With thousands of stores and millions of customers all over the world, they’re constantly looking for new ways to innovate. Using a shipping container for a Starbucks store makes perfect sense given their mission and goals, and we’re excited to share more about how they did it.

Just south of Seattle proper is the suburban city of Tukwila, Washington. It’s the location for Starbucks’ first shipping container retail store, adjacent to the King County International Airport and numerous Boeing facilities.

They call the new shipping container coffee shop the ‘Reclamation Drive-Thru’. It serves walk-up and drive-through customers (no interior dine-in space is available, though there is outside seating) and is made from reused containers that were reclaimed from their scrap metal destiny at their end-of-life.

At Starbucks headquarters just up the road in Seattle, designers could literally stare out their windows and see shipping containers being moved around at the Port of Seattle on the Puget Sound. A desire for a new type of eco-friendly stores plus the inspiration of this shipping port window view planted the seed for Starbucks to pursue a shipping container coffee shop. At the time, using decommissioned shipping containers for a new sustainable retail building was a fairly novel idea.

Conception

Their Global Store Design Senior Manager, Anthony Perez, said they wanted their new Eco-friendly stores to be “green, thought-provoking and sustainable- the sort of project that stirs chatter” and create “experiences that honor the integrity of the neighborhoods where they operate.” Anthony succeeded in his task since the stores have been featured all over the internet and in major media outlets.

Like almost every other company, Starbucks uses shipping containers to source and/or deliver products all across the world. So, it seems quite fitting that they decided to use these same containers to build a store. Shipping containers are normally scrapped after their working lifespan, so Starbucks wanted a way to help reduce its supply chain waste stream through creative reuse.

Anthony’s design team said one of the most fun parts of designing with shipping containers was centered around the fact that they couldn’t modify the dimensions of the containers.  They had to completely rethink how everything would fit inside of this new shape which became its own puzzle to be solved.

Design

Starbucks settled on the idea of using four end-of-life containers for the store, plus a fifth container used as storage and a trash/recycling center. The ground floor footprint starts with an L-shaped arrangement of two containers: a full 40-foot long unit for the long leg, and a cut-down 16-foot long unit for the short leg. On top are two additional 40-foot containers, one of which spans across the drive-thru lane and is supported by steel beams.

The average size of a traditional Starbucks retail store is about 1700 square feet, but the designers wanted to shrink this considerably. The focus on sustainability wasn’t just about alternative building techniques, but also minimization of the store’s size and making every square foot and material count.

To remove that much floor space, removal of the interior seating area was a given. Such a nontraditional move required designers to make the space that was left both engaging and useful. They had to provide a location where customers could still relax and converse in the open air while appreciating the design of the building next to them.

Starbucks settled on 448 gross square feet of floor area, in which the designers were able to create a workspace for three baristas and their equipment plus the requisite area for material storage. The 16-foot container has both ends opened up and turned into drive-through or walk-up service windows. The longer ground floor container is relatively unmodified except for an externally accessible bathroom on one end and shade canopies and stand-up counters added on the side.

Those two 2nd floor containers don’t add floor area to the store, but they do have a purpose. From a marketing perspective, these containers make the store twice as tall and recognizable from further away while serving as a canvas for the Starbucks logo and a creative mural.

More functionally, both ends of each were cut off and replaced with an intricate metal screen that lets air pass right through the body of the container. With the HVAC equipment in these elevated containers, they are shaded from the sun while getting ample fresh air through these end vents.

To further aid in climate control, builders used soy-based closed-cell spray foam to insulate the occupied spaces. Coupled with the shade provided by the upper containers, the highly-insulated containers have a very reasonable energy usage that helps with the company’s eco-friendly goals.

And the eco-conscious design didn’t just stop there. The Starbucks designers added low-maintenance xeriscaping coupled with rooftop rainwater collection, then repurposed excess container corrugation sheets for the road signage. 

All said, the project lasted about 10 months, but it only took about two weeks once the containers were on the site for the store to open. This was thanks to the modular, off-site construction that the shipping container construction offered. And it also came with the added benefit that the store could eventually be disassembled and moved to another location in the future, if necesssary.

The building was finally completed in December of 2011, and their sustainability efforts were eventually rewarded in May of 2013 with a LEED certification. You can even see a LEED certification medallion on the side of one of the containers.

Conclusion

Since the construction of the Tukwila shipping container store, Starbucks launched additional stores built with shipping containers in other cities like Chicago, Denver, and Kansas City. Arthur Rubinfeld, Starbucks’ Global Development President, states these stores represent a much large global initiative to build Eco-friendly stores worldwide.

Update: As of late 2021, the Tukwila Container Starbucks seems to be closed, possibly as a result of complications related to the COVID pandemic. We hope this location is able to reopen in the future, but if not, it still serves as an impressive example of shipping container design.