Starbucks Goes Fitness – Really?

Starbucks, the chain that did for cafés what McDonald’s did for restaurants, will start a new in-house wi-fi network with six online channels.

Heavy Weight Publishing Partner

That of course isn’t terribly interesting, but one of the channels will be called “Wellness” and the primary content partner for that channel will be Rodale, Inc., who are behind publications like Men’s Health, Runner’s World and Eat This, Not That! In other words: a well known name and big player in the world of fitness.

Rodale announced that they will provide a fitness application called “Run, Ride and Walk Finder” for that channel that will provide Starbucks customers with…

[…] geo-targeted maps of more than 300,000 routes that highlight Starbucks stores along the way, and customers can upload their own trails that begin or end at their local Starbucks.

“The Right Balance”?

Yes, we can jog, run and bike from one Starbucks to the next. And, of course, on their website Starbucks touts how important it is to “find the right balance for you” and that they can help us make “the choices that work”, no matter if we are “counting calories, watching fat and sugar intake or looking for more fiber or protein (…)”.

All very nice, but the simple fact remains that the most popular and most advertised Starbucks items seem to be those with high calories. Which makes the good old calories in vs. out all that harder.

Let’s have a look at the nutritional values of some of their typical beverages and foods:

• A 16 oz cup of the “Peppermint White Chocolate Mocha” has 470 kcal and 80 g carbohydrates, 76 g of those from sugar. As one gram of carbohydrates has four kcal, that means that 304 – almost 2/3 – of the calories in the Mocha are from simple carbohydrates and have zero nutritional value, if you don’t count the sugar rush.

• Many people would assume that a smoothie would be the healthier alternative, but Starbucks’ “Orange Mango Vivanno Smoothie” comes with 260 kcal per 16 fl oz, most of them (34 g) again from sugar.  In comparison 16 oz of Coca-Cola, the softdrink most people have in mind when they think “sugar”, have only 194 kcal.

• One “Lowfat Red Raspberry Muffin” (128 g), please note the “lowfat”, comes with 340 kcal and the item with the smallest amount of calories on their bakery menu I could find, the tiny 33 g “Birthday Cake Mini Doughnut”, brings 133 kcal to the table.

I’d Rather Not

I’d say it would be a better course of action if the above application was named “Run, Hide and Balk” and used to avoid a Starbucks as good as you can, because one hour of jogging could be more than outdone with a coffee and roll there.

And the other thing I’ll be really interested in is  how Starbucks will be treated in magazines owned by Rodale, Inc.

Picture courtesy of Vera Kratochvil.