Long before Starbucks became a global empire with 35,000 stores and standardized blends, it was a small Seattle roastery experimenting constantly. The early company didn’t just sell beans, it created sub-brands, limited blends, regional experiments, and private-label offerings that have since vanished into corporate history. Many of these early products were quietly discontinued, buried after acquisitions, or dissolved after internal disputes. The result is an entire layer of Starbucks history that most modern customers have never heard of.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Starbucks operated nothing like the uniform, centralized machine it is today. Each store roasted in-house. Each location carried its own limited blends and experimental sub-lines. Some were created by individual roasters. Some were collaborations with local bakeries or restaurant partners. Some were created specifically for wholesale customers. Today, almost none of them exist, and Starbucks rarely acknowledges that these early blends were ever part of its DNA.
One of the first forgotten sub-brands was the Starbucks Select line, an upscale series of single-origin coffees reserved for restaurants and high-end hotels in Seattle and Vancouver. These coffees were roasted differently than in-store beans and packaged in a distinctive gold-and-black label system. When Starbucks expanded rapidly in the early 1990s, the Select line was phased out because it complicated supply chains and clashed with the new, unified branding strategy.
Another lost line was Sears Private Blend, a little-known collaboration that allowed Starbucks to roast coffee for Sears stores under an exclusive agreement. For a brief period, Starbucks produced multiple blends for Sears’ catalog and retail shelves. When the partnership unraveled, Starbucks discontinued the blends and destroyed the branding materials, making it one of the earliest corporate clean-ups in company history.
Starbucks also produced a series of now-vanished blends that were tied to regional roasters who helped in the company’s early years. Among them were Monorail Blend, Cascara Reserve, Puget Sound French Roast, and Harbor Light Espresso. These blends were location-specific, often sold only in a single store, and frequently tied to individual roaster personalities. When Starbucks standardized its roast profiles across all locations, those experimental blends were quietly eliminated.
The 1980s saw even more sub-brand experiments. One of the most ambitious was Starbucks Special Reserve, a predecessor to today’s Starbucks Reserve brand. These coffees were microlots, hand-sourced by early buyers who had relationships with small farms in Sumatra, Kenya, Guatemala, and Yemen. But because sourcing was inconsistent and expensive, Starbucks discontinued Special Reserve during the early 1990s expansion period. The name would later be revived, but the original line, its bags, and its early notes are almost entirely lost.
Another sub-brand Starbucks rarely mentions is Merrill & Banks, a small private-label project Starbucks acquired and then folded into its retail strategy. The brand had its own blends, packaging, and customer base before being absorbed and eventually erased. When Starbucks officially retired the name, almost all of its blends were discontinued permanently.
The company also experimented with a line called the Starbucks Origins Portfolio—a collection of coffees that focused heavily on geography and unique processing methods. Some of the rarest coffees ever sold by Starbucks came from this line, including early Kona, Yemen Mocha Matari, and Tanzania Peaberry offerings. Many of these were never revived after Starbucks’ later shifts toward mass production and predictable supply chains.
Behind the scenes, Starbucks ended dozens of other micro-projects: small-batch decaf experiments, early barrel-aged coffees, unbranded wholesale deals, and internal blends created for staff. Some blends were tied to farms or importers that later sued Starbucks over contract changes. Others fell apart due to quality issues or shifting budgets. Some were simply forgotten when Starbucks shifted its business model from a regional roaster to a global beverage chain.
What makes this forgotten layer of Starbucks history so fascinating is how different the company was in its early years. Starbucks behaved like a craft roaster, curious, experimental, chaotic, and heavily dependent on individual roasters' creativity. Today’s Starbucks is the opposite: streamlined, standardized, and optimized for global consistency. The early sub-brands don’t fit that image, so they were allowed to fade quietly into the background.
These lost blends represent the ghost map of what Starbucks might have become, a more artisanal competitor to specialty roasters, focused on microlots, regional identity, and small-batch flavor exploration. Instead, Starbucks pivoted toward scale, speed, and broad accessibility. The buried sub-brands show a version of Starbucks that once prioritized complexity over consistency, and experimentation over uniform branding.
For coffee historians and roasters, the original Starbucks sub-brands are a reminder of how much the industry has changed. As Starbucks grew, it erased many of the quirks that made its early days interesting. But those forgotten blends still matter, they’re the blueprint for the coffee culture that would eventually inspire thousands of independent roasters across the country.
Sources & Further Reading:
– Archived Starbucks packaging & product catalogs (1970s–1990s)
– Interviews with early Starbucks employees and roasters
– Corporate history notes from Starbucks’ pre-IPO period
– Seattle newspaper coverage of early sub-brand experiments
– Historical coffee trade documents from the Pacific Northwest
(One of many coffee history stories shared by Headcount Coffee — tracing the forgotten roads that shaped modern roasting.)
