Why Starbucks, Dunkin', and Tim Hortons All Taste the Same

Three brands. Three cups.

So why do they all taste the same?

Starbucks. Dunkin'. Tim Hortons. Scooter's. Pick your favorite. The menu changes a little. The cup changes a little. The experience doesn't change at all. You get your coffee and you go.

Somewhere along the way, the most human thing in the world — sitting down and having a cup of coffee with somebody — turned into a transaction.

Black Sheep Coffee co-founder and co-CEO Eirik Holth joined The Brian Nichols Show to break down how the industry consolidated itself into a single flavor... and what it actually took to build 140+ shops going the other direction.

Listen to the full episode (TBNS 1094): https://www.briannicholsshow.com/why-starbucks-dunkin-and-tim-hortons-all-taste-the-same-tbns-1094/

TWO FINANCE GUYS, ONE FIXED DATE, NO PLAN

In 2013, Eirik and his college roommate Gabriel Shohet put a fixed date on the calendar, quit their corporate finance jobs, and moved to London with about $15,000 each and no business plan.

They ripped apart pallets to build the first bar. Pulled materials out of junkyards. That wasn't a phase — it's the store design now.

And the bet was robusta. The bean the specialty world had written off as commodity filler.

Higher caffeine. Lower acidity. Full-bodied enough to punch through the milk. Nobody was championing it, so they did.

That's the American Dream with a London zip code: find the problem everyone else ignored, then bring the solution before the committee votes.

THE COPY-AND-PASTE COFFEE PROBLEM

Too corporate on one side. Too hipster on the other.

In the middle: a thousand shops that feel interchangeable. Same lighting. Same queue. Same "we'll call your name" energy that somehow still feels anonymous.

Customer experience isn't just the phone call. It's the graffiti wall. The curated playlist. The Maker's Mark wax dip — that little detail that proves a human made a choice.

AI can regurgitate empathy. It will never actually feel it. And the copy-and-paste coffee joint keeps losing to the place that bothered to make a choice.

I live this fight in the day job every week. The brands that win aren't always the ones with the biggest media budget. They're the ones that refuse to become wallpaper.

WHY THEY SAID NO TO PRIVATE EQUITY

Eirik breaks down why they turned down venture capital and private equity.

They raised from customers who shared a fifteen-year view instead. Keeping board control is the only reason the concept ever got to become a concept.

When you double the store count, something always breaks. Founder vision collides with the guy who came from Chipotle and wants the same playbook in every ZIP code. Black Sheep's answer was a franchise model built around owner-operators — and treating "going rogue" as a feature, not a bug.

Turnkey systems. Local ownership. Room for a shop to feel like a place instead of a spreadsheet cell.

That's how you scale without sanding off the thing people showed up for.

ONE HEADLINE METRIC: CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Not vanity follower counts. Not store openings for the press release.

Customer satisfaction.

If that number holds while you grow, the rest can follow. If it slips, you're just franchising mediocrity faster.

Black Sheep's U.S. footprint is expanding — Dubai, Texas, Florida energy in the conversation, blank-canvas territory for operators who want to pick their own map. Find them at https://blacksheepcoffee.us, and franchise info at https://blacksheepcoffee.us/pages/franchising-us.

FOUNDER VISION VS. THE CHIPOTLE PLAYBOOK

There's a moment in every growth company where someone who scaled a different brand walks in with a binder.

Eirik's warning is familiar if you've ever watched a distinctive product get "professionalized" into mush. The Chipotle-hardened operator isn't evil. They're optimized for sameness at speed. Black Sheep's bet is that sameness is the disease in coffee already — so importing that operating system wholesale would kill the patient.

Franchisees going rogue sounds scary to private equity. To Eirik, it's how a shop in Texas or Florida can feel alive instead of templated. Turnkey systems give you the bones. Owner-operators give you the pulse. Board control bought them the right to keep that tension unresolved in favor of the customer — not the quarterly exit.

That's also why the robusta bet mattered. Specialty culture had a catechism: arabica good, robusta filler. They heresied on purpose because milk drinks need body and caffeine, and customers aren't grading cupping scores — they're deciding whether to come back tomorrow.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The coffee industry didn't accidentally become one flavor. Consolidation, risk-averse menus, and transaction-first design did that.

Eirik Holth's counter-bet was simple and hard: champion the bean nobody wanted, design stores like they were built by humans, keep control long enough for the idea to matter, and measure the thing customers actually feel.

Next time your latte tastes like every other latte on the block, you'll know why. And you'll know what the alternative looks like.

Educated. Enlightened. Informed.

LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE

Why Starbucks, Dunkin' And Tim Hortons All Taste The Same | TBNS 1094

https://www.briannicholsshow.com/why-starbucks-dunkin-and-tim-hortons-all-taste-the-same-tbns-1094/

Guest: Eirik Holth — Co-founder & Co-CEO, Black Sheep Coffee

US site: https://blacksheepcoffee.us

Instagram: @black_sheep_coffee — https://www.instagram.com/black_sheep_coffee/

Follow Brian: @BNicholsLiberty on X, Facebook, and Instagram

Show site: https://www.briannicholsshow.com

Sponsor note: Cardio Miracle — 15% off with code TBNS at https://cardiomiracle.com/TBNS