In an abrupt move, Starbucks said Wednesday that Kevin Johnson, its chief executive since 2017, was retiring after 13 years with the company.
Howard Schultz, who joined Starbucks in the early 1980s and built it into a global giant, will step in as interim chief executive when Mr. Johnson, 61, leaves his job on April 4, the company said. Mr. Schultz, 68, had been chief executive for two previous stints, most recently from 2008 to 2017, when Mr. Johnson took over and Mr. Schultz became executive chairman. Starbucks said it had hired a search firm and expected to pick a new leader by fall. Mr. Schultz, who left the company in 2018, will also rejoin the company’s board of directors.
The announcement comes ahead of Starbucks’s annual shareholder meeting on Wednesday, during which Mr. Johnson will speak. Mr. Johnson said that he had first discussed his plans with the company’s board of directors last year.
“A year ago, I signaled to the board that as the global pandemic neared an end, I would be considering retirement from Starbucks,” Mr. Johnson said in a company statement. Shares of Starbucks rose more than 6 percent on Wednesday.
Under Mr. Johnson, Starbucks was one of the big winners of the pandemic. As Covid-related restrictions closed restaurants to guests around the country, Starbucks successfully utilized — and grew — its drive-throughs, app and loyalty rewards program to quickly deliver lattes and snacks to customers. By spring 2021, Starbucks said that sales at its restaurants had made a “full recovery” from pandemic closures.
Last fiscal year, which ended Oct. 3, 2021, Starbucks saw revenues jump more than 23 percent, or $6 billion, to $29 billion from a year earlier when the pandemic shut down parts of the country for weeks. Operating income more than doubled to $4.8 billion.
But while Starbucks’s financials have been robust, the company has struggled in recent months to manage a wave of store unionizations. Before last December, none of the company’s 9,000 stores had unionized. Since workers at two Buffalo-area stores voted to unionize in December, at least six locations have done so and workers at more than 100 stores have filed for union elections.
Starbucks on Tuesday was hit with a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board, which accused the chain of illegally penalizing two Arizona workers involved in the union drive at a Phoenix location, the latest in the company’s labor disputes.
SBWorkersUnited, which has updating and rallying employees on social media about the unionization push, on Wednesday morning tweeted for “Howard Schultz, who has been a leader of Starbucks’ anti-union campaign to put union-busting behind him and embrace Starbucks’ unionized future.” In November, just before voting began on unionization at three Starbucks locations in Buffalo, Mr. Schultz showed up to speak with workers.
“We’re not a perfect company,” Mr. Schultz told employees at the meeting, according to a transcript provided by the company. “Mistakes are made. We learn from them, and we try and fix them.” He argued that the company’s history of doing right by its employees, including offering health care benefits and equity, showed that it had their interests in mind.
In the announcement Wednesday, Starbucks said that Mr. Johnson will continue to serve on the board and as a consultant through September. The company, which said it has been engaged in succession planning since last year, said it anticipates to have a new chief executive by the fall.
This isn’t the first time Mr. Schultz, who joined a small Seattle coffee shop called Starbucks in 1982 before later purchasing it, has returned to lead the company.
After stepping down as chief executive in 2000 but remaining its chairman, Mr. Schultz returned in 2008, abruptly replacing Jim Donald, then the chief executive, when the company was struggling with a downturn in the economy, an influx of coffee competition and missteps.
“When I returned, in January 2008, things were actually worse than I’d thought,” Mr. Schultz told Harvard Business Review in 2010.
In 2017, Mr. Johnson, then Starbucks’s president and a former senior executive at Microsoft, became chief executive. A year later, Mr. Schultz stepped down as executive chairman and board member.
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