The Controversial Fact You Never Noticed About Starbucks Food Display Cases

If you pay very close attention, you'll notice that many of your favorite restaurants were designed with specific tactics in mind, whether that's to urge you to spend more money or a little more time at the bar. Or like how Starbucks plays music in the store to create a welcoming ambiance and invite customers to relax. Though you may have noticed the bumping tunes and the return of the beloved condiment bar, you may not have noticed that the baristas never actually touch any of that enticing food in the display case by the register.

Starbucks uses real food in its display cases, nothing 3D printed or artificial, but that food is very rarely (typically never) served to customers and is usually thrown away at the end of the day. At a local coffee shop, you might order a cheese danish from the little display window and watch a barista serve it right from the shelf, but at Starbucks, that Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffin (arguably the best Starbucks pastry) won't come from inside the case. Besides the fact that display case food usually ends up in a trash bin, some baristas have shared on Reddit that their stores will re-use the display food for multiple days or weeks until it turns "rock solid." The controversy doesn't end there.

Social media exploded with videos and posts from Starbucks employees corroborating that display case food is thrown in the trash, despite Starbucks' FoodShare mission aimed at reducing food waste. One user on Reddit complained that not only is the entire process "a waste," but it requires "30 minutes of labor at least every single day to set it up and clean it out." A TikToker/Starbucks employee posted a video in a series where they crumble pastries into the trash every night with a caption that said "b4 anyone loses it: the case had flies so we couldn't sell," which is further evidenced by a Reddit user who added, "even worse when the pastry case is filled with flies." Some people speculate that Starbucks uses real food over fake food to maintain a specific aesthetic, though Starbucks hasn't confirmed this.

As videos circulated, customers expressed their unhappiness. "[It would] be more cost effective to just take pictures and post pictures," said a TikTok comment, while another pointed out that "the amount of food waste in the food industry ... is actually insane." Starbucks gave a statement to Green Matters explaining that "store partners have resources available to prepare food for donation pick-up based on the store FoodShare donation model" and that "stores are instructed to sell bakery items from the food case later in the day." Almost two years after Starbucks gave that statement there are still videos emerging of employees throwing away display case foods.