Is Starbucks About to Lose Billions in Free Advertising—One Cup at a Time?

Starbucks is phasing out clear plastic cups to reduce landfill waste—but the move may cost them one of their most valuable marketing engines.

May 23, 2025

“I’m not even going to post it. What’s the point?”

That was the reaction from my 16-year-old daughter after receiving her latest drink from Starbucks. Until then, she’d shared every order—layered Refreshers, pink drinks, unicorn concoctions—on TikTok. Now? A streak years in the making was broken.

The culprit? A plain white paper cup.

For her, it wasn’t just a drink. It was a ritual, a shared identity, a creative moment of connection with friends and peers. It was exactly the kind of brand-first experience that Starbucks has cultivated for decades. That moment — captured in the photo that would normally follow it — never happened.

1. The Cold Truth About a Warm-Weather Brand

For decades, Starbucks was synonymous with hot drinks and cold mornings. But that’s changed. In 2013, cold beverages accounted for approximately 37% of Starbucks' U.S. beverage sales. Today, that number is nearly 75%.

Bright, layered, fruit-filled Refreshers. TikTok-famous Frappuccinos. Colorful iced concoctions that are tailor-made for Instagram and TikTok.

And until recently, they came in clear plastic cups that let customers show off every swirl, hue, and gradient. The kind of visuals that practically beg to be posted. That were likely, in fact, designed to be posted by one of the most sophisticated brand marketing organizations in the world.

But now? Those vibrant drinks are being served in plain white paper cups.

Why? Sustainability. Starbucks has been working for years to reduce its contribution to landfill waste. They had previously developed a clear plastic cup that used 20% less material and was technically recyclable. But according to a CBS News investigation, fewer than 1% of those cups were actually recycled, because the type of plastic used wasn’t in demand by commercial recyclers.

Shortly after the report aired, Starbucks began testing white paper cups for cold drinks in select U.S. states—with plans to expand further.

On the surface, it seems like a good thing. Certainly reducing landfill waste is a worthy cause. But there’s an unintended consequence brewing.

2. Organic Exposure: The Billion-Dollar Free Media Engine

Starbucks isn’t just a coffee brand. It’s a content brand. Every day, millions of customers around the world snap and share their drinks.

The hashtag #Starbucks has over 61 billion views on TikTok.
Instagram users have posted Starbucks content more than 40 million times.

The visual appeal of Starbucks’ clear-cup drinks has become one of the brand’s most effective unpaid marketing channels. According to industry estimates,

Starbucks may generate hundreds of millions of dollars in equivalent media value each year from customer-generated content.

Starbucks’ cold drinks in their iconic clear cups are a social media phenomena each spring and summer. While exact impression counts are proprietary, the proxy data – billions of TikTok hashtag views, millions of user posts, and follower counts in the tens of millions – all point to an immense organic reach. In the U.S., it’s safe to say Starbucks cold beverages generate hundreds of millions of unpaid impressions over the spring-summer months across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Globally, that impact is even larger, likely multiple billions of impressions when combining platforms.

Starbucks' only comparable organic marketing engines are their Fall Pumpkin Spice Latte launches (#PSL tweets top 3k+ daily at the peak of the season) and the holiday Red Cup in November and December which trends on all social media platforms every year.

If Starbucks were to pay for the billions of impressions it earns organically, the costs would be enormous. For a rough illustration:

The ~61 billion TikTok impressions from #Starbucks content, at about $9/CPM (CPM = Cost per 1k impressions), would equate to $550+ million in ad spend value.
Instagram’s ~3–4+ billion estimated impressions from UGC could be worth on the order of $30–$40 million at ~$10/CPM.
Facebook impressions, while harder to quantify, would also represent millions of dollars in value.
And that’s just posts you can quantify by using the hashtag #Starbucks

Of course, not all impressions are equal. Organic content carries authenticity and emotional resonance that paid media rarely achieves. And Starbucks’ unique drink aesthetic has driven that UGC engine for years.

Consider how much money other brands spend on paid influencer posts, celebrity endorsements, PR and other forms of “social proof” advertising. All of it in the hopes that one day some small group of people will organically post about their brand to their friends and family.

Starbucks is sitting atop a gold mine of user-generated content showcasing their products in the best possible light. It’s the well-earned reward after a hard day (doing whatever – from winning a soccer game to cleaning a closet). It’s the symbol to the start of the weekend or vacation or road trip or adventure. It’s the status symbol that makes 13-year old girls feel they have something tangible in common with the TikTokers and YouTubers who are their generation’s celebrities. To fail to understand that this media is not the same as a typical “media impression” is to vastly misunderstand the brand.

The clear cups are a visual symbol of some aspirational expression of their customers. Their contents—colorful, customizable, and crave-worthy—became one of the brand’s most effective unpaid marketing engines – and also gave the brand a kind of cultural cache and relevance that few other brands have achieved.

What happens when the medium goes opaque?

3. Is Starbucks Sacrificing Visibility for Sustainability?

The shift to white paper cups aligns with Starbucks' broader sustainability goals. But it primarily impacts cold drinks — the drinks that now dominate sales and drive social engagement.

So the question becomes:

Does Starbucks have to choose between saving the planet and staying visible on social media?

4. Smarter Paths Forward

Here’s the good news: Starbucks doesn’t have to pick a side.

Frequently when advising a company on an unavoidable need to pivot (which is far more serious a problem than Starbucks’ clear cup problem), I’ve found it’s helpful to take a dialectic approach to the problem.

This is particularly helpful when you appear to have an either/or problem. In this case, it seems as though you can either remove plastic cups from Starbucks’ supply chain (and meet sustainability goals) or you can keep plastic cups and reap hundreds of millions of dollars worth of free social media marketing.

Rather than view the two conflicing goals as mutually exclusive, frame the problem as “how can you” do them both. You do this by distilling the real problem at the root of each conflicting idea, and then turn it into a “How” question. This is a dialectic approach - try it yourself to find a solution to two conflicting issues:

Thesis:

“plastic cups are bad for the environment – and since we can’t stop them from getting thrown in landfills, bad for our brand” - so we have to get rid of them.

Anti-thesis:

“we have to have plastic cups or no one will post pics of our cold drinks anymore.” - so we can’t get rid of them. (I suspect only the social media manager might realize this… but that person is not likely invited to the meeting where these things get decided.)

Synthesis:

“How do we reduce landfill waste without destroying our free social media marketing engine we’ve built?”

When you frame the problem through a single lens, it leads to only narrow solutions. When you create a “HOW” question that incorporates the END RESULTS you want from each thesis, you create the springboard for new ideas.

With that new question, some options become obvious… I’m sure the team at Starbucks, who actually know a lot more about cups than me, would produce a much longer and much more interesting list – but even I could come up with:

a. Compostable Clear Cups

Biodegradable, plant-based cups (like PLA or PHA) maintain transparency while improving sustainability. While costlier upfront, they could offset value lost in earned media—and help scale adoption for the entire foodservice industry.

It’s very likely that these cups cost a lot more than Starbucks’ current plastic cups. But the cost of the cups are likely being evaluated only by the procurement and supply chain teams, whose Cost-of-Goods model does not include media impressions. Even this article’s cursory research points to a totally different cost center to offset additional cost of compostable cups. When the financial impact of losing nearly $600M in free media impressions (by fans) is factored in, the cost may not seem as high.
And how good would it be for the Starbucks brand to not only switch to compostable cups, but also, because of their scale, create the financial incentives for compostable cup makers to scale operations so that the overall cost/cup goes down, making it a viable option for many other businesses to switch as well?
But at Starbucks’ scale it’s possible that even the $600M-$1B in media would not offset the difference in cost, so we should consider other options…

b. Designer Paper Cups with Visual Punch

If paper is mandatory, make it postable. Think seasonal art drops, influencer collabs, or translucent cutouts. Think Red Cup meets Nike collab.

Consider that Starbucks has already proven, with both the Red Cup and the Pumpkin Spice Latte that viral paper cups are viable. A Spring or Summer seasonal set of limited edition paper cups-as-canvas for influential collaborators could be just as viral as the original clear cups – and draw new audiences.
This is also a strategy that could create hype similar to new sneaker drops… imagine a limited edition Banksy cup (Would he do that? Maybe not), but for sure NBA, soccer, pop musicians, YouTuber and reality TV stars would do it in a heartbeat.

c. Reusable, Share-Worthy Cold Cups

Starbucks already designs and sells limited-edition reusable cold cups in their stores — but they haven’t put their marketing and brand muscle behind making any of these cup designs the must-have accessory of the season. They could. Remember the Stanley Cup craze? That movement started with moms and a few influencers.

d. Sustainability as a Flex

Incentivize UGC around sustainability. Let customers who share their paper cups earn points, social rewards, or visibility. Make saving the planet the cool post.

To be clear, this is harder said than done – these kinds of things often take off organically when a celebrity posts something and it resonates with their audience. Of all these options, this one feels the most like what would be in a proposal from an agency and the least controllable outcome from Starbucks’ point of view.

5. A Brand Built on Reinvention

Starbucks has always innovated beyond coffee. It defined the “third place.” It normalized $5 lattes. It made drive-thrus premium and mobile ordering frictionless. It even turned fall into a flavor.

The same spirit that helped Starbucks go viral every season can help it go green without going invisible.

Because in 2025, content is currency. And an un-postable product for a brand like Starbucks is a wasted opportunity that’s bleeding hard-earned value daily… As a person who’s specialized in brand strategy for my whole career it’s honestly painful to watch brand evangelists who enthusiastically posted every drink online as part of a lifestyle and identity statement respond to the same exact product with a side-eye and a shrug.

Let’s hope Starbucks can find a way to both save the world and maintain their brand dominance. But first they have to ask the right questions.

This article originally appeared on Hypescience, a newsletter exploring brand strategy, applying startup thinking and behavioral science to the social feedback loops shaping our culture.

Note: I write articles with the help of ChatGPT and Perplexity for research (and copy-editing my long, boring copy into much shorter, more readable form). While I fact-check the most important data points, I may miss something that might be inaccurate. If I get something wrong, please let me know and I’ll correct it. All article ideas, perspectives and recommendations (and em–dashes) are my own. Thanks!

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