After making favorable statements on cryptocurrencies in the past, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz gave more details on how the globally present gourmet coffee store chain could tap into cryptoactive handling in its operations. In an interview with Fox Business on Tuesday, the executive discussed a likely application for company payments running on blockchain and the firm's potential for having its own digital currency.

I think blockchain technology is probably a foundation on which an integrated Starbucks app could be built", Schultz said. In the last four or five years, says Schultz, Starbucks has laid the foundation for an integrated digital mobile payment system. Almost 50% of payments received come from smatphones, he says.

This distributed app could be a payment application that extends the mobile app Starbucks owns. However, the possibility of having a distributed application, running on its own blockchain, is a key step in making the jump to a currency of its own, which would be fully justified by the extended reach of this franchise throughout the world.

"We are testing cashless stores, where there is no cash management, we are increasingly efficient in this field. In China, 70% of the business is cashless and in the next few years, many of our U. S. stores will also be cashless. I said earlier that this is not about bitcoin. I believe that with the framework and platform we have for our mobile app, we could potentially be one of the first companies to have an own digital currency integrated into our app."

Howard Schultz
CEO, Starbucks

The executive emphasizes that the company continues to make its decisions with a "long range" perspective and that the key question for Starbucks is how a physical store retailer can be relevant outside the stores, how to extend that experience to other areas.

At a press conference to discuss Starbucks' 2017 earnings, Schultz said in late January that he does not consider bitcoin a coin, but he does not rule out that some cryptoactives survive because of their usability and brand legitimacy. "I personally believe that one or more reliable and legitimate digital coins will come out of the blockchain technology", he said on that occasion.