Howard Schultz

Howard Schultz is an American businessman and former CEO of Starbucks Coffee Company whose 40-year leadership of Starbucks transformed the Seattle-based coffee company from a small Pacific Northwest specialty-coffee retailer into the largest American coffeehouse chain. He was born Howard D. Schultz on July 19, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York City, into an Jewish-American working-class family. His father worked as a Brooklyn truck driver and struggled with chronic financial difficulties — an upbringing that shaped Schultz's later Starbucks employee-benefit policies. He attended Northern Michigan University on a football scholarship, graduating in 1975.

His 1982 Starbucks hire — when the company was a Seattle-area specialty coffee retailer with four locations — launched his coffee-industry career. He left Starbucks in 1985 to launch his own Italian-style coffeehouse chain Il Giornale (the name was changed in 1987 when Schultz's Il Giornale acquired the Starbucks brand from the original founders). The 1987 acquisition launched the Schultz-led Starbucks expansion period.

Under his leadership across his two CEO terms (1987–2000, 2008–2017, and the 2022–2023 interim CEO return), Starbucks expanded from 11 locations to over 33,000 locations across 80+ countries. The Schultz-era Starbucks innovations included the Frappuccino blended-coffee-drink launch (1995), the Starbucks Card stored-value-card launch (2001), and the 2008 Starbucks Reserve specialty-coffee program. The Starbucks employee-benefit policies — including the full-tuition Arizona State University college-degree program (launched 2014) — have been continuously cited as the American employee-benefit innovations of the 2010s.

Schultz explored political ambitions, including a 2019 Independent presidential campaign that he suspended in September 2019. His 2022 return as interim CEO of Starbucks — to lead the company through its post-pandemic restructuring and continued unionization disputes — was shaped by continued American labor-organizing tensions across the Starbucks American chain. He authored multiple bestselling books including Pour Your Heart Into It (1997), Onward (2011), and From the Ground Up (2019).

His name Howard is from the Old Germanic Hugihard meaning "brave heart." Howard has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for over a century.