Gopuff adds Starbucks ex-CEO Howard Schultz as a director
The Philly-based Gopuff delivery chain says the ex-Starbucks CEO will help guide growth.
Gopuff, the Philadelphia-based, privately owned snack delivery service with warehouses in more than 500 U.S. and U.K. communities, has added Howard Schultz, former CEO of the ubiquitous Starbucks coffee chain, to its board.
Schultz, who stepped down from day-to-day management in 2023 but remains Starbucks chairman emeritus, said in a statement he’s glad to be able to join Gopuff while its culture is still forming.
He joins the Gopuff board about a year after Gopuff started brewing Starbucks coffees in its Philadelphia-area warehouses and selling them hot to delivery customers.
Gopuff, which has lately built partnerships with Disney, Robinhood and other brands and says it has been boosting sales and concentrating on “speed, reliability and affordability” as it grows past COVID-era cutbacks, in a statement called Schultz’s willingness to serve as a director and adviser “a defining moment.”
He started at Starbucks in Seattle in 1987. It currently operates 40,000 stores and oversees 400,000 employees in almost 100 countries, powering past periodic waves of economic expansion and contraction, store closings, and labor conflicts.
Gopuff, founded by then-Drexel University students Yakir Gola and Rafael Ilishayev in 2013, is still “in the imprinting stage of its culture and growth,” Schultz said in a statement.
Gopuff, founded in 2013, in its early promotions associated itself with the college beer and cannabis culture, and still sells beers and THC and CBD products, but broadened its marketing to include a range of convenience-store, household and prepared-food items as it attracted billion-dollar investments from Silicon Valley, Japan and Saudi Arabia.
The company sold shares and bonds to large investors, implying the company could be worth as much as $40 billion amid speculation of a pending IPO in 2021, but last year priced new investments at a back-to-earth valuation of $8.5 billion. Starbucks is worth around $112 billion in recent stock-market trading.
Gola said he is “humbled” to add Schultz to the board, adding that Schultz, to him, also stands for “an unwavering belief that how you treat people matters” and will help “redefine” Gopuff’s approach to customers.
Schultz built “a great consumer brand” and will help Gopuff do the same, added Ilishayev in a statement.
Besides Schultz and the founders, Gopuff directors include Betty Atkins, who sold her energy software company, Clear Standards Inc., to SAP, whose U.S. arm is based in Newtown Square; and Anthony Bucci, founder and former executive at Philadelphia-based RevZilla.
