Starbucks Buyout
By the early 1990s, the Starbucks Corporation, under the leadership of CEO Howard Schultz, was expanding aggressively in major urban US markets. Facing an increasingly competitive market and weary from the time-consuming demands of running The Coffee Connection, George Howell sold his Boston-area stores to Starbucks in 1994. Subsequently, Starbucks appropriated the Coffee Connection's popular Frappucino beverage and made it available chain-wide. Howell continued to travel the world, visiting a range of coffee-producing countries and working as a coffee consultant. Beginning in 1997, he worked for the United Nations and the International Coffee Organization (ICO), creating models of economic sustainability for coffee farmers. In 1999 he conceived and co-founded a program designed to help break the commodity/price cycle in the specialty-coffee industry. In 2002 Howell returned to the retail coffee market, when he founded the George Howell 'Terroir' Coffee Company, which sells whole bean single-estate coffees through a website.
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