Starbucks has announced that they’ll be removing the La Boulange mini loaves and returning three favorite sliced loaf items. This doesn’t affect all Starbucks because some stores have not yet switched to the La Boulange mini loaves. This is what the La Boulange mini loaf lineup looks like:

IMAG9844 Loaf cakes 7th and Pike April 2014 copyBloomberg.com reports that Starbucks is bringing back the sliced lemon loaf with icing, the sliced banana bread loaf, and sliced pumpkin loaf. None of this is too surprising. Starbucks heard an outcry of complaints on social media sites, as well as MyStarbucksIdea.com complaining that the new mini lemon loaf wasn’t to customers’ liking. (A MyStarbucksIdea.com search will bring up many ideas that relate to the new La Boulange food items. Here’s another lemon loaf MSI idea thread.) Many people missed having frosting on the new La Boulange lemon loaves. When the new La Boulange mini loaves were first introduced, customers could ask for a separate mini tub of either vanilla or lemon frosting. But Starbucks found that few people requested the frosting separately and stopped offering that option.

Earlier this year, in Arizona, Starbucks did a small test of comparing sales of the new lemon loaf with the previous sliced loaf. I can only imagine that the older sliced version sold better.

Interestingly, when the new sliced loaves return to Starbucks, it sounds like it will still be a new La Boulange recipe baked as a loaf and sliced.

I’m not sure what will happen with the other La Boulange mini loaves. I always did like the new La Boulange classic coffee cake. From what I’m hearing, the Classic Coffee Cake, Reduced Fat Berry Coffee Cake and other mini loaves are staying, as far as I know.

More generally speaking, from what I can see, it looks like areas that introduced La Boulange saw some of their food sells increase depending on the item. No doubt, I am always hearing baristas say that they sell many more La Boulange croissants than they did of the previous version of the croissants. Starbucks reported at their annual meeting (March 2014) that they’ve sold more than 10,000,0000 La Boulange chocolate croissants!

IMAG9571 10 million chocolate croissantsOn the other hand, many customers didn’t like that the chocolate chip cookie became smaller in size when their stores began selling the La Boulange version chocolate chip cookie. It looks to me like the cookies have gotten larger recently in response to this.

What do you think of the change? Do you have a favorite La Boulange item?