Starbucks Coffee has opened the first-ever Starbucks Pickup store in New York City’s Penn Plaza.

The location uses the Mobile Order & Pay feature of the Starbucks mobile app as the primary ordering and payment method for customers. Customers who visit the location will place and pay for their order using the app, selecting Penn Plaza as their location and building their order using the full Starbucks menu. After arriving at Penn Plaza, customers can track the progress of their order on a digital status board and pick up their beverage and food items directly from a Starbucks barista.

In designing the Starbucks Pickup location, the company began with a prototype in the Tryer Centre, a centre for innovation at the Starbucks Support Centre in Seattle. At Tryer, teams focused on operations, digital innovation and design worked with store partners (baristas) to create an experience that gave store partners the tools they needed to deliver the best customer experience.

“Our customers who are on-the-go have told us that connection and convenience are important to them,” said Urban Markets for Starbucks VP Katie Young. “By designing a store specifically for the mobile order occasion, we can deliver both for these customers using the store’s design, location and the expertise of our baristas.”

The concept is being evaluated for introduction in other markets where app-based orders and payments are popular, suggesting it may be trialled in Asia before too long.