Starbucks is delving into the high-end coffee market with a new kind of store that looks nothing like the coffee chain we know.

The first Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room opened Friday in Seattle, and the company has plans to build another 100 locations in the coming years.

"Everything we’ve ever done has led us to this point," Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz said in a statement. "This is the moment of the next generation of Starbucks."

The store's designer, Liz Muller, likens the 15,000-square-foot roastery to the fictional Willy Wonka chocolate factory.

The New York Times has called it "part retail store, part manufacturing facility and part theater."

There are coffee bars throughout the store. Overhead, pneumatic tubes transfer beans to roasters and coffee silos.

"A 32-foot-high Copper Cast, where beans rest after roasting, shines like a newly minted penny," writes USAToday's Bruce Horowitz.

Muller told Horowitz that the store is meant be the "theater of coffee."

"We wanted to create a space to reinvent retail for the 21st century," she said.

The roastery is expected to produce 1.4 million pounds of small-batch coffee within the first year, according to the company.

An eight-ounce package of the high-end coffee beans sell for between $13 and $50. They will be available in more than 1,500 of Starbucks' existing stores, as well as future Reserve-only locations.

"We’re going to take the customer on a journey, immersing them in an interactive environment where they’ll be introduced to handcrafted, small-batch coffees within feet of where they’re being roasted," Schultz told The Times.

In addition to coffee, the roastery will also offer a food menu prepared by James Beard Award-winning chef Tom Douglas. The menu includes seasonal pizzas from a Serious Pie restaurant located inside the building, as well as pastries, sandwiches, salads, and sweets.

Instead of carrying Starbucks' logo, the bags of coffee for sale inside the store are marked with the letter "R," which stands for "Reserve" — the name of the chain's new line of high-end coffee.

In fact, you won't find the familiar Starbucks logo anywhere inside the store, which will serve as a flagship for the new chain of cafés.

The coffee beans available for sale include Colombia Montebonito and Sumatra Peaberry Lake Toba.

Starbucks is expected to open future Reserve cafés in urban areas like New York City and Washington, D.C.



