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As the 2025 holiday season kicks off, Starbucks and Dunkin’ continue to see strong consumer engagement, with both brands outperforming their 2024 traffic levels and capitalizing on early seasonal launches.
Q3 2025: Strong Recovery for Both Coffee Giants
Both Starbucks and Dunkin’ outperformed their 2024 traffic levels in Q3 2025. Starbucks visits rose 0.7% year-over-year in Q3, following slight declines in Q1 (-1.0%) and Q2 (-0.2%). Dunkin’ showed a similar trajectory – rebounding from a 1.8% drop in Q1 to a 1.7% increase in both Q2 and Q3.
These gains suggest that both brands have successfully reignited customer visits heading into the critical holiday season, when limited-time drinks and seasonal marketing tend to drive engagement.
Holiday Menu Drives Traffic
The weekly data highlights the impact of seasonal offerings in the coffee space. Starbucks’ Bearista launch – on the same day as the holiday menu rollout – proved to be a major traffic driver, propelling visits up 11.9% year-over-year during the week of its launch. And the strong visit trends continued the following week with a 6.2% YoY increase, helped by an impressive “Red Cup Day” performance and highlighting Starbucks' capacity for generating demand with limited-time offerings.
Meanwhile, Dunkin’s Wicked collab – announced along with its holiday menu rollout – also generated traffic boosts, with visits up 3.5% to 3.6% YoY during the two weeks following the launch.
As competition in the coffee category intensifies, both brands’ early-season success highlights the growing importance of timing and tradition in driving visit growth.
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Placer.ai leverages a panel of tens of millions of devices and utilizes machine learning to make estimations for visits to locations across the US. The data is trusted by thousands of industry leaders who leverage Placer.ai for insights into foot traffic, demographic breakdowns, retail sale predictions, migration trends, site selection, and more.
