Starbucks Shelves Teavana Bars

The (tea) bar is closed at Starbucks.

The coffee mainstay is rethinking its foray into the tea category, turning three standalone Teavana tea bars in New York into Starbucks stores and shutting down the Teavana location in Beverly Hills, The Seattle Times recently reported.

The outlet points out that the reallocation comes a little over three years after Starbucks purchased Teavana to begin with, having shelled out $616 million for the designer tea company late in 2012.

One full-service retail Teavana location, in Seattle, will stay open, while the remainder — some 350 in North America, according to FierceRetail — will only sell tea in bulk and not in individual beverage form.

Despite the scaling back on Teavana bars, Starbucks, according to The Seattle Times, remains dedicated to selling the brand in its coffee shops. Tea is a product category whose sales, the outlet shares, are growing by double digits in North America, and it’s on track to become a $3 billion business within five years’ time. The FierceRetail story adds that the Teavana brand will play a role in Starbucks’ planned expansion of 3,4000 stores in China.

The Teavana situation isn’t the first one where Starbucks found itself reconsidering the allocation of acquired brands, notes The Seattle Times; similar instances occurred for the coffee giant regarding the upscale bakery brand La Boulange in 2013 and, before that, in 2011, with the juice company Evolution Fresh.