TurboChef Talk Heats Up

Investors sniffing around TurboChef (OVEN Quote) might want to wake up and smell the coffee -- right now.

TurboChef, best known for selling the ovens that cook Subway's popular toasted sandwiches, soon could have Starbucks (SBUX Quote) hooked on its high-speed ovens as well. Earlier this week, Starbucks began rolling out hot breakfast and lunch sandwiches at its 126 Chicago-area stores. Starbucks, which has been testing TurboChef's ovens for a couple of years, now sells hot sandwiches in five major markets.

"The customer response has been great," Brigid Benson, a regional manager for Starbucks, told TheStreet.com on Wednesday. "It's been very exciting."

To be clear, Benson never said that Starbucks -- a company that's fiercely protective of its strategies -- has installed TurboChef-brand ovens in its Chicago stores. Rather, she called such information "proprietary" and declined to elaborate further. However, a Starbucks manager on the West Coast confirmed that her store in fact uses TurboChef while echoing Benson's comments about strong customer response and saying that the hot sandwiches are definitely "here to stay."

Starbucks has also expressed a strong interest in using ovens that successfully contain aromas -- which TurboChef's unique design allows -- so that the scent of its flagship coffee products continue to fill the air.

Meanwhile, TurboChef itself has said little. This spring, TurboChef reminded investors that it must be "extremely sensitive and sort of defer to Starbucks" about the coffee chain's menu expansion. Back in 2004, for example, TurboChef disclosed its original contract with Starbucks in the briefest of 8-Ks filed the day before Christmas Eve. TurboChef has since offered very limited updates when asked about the deal, although the company officially added Starbucks to its partial customer list -- for the first time ever -- when releasing its latest quarterly results.