It's been a little over a year since the tech giant officially announced Apple Pay as a new way of paying through mobile devices, and now it's starting to really kick off as more and more of the biggest companies in the U.S. start accepting it in their stores - such as the new Starbucks Apple Pay availability!

Jennifer Bailey, the service's VP, recently announced Starbucks' Apple Pay affiliation, saying that the coffee chain will begin using the Apple service in a few of their stores by the end of 2015, expanding further to their entire list of stores by 2016.

According to Tech Times, Bailey spoke about the Starbucks Apple Pay partnership earlier this week during the Code Mobile Conference event at Half Moon Bay, California, revealing that the pilot program will begin in late 2015 ahead of a major expansion in 2016.

"I have to say in the last year of working on Apple Pay, we've sees a sea change in momentum around acceptance at the merchant level," said Bailey, CNET reports, speaking about both the Starbucks Apple Pay expansion as well as how the first year of the service has worked out, as it turns out that users of Apple Watch are using the mobile pay service "very actively."

Starbucks already has its own - and vastly popular - mobile payment app that accounts for a fairly high percentage of the company's in-store sales and is also connected to the chain's loyalty program, but it's unclear whether that will work with Apple Pay as well.

According to Recode, the Starbucks Apple Pay collaboration isn't the only news on the service, as Bailey also revealed two other major chains that will be adhering to Apple's mobile payment: KFC and Chili's.

Critics of Apple's mobile payment service have said from the start that its major problem is that there are very few places where it's accepted - but Starbucks' Apple Pay connection will make that whole thing quite different!