The story
Founded by Alfred Peet in 1966, in Berkeley.1
Alfred Peet (1920–2007) grew up in the Netherlands, where his father owned a coffee and tea business in Alkmaar, Holland. Peet trained with his father to roast and grind coffee. In 1938, at the age of 18, he moved to London where he was employed by Twinings coffee and tea company. He also spent time in New Zealand and Indonesia before moving to San Francisco in 1955 where he worked for a coffee and tea importer.
In 1966, Peet opened the first "Peet's Coffee, Tea & Spices" in Berkeley, California, on Vine Street near the University of California, Berkeley campus. It originally sold coffee beans, not cups of coffee. His coffee beans were hand-roasted in small batches. The company grew to four locations and became known as "Peet's Coffee and Tea." Peet wanted to bring better coffee to the American market and became known as "the grandfather of specialty coffee." The original location at Vine and Walnut remains open. The second location of Peet's Coffee was in Menlo Park, California.
Peet sold his business to Sal Bonavita in 1979, but remained working with the company as a coffee buyer and consultant until 1983. In 1984, Jerry Baldwin, a Starbucks founder, bought Peet's four locations from Sal Bonavita. In 1987, Baldwin and his Starbucks co-investors sold Starbucks to focus on Peet's. Howard Schultz, Starbucks' new owner, entered into a four-year non-compete agreement in the Bay Area.
In 2001, the company was incorporated as Peet's Coffee and Tea Company and had its initial public offering. The company was listed on the Nasdaq under the symbol PEET, and 3.3 million shares were sold at $8 a share. Shares climbed to $9.38 and the company raised $26.4 million.
Peet's opened a roasting plant in Alameda in 2007. This new location replaced the former operations in Emeryville, California.
In 2012, employees at a Peet's location in Chicago formed Peet's Worker's Group to address concerns about compensation, irregular scheduling, sick leave, and working conditions which resulted in frequent wrist injuries. Three representatives from Peet's corporate visited their store, where they attributed workers' complaints to the performance of manager of that location, and declined to discuss further concerns except in one-on-one meetings. The group subsequently lost momentum, and the lead organizer was fired after clocking in late for the third time in one year. Remaining members of Peet's Worker's Group attributed her firing to a selective enforcement of the company's lateness policy.
In 2012, Peet's was taken private when it was acquired by JAB Holding Company, a German investment group, for $977.6 million, or $73.50 per share. At that time, the acquisition was one of the largest prices paid for a Berkeley-founded company. JAB Holding (Joh. A Benckiser) also owns minority stakes in the consumer products companies Reckitt Benckiser, Coty and control of luxury brands Bally, Belstaff and Jimmy Choo. JAB Holding later acquired a portion of Caribou Coffee.
In August 2014, Peet's acquired Mighty Leaf Tea, a specialty tea brand based in the Bay Area, in partnership with Next World Group. It was announced in October 2015 that Stumptown Coffee Roasters would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Peet's. Later that same month, Peet's announced that it was acquiring a majority stake in Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.
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In 2015, Peet's Coffee merged with Jacobs Douwe Egberts, both majority-owned by JAB Holding, to form the Dutch multinational coffee and tea company JDE Peet's.
In December 2016, Peet's announced that it was building a second roaster in Suffolk, Virginia. The 175,000-square-foot facility will cost $58 million and was set to open in 2018. At that time, the Alameda roaster was producing approximately 1 million pounds of coffee each week. Peet's opened its first location in Shanghai, China, in October 2017.
As of fiscal year 2019, Peet's revenue grew to $983 million. On May 29, 2020, JDE Peet's raised $2.5 billion by taking the company public on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange in a deal that valued the company at $17.3 billion. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic and economic slowdown, it was the largest initial public offering in Europe during the first five months of 2020 and the second biggest IPO in the world.
In August 2025, it was announced Keurig Dr Pepper would purchase Peet's Coffee for $18.4 billion. The companies plan to split into two US-listed firms after the merger.
From Wikipedia’s article on Peet's Coffee, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5