Peet’s Coffee will be closing roughly 27 locations across California by the end of this month, a company representative at its Emeryville headquarters confirmed Tuesday.
There are 283 Peet’s locations nationwide including franchises, with 135 in the greater Bay Area alone. Employees of two Peet’s locations on Market Street, who said they were not allowed to speak on the matter, were notified of their stores’ impending closures last week. They said many of Peet’s downtown shops, with the exception of the Embarcadero location, are among those impacted. In a few of them, hiring signs are still posted in the window.
The closures follow some major changes at the company. Last week, Keurig Dr. Pepper launched its $18 billion all-cash takeover of Peet’s parent company, JDE Peet’s. Keurig announced the buyout in August and, in October, raised $7 billion from private equity firms to finance the purchase.
Peet’s was founded by Alfred Peet in Berkeley in 1966. In the ‘70s, Peet himself trained three young entrepreneurs — even providing them with roasted beans — for their new venture named Starbucks (maybe you’ve heard of it). Peet’s eventually went under the ownership of one of the Starbucks co-founders, Jerry Baldwin, who took the company public in 2001. Peet’s currently operates in Emeryville, with roasting in Alameda.
Its parent company, Netherlands-based JDE Peet’s, was formed in 2019 from the merger of Dutch coffee and tea conglomerate Jacobs Douwe Egberts (JDE) and Peet’s Coffee and is now the world’s largest pure-play coffee company. The board of JDE Peet’s fully supported the takeover and unanimously recommended shareholders to accept the deal, Reuters reported last week.
A reason for the closures was not given, nor did they comment on whether it was related to Keurig’s acquisition.
