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In August, Keurig Dr Pepper announced that it had agreed to acquire JDE Peet’s for $18 billion, with plans to create a coffee mega-corporation once the deal was complete. But just last week, news broke that Peet’s will close 30 locations in the Bay Area and Illinois by the end of January.
News of the closures came just days after Keurig formally launched its takeover bid, making a cash offer for JDE Peet’s shares, which the board and a majority of shareholders agreed to accept. Peet’s said the closures “reflect a broader effort to align our business with long-term growth priorities and current market conditions,” according to a statement given to Nation’s Restaurant News.
Peet’s was founded in Berkeley in 1966 and at one point had nearly 400 locations. But the brand ended 2024 with just 255, mostly in California, according to data from the restaurant industry research firm Technomic.
The closures will mainly impact stores in California’s Bay Area. But a store manager in Evanston, Illinois, told the Daily Northwestern that three Chicago-area locations would also close. In an email to employees at the Evanston store, Peet’s cited “continued underperformance that affects the sustainability and profitability of store operations” as the reason for the closure. One employee told Evanston Now that workers were offered severance pay but not transfers to other Peet’s stores.
Several Peet’s locations on the West Coast have unionized in recent years, including the first-ever store opened by Alfred Peet in 1966. One unionized location in Berkeley is among the stores set to close.
In an Instagram post, the union accused the company of failing to bargain over the impact of the closure on workers. The union said Peet’s went directly to workers with severance offers rather than “meeting their legal obligation to bargain.”
