Introduction to Foreign Coffee Brand Peet's Coffee - What's Its Market Position and Relationship with Starbucks

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The Legacy of Peet's Coffee

Peet's Coffee was founded by Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant to the United States. He found American coffee simply undrinkable, so in 1966 he opened the first Peet's Coffee in Berkeley. How influential was it? Peet's introduced a great many Americans to good coffee for the first time. Ask people in the specialty coffee industry why they chose this trade, and an enormous number will tell you it is because they tasted Peet's and realized coffee could actually be this good.

The Starbucks Connection

Among Peet's fans were three people: Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegel, and Gordon Bowker, who founded Starbucks in Seattle in 1971. Yes — Starbucks was inspired by, and came into being because of, Peet's Coffee. In its early years Starbucks sold no espresso, no latte, no cappuccino. In fact, it sold no brewed coffee at all. It sold only beans, and you could taste coffee in the store only when sampling those beans. At first Starbucks did not roast its own beans; it ordered them from Peet's. Baldwin and Bowker later imitated Peet's roasting methods and gradually developed a style of their own.

A Brief Merger and Then Separate Paths

In 1984 — a peculiar year indeed, sharing its name with George Orwell's novel and seeing the arrival of the Macintosh — Alfred Peet decided to sell Peet's. Baldwin and Bowker, seeing their dream coffee shop for sale, eagerly bought it. So for a time Starbucks and Peet's were essentially the same company. After the acquisition, Starbucks managers had to fly back and forth, worn out running both the Seattle Starbucks and the San Francisco Bay Area Peet's locations. Eventually Baldwin and Bowker, surprisingly, gave up the Starbucks they had founded and sold it to Howard Schultz, who had been one of Starbucks's managers. Today's Starbucks was certainly shaped by the early Starbucks, but more accurately it was built by Howard Schultz together with Dave Olsen, owner of Cafe Allegro — the pioneering Seattle espresso bar near the University of Washington — though that is another story.

The Dark Roast Philosophy

Peet's belongs to the dark roast school. Whether that is a good approach is a fair debate. Their theory holds that coffee must be dark-roasted to draw out many flavors and achieve a complete taste profile. I am somewhat persuaded by it. The catch is that dark roasting pushes coffee flavor to its limit, and pushing flavor to the limit sits on a thin line from failure. That means dark-roasted beans must be roasted with great care, freshness matters more than with light roasts, and brewing cannot be careless. Peet's roasting does maintain a certain standard — in truth, it is far better than many of the people who constantly criticize Peet's.

The Challenge of Consistency

The problem is that they do not have staff good enough, or brewing methods capable of showing off their beans' finer qualities.

Let us not even discuss espresso. If you order a latte or something similar, it is probably better than Starbucks, but that is not much of an accomplishment. Good espresso is hard to come by at Peet's, so let us pin our hopes on the regular coffee. Regular coffee in America has traditionally been brewed by machine, and for a dark roast like Peet's you really need to find the right temperature carefully and drink it immediately after brewing for the best result. Peet's stores are said to discard old coffee every thirty minutes, but thirty minutes is still too long. To genuinely improve your odds of a good cup, you would rather wait for the next fresh brew. It raises your chances, but there is still no guarantee. I suspect temperature is involved, though there could be other reasons.

The Peet's Experience: Hit or Miss

In my many visits to Peet's, roughly nine times out of ten you get coffee that is undrinkably bad. Curiously, the bad coffee you usually encounter is either tasteless or heavily burnt with nothing else to it. Peet's bad coffee mixes in many strange flavors, plus other unpleasant, jarring sensations. Bad is bad, though. But if you are lucky, you may experience the most wonderful coffee of your life. From the first sip, as the temperature changes, each sip carries you through a different, beautiful world. Buying Peet's beans to brew at home is of course another option (if you are in the US). Brewing it yourself is less likely to go wrong, though I have still not been able to reproduce that one perfect experience I had "right" at a Peet's store.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

For drinks that live and die on a solid espresso base — a cappuccino or a latte — the roast and the blend matter as much as the barista. FrontStreet Coffee's espresso range is designed around exactly that. The Classic Blend is the crema workhorse, built on a traditional Mamba recipe with a deep roast so even beginners can pull thick, fine crema with chocolate, nut, and caramel sweetness; it is the first choice for a bold, mellow milk coffee.

If you are watching costs, FrontStreet Coffee's Black Cocoa Blend is 100% Arabica with ample crema, a full body, and a friendly price. For something fruit-forward, the Strawberry Candy espresso blend delivers berry, rose, raisin, and fruit-candy aromas, while the Grana Gesha SOE — a natural-process Ethiopian single origin, medium-roasted — brings berry, orange, and persimmon with a milky-candy note once steamed milk is added.