Peet's Coffee & Tea is a specialty coffee roaster and retailer. Founded in 1966 by Alfred Peet in Berkeley, California, Peet's has a large cult following known as the Peetniks due to their strong customer loyalty to its wide range of varietels and signature blends of coffee and tea. Peet's is especially noted for its strong, darkly roasted coffee, advertising that they are hand-roasted and delivered to stores as fresh as possible. The company operates about 100 stores, mostly in California, with outlets in Seattle, Portland, Boston, Chicago, Austin, and Denver.
Alfred Peet started Peet's Coffee and Tea in 1966 in Berkeley, California. Known as the "grandfather of specialty coffee", the original outlet was located on the corner of Walnut and Vine in Berkeley, close to the University of California. Peet grew up in the coffee business while living in Holland as a child. Moving to San Francisco, California when he was 35, he began roasting coffee as he knew it. They now roast in Emeryville, just minutes from where the first outlet was.
Peet's was the inspiration for now rival Starbucks. The original founders of Starbucks knew Alfred Peet personally, founded Starbucks in Seattle as kindred spirits, and bought the coffee beans for Starbucks directly from Peet's during their first year of business in 1971. In 1984 Starbucks, still a local Seattle chain, bought Peet's Coffee and Tea, roughly doubling Starbuck's operations and expanding them out of Seattle and into the Bay Area. In 1987, the original owners of Starbucks, still Peet's loyalists at heart, decided to sell their Seattle operations and the Starbucks name and focus on operations in the Bay Area. Starbucks was bought by one-time Peet's employee Howard Schultz and became the multinational empire it is today.
Peet's has been slower to expand and has maintained (to some extent) more of its focus as a coffee and tea retailer, not a coffee bar. This distinction has long separated Peet's and Starbucks from the time when Schultz and the owners of Peet's still worked together in the 1980s. Peet's is still primarily a California operation, with a few stores in other metropolitan areas (see above). The company went public in January 2001. After a very successful IPO, shares struggled through the first year but have posted solid gains ever since. As of 2005, Peet's is listed as a competitor of Starbucks with a market cap of roughly $450M compared to Starbucks's roughly $20B.