News broke earlier today that Peet’s Coffee & Tea has moved to acquire Stumptown Coffee Roasters, a Portland, Oregon based specialty coffee brand founded in 1999. Amidst what we can only guess must be an unimaginable amount of pestering inquiries, Stumptown Coffee Vice President Matt Lounsbury (pictured above) spoke to Sprudge.com about the move.
Here’s some key takeaways from that conversation, including confirmed plans for upcoming Stumptown Coffee expansion into the Washington DC and Austin, Texas markets.
When did Stumptown staff learn about the sale?
Matt Lounsbury: “Peet’s Coffee CEO, Dave Burwick, just informed the staff this morning. He’s a really cool guy.”
How much will this change daily life at Stumptown?
ML: “They really want to see us continue doing what we’re doing. Peet’s is going to allow us to keep growing, and keep doing our thing. This is not a merger, they’re not going to fold us, we’re going to continue to operate independently.”
But what of our society? What does this say about the coffee world right now?
ML: “It’s interesting, here we are we’re at a moment where specialty or third wave or whatever is getting real and it continues to grow and not only with a new consumer base but there’s scale happening. You have a number of different brands entering this scale and it’s going to benefit everybody.”
Will you please tell us how much your company sold for?
ML: “I cannot currently disclose the sale amount.”
Will any big changes happen at Stumptown immediately?
ML: “No. They want us to continue doing what we’re doing. For us, it just means to continue to grow but finish the year and get into the holiday season. And we’ll continue to operate at the HQ in Portland.”
Does this mean you’re about to open a gang of new cafes?
ML: “We’ll open our new cafe in NOLA in February, but we’re going to be able to do more. I want to open up 10 cafes in the next three years and a partnership allows us to act on that reality. We’re pretty open about our strategy. We’ve got these hubs in Portland, NYC, LA, Seattle, and we’ve been spending all this time in Austin, Washington, DC. It makes sense for us to be there, and now we can move faster and complement it with retail.”
So that means upcoming expansion in Washington DC and Austin?
ML: “We’re interested in that in the very near future. These are places where we’re just starting to have fun.”
Can we expect to see your cold brew in a bunch of new spaces now?
ML: “There’s scale associated with cold brew and we’re helping this category go from zero to something very real. We’re continuing to grow distribution, but right now we’re just trying to get Nitro in as many hands as possible.”
Wow.
Read full coverage of the Stumptown Coffee sale news here. This story is developing…
Top photo by Robyn Brems.
Full disclosure: Stumptown Coffee is a longtime advertising partner of this website. Sprudge was founded by Zachary Carlsen and Jordan Michelman in the Stumptown Pine St. cafe in Seattle in 2009; at the time Carlsen was a Stumptown employee.
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