JAB To Merge Peet’s Coffee, Douwe Egberts In Public Listing

To create a more formidable contender to take on Starbucks and Nestlé, JAB Holdings is bringing together some of the best-known coffee brands in the world. The investment firm will merge premium U.S. coffee brand Peet’s Coffee and coffee roaster Jacobs Douwe Egberts Group into one entity to gear up for a listing, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed sources.

JAB reportedly has not yet decided on a venue, but is strongly mulling the Amsterdam bourse, with the Dutch lineage of Douwe Egberts stretching back centuries.

The primary motivation for the listing is to enable an exit for investors who have backed JAB as it has gone on a $50 billion deal spree through the consumer sector in recent years, per an unnamed source in the report.

JDE Peet’s would become the biggest publicly traded coffee firm, with approximately $7 billion in sales annually, if the float occurs. It would be run by Casey Keller, who is the CEO of Peet’s. The listing will be one of the biggest European IPOs slated for next year.

JDE Peet’s is mostly focused on selling capsules and roasted coffee beans under brand names like Senseo, L’Or and Tassimo. However, a small portion of the company’s sales comes from making hot beverages for diners in Peet’s U.S. coffee shops. JDE Peet’s owns upscale coffee shops like Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, in addition to Stumptown Coffee Roasters.

In separate coffee news, Nestle began to offer Starbucks-branded coffee in mainland China in August. The company first started to sell products with the Starbucks label in February in Asia, Latin America and Europe. Rashid Aleem Qureshi, Nestle’s CEO for the Greater China region, said per reports at the time, “We believe China is the most exciting market in general, but especially for coffee because … per capita cup consumption is quite low as compared to Asia.”