“If not for Peet’s, Starbucks might never have gotten off the grounds,” said the Los Angeles Times, pun intended. “Peet served as the Seattle-Based chain’s wet nurse, training its founders and supplying it with coffee until Starbucks grew too big. At that point Peet helped Starbucks purchase a secondhand roaster and taught the owners how to use it.”
Alfred Peet (1920-2007) has been called “the Dutchman who taught American how to drink coffee.” Born in the Netherlands, Peet apprenticed with Twinings coffee and tea company in London, and then worked as a tea taster in Indonesia and New Zealand prior to emigrating to San Francisco. “I came to the richest country in the world, so why are they drinking the lousiest coffee?” Peet said of Hills Brothers and Folgers coffee, then based in the city.
“Founded in 1966 by Alfred Peet in Berkeley, California, Peet’s Coffee laid the foundation for the specialty coffee movement in the United States,” said The Proper Kitchen. “His mission was clear: to provide a superior product that elevated the coffee-drinking experience.” George Howell, who was mentored by Peet and took his techniques to the Boston coffee scene, recalled Peet’s in 1968, “I saw people standing outside holding porcelain cups… it seemed to be some kind of art gallery gathering… an alchemist’s dream: a wealth of exotic-shaped coffee machines and… a panoply of glassed-in panels of roasted coffee blends labeled with exotic names.”
“He saw [the young men he mentored] not just as his pupils, but as the sons he never had,” Sprudge reported. After growing to several stores, Peet became trapped by what he called “his biggest failure as a businessman,” an inability to delegate. “He had this very high standard and was so absorbed by his business, and then at a certain point it was too much. He thought, ‘Well, I need to sell the business. Otherwise, I will be stuck in it.’” He sold Peet’s to Sal Bonavita in 1979, remaining a mentor for five years.
“A cup of coffee is only as good as the hands that crafted it,” Peet said. With the recent release of several biographies, Peet is now rightfully receiving the credit for having trained and mentored many entrepreneurs who went on to create powerful gourmet coffee tribes throughout the U.S.