Peace Coffee, a “fair-trade” coffee association determined by a nonprofit in a basement, has been purchased by a longtime CEO and a business partner.
“What’s not going to change is a enlightenment and goal of being a good locally owned company,” pronounced CEO Lee Wallace. “We’re in business for all a stakeholders, including customers, employees and coffee farmers. We’re going to deposit and continue to grow.”
Terms of a transaction were not disclosed.
Wallace is assimilated in a buyout by Kent Pilakowski, a maestro consumer-food marketer who spent years during General Mills before using his possess company, that worked with small, specialty-food producers who indispensable sales and selling plan and services.
Peace Coffee was launched in 1996 by a Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), and a organisation of bankrupt Mexican coffee farmers during a duration when prices had bottomed out.
By 1999, Peace Coffee was one of 24 U.S. “fair-trade” coffee roasters that shaped Cooperative Coffees, that worked with farmers from Guatemala to Rwanda to accommodate fair-trade general acceptance and bypass coffee brokers. They paid aloft prices and also desirous a North American transformation among many coffee companies to provide growers better.
This year, Peace Coffee expects income to tip $8 million, some-more than 80 percent generated from indiscriminate sales to retailers, including Kowalski’s, Coborn’s, Lunds and Byerlys, Target, food cooperatives, coffee shops and colleges.
Wallace pronounced a association is flourishing sales some-more than 10 percent annually, a clever display in a coffee-saturated market, interjection partly to a new further of a sell emporium nearby a domicile in south Minneapolis, and a first-floor and skyway cafeteria in a Capella Tower in downtown Minneapolis.
The association has 58 employees.
“IATP has a prolonged story of incubating and building innovative projects and environment them giveaway as successful enterprises,” pronounced Juliette Majot, executive executive of IATP. “We are gratified that Peace Coffee will continue to flower underneath a care of Lee Wallace.”
Peace Coffee is a public-benefit corporation, among a flourishing organisation of about 100 “socially conscious” Minnesota businesses. The 2015 Legislature combined a new business category, in that owners dedicate to doing some arrange of amicable good.
Public-benefit companies compensate taxes and can make a profit. But they let shareholders, business and clients know that they may, during times, put amicable beliefs over profits.
Some are startups, while others — including Peace Coffee and St. Paul-based Sunrise Banks — are determined companies that chose to turn public-benefit companies when lawmakers combined a new class.
Wallace remarkable that Peace Coffee pays entry-level workers some-more than smallest salary and exceeds local-benefit standards.
“If we can sell some-more coffee and do improved things for coffee growers, we also do some-more for a employees,” Wallace said.
Peace Coffee always has had an eco-friendly bent, including delivering some of a coffee by bicycle-powered carts.