EMERYVILLE — When Dave Burwick took on a purpose of CEO of Peet’s Coffee in early 2013, he was confronting a vast challenge: lead a association with a 50-year story from open entity to private, while also flourishing Peet’s participation opposite a country.
In a past 4 years, he has helped a association do only that. The coffee hulk has grown from $395 million in annual sales to scarcely $800 million. It has stretched a store count to a East Coast, carrying non-stop cafes in Boston, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, and it beefed adult a business, offered to grocery stores and offices. The association has combined 70 Peet’s sell locations in a past 4 years, reaching 270 locations — and some-more than 100 coffee bars during partners such as universities and cafes.
Going to a association in transition, as Peet’s was during a time, was a bit daunting, Burwick said.
“It was scary,” he said. “There were so many unknowns.”
When he started a talk process, he suspicion he was streamer into a still-public company. It was after a array of interviews that a association was sole to JAB Holding Co., allowing it to deposit in new store expansion and other initiatives though carrying to broach quarterly gain to Wall Street, Burwick said. A few months later, he supposed an offer from a new tenure and changed his family to Lafayette from Connecticut.
It was critical for Peet’s to find a right personality immediately after a transition, pronounced Jean-Michel Valette, who served as authority of a Peet’s house during a time, and continued on as a house member after JAB’s squeeze of a company.
“Peet’s is a special association that requires a special kind of leader,” Valette said. “It isn’t only a retailer. It is also a coffee roaster, a coffee sourcer, a seller to a supermarkets by a smoothness system. If we demeanour during all those, they can be rather opposite cultures, and carrying someone who intuitively wants to lead a mission-driven enlightenment was essential to us.”
Burwick’s years of knowledge in a libation attention helped ready him for a charge of heading Peet’s. Originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, he graduated from Vermont’s Middlebury College before starting a career in open family and eventually graduating with an MBA from Harvard Business School. He worked for PepsiCo for 20 years in several capacities, including heading a business in Canada. Just before fasten Peet’s, he worked as boss of Weight Watchers in North America.
“I had to atone for my sins” after operative for a soda company, he joked. It was underneath his care that Weight Watchers snagged celebrities like Jennifer Hudson to publicize a weight-loss program.
But entrance to Peet’s was a opposite task. Although he had led vital groups of vast companies, this was a initial time Burwick, now 55, would be CEO. Started by Alfred Peet in 1966 in Berkeley, Peet’s has been a renouned Bay Area association with a clever brand, pronounced executive of code selling Andrea Fernandes.
“Some leaders wish to come in and change everything,” Fernandes said, though progressing a standards set by Peet’s founder, that embody clever coffee sourcing and hand-roasting, has been critical to gripping a code renouned among a longtime Bay Area following and bringing in new business as it expands opposite a country.
Under Burwick’s leadership, Peet’s has amped adult a store count and a deals to sell a coffee to retailers like grocery stores. It has also bought smaller coffee roasteries Intelligentsia and Stumptown Coffee in an bid to have a palm in a supposed third-wave coffee movement, consisting of small, eccentric qualification coffee roasters.
Recently, Peet’s inked a understanding to move a $58 million, 175,000-square-foot roasting trickery to Virginia — an East Coast reflection to Peet’s existent roastery in Alameda.
Burwick plans to continue to grow a 5,000-employee company, though that’s not though challenges. As a Bay Area business, it’s faced with a parsimonious labor marketplace here that creates employing a challenge, Burwick explained. It’s also competing among a swarming margin of players, from coffee hulk Starbucks to a slew of eccentric roasters that have popped adult in a Bay Area and opposite a country.
The association also has a advantage of being in a Bay Area — belligerent 0 for a expansion of a coffee attention and an sparkling place to do business, he said.
“It’s moving to work in a same village as tech companies and others and (to see) competitors and people who are blazing a route since it army we to do a same thing,” Burwick said.
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