Note to self: Less writing about coffee and do more in the coffee business. I need to cash in on part of this $18Bz getting floated around here. I couldn’t help but think of Scrooge McDuck swimming in a vault of coffee since they just dropped 18 Big Ones on the Peets brand.
Keurig Dr Pepper just dropped a cool $18 billion to buy JDE Peet’s, the big‑shot owner of Peet’s Coffee, L’OR, Jacobs, Douwe Egberts and more. That’s €31.85 per share, about 20–33 percent over what folks were trading JDE Peet’s stock for lately.
But hold your latte: this isn’t about fusing coffee and soda. They’ll break up again, like the ex you wish you never rekindled. One part becomes a coffee powerhouse, the other stays a soda stronghold. The coffee side lines up $16 billion in annual sales. The beverage side, $11 billion.
They’re talking about throwing $400 million in cost savings into the pot over the next three years with earnings benefits starting day one.
On leadership lineup? After the split, Tim Cofer heads the soda side in Frisco, Texas. Sudhanshu Priyadarshi takes charge of the newly minted “Global Coffee Co.” out of Burlington, Massachusetts, with its international HQ in Amsterdam.
Birds of a brewing company: JAB Holding, the puppeteer, holds big stakes in both and basically engineered the original Keurig‑Dr Pepper tie‑up back in 2018. This deal gives them a tidy exit from the coffee mess with about a $12.5 billion payday.
Wall Street threw up a bit: KDP stock dropped around 7–11 percent. Some of its worst trading days in years. S&P even slapped it with a negative credit watch thanks to the debt load and deal complexity.
Why the split‑and‑reassemble? Analysts say it makes each business sharper and easier to value separately. A pure‑play coffee outfit could float higher than that messy soda/coffee combo.
I see a Dr Pepper launching their own cold brew very soon after this deal is done. No one asked for it, but it’s coming.