Peet's Coffee Is Buying Stumptown Coffee Roasters

Stumptown will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Peet's Coffee.

Stumptown CEO Duane Sorenson confirmed via email to food website Eater that California coffee giant Peet's coffee has reached an agreement to buy Stumptown coffee, considered a pioneer of third-wave coffee when Sorenson founded the company on Southeast Division Street in 1999.

But it should come as no surprise. The Wall Street Journal had already reported this May that Stumptown and its current owners were mulling a sale.

When Willamette Week broke news of Stumptown's sale in 2011 to majority partner TSG Investments, a San Francisco investment firm, we also noted that TSG had a very specific business plan.

"TSG takes consumer products and service companies with recognizable brands," wrote Ruth Brown in 2011, "increases their value and then sells the companies, usually within five to seven years."

By that token, Stumptown's actually a little ahead of schedule.

Peet's president Dave Burwick told the Wall Street Journal that Peet's stake would be 100%—meaning that company founder Duane Sorenson has also divested the rest of his original stake.

Sorenson has told Willamette Week he intends to stay in Portland, and has founded three restaurants—Woodsman Tavern, Roman Candle, and Ava Genes—along Southeast Division Street over the past four years.

All three restaurants are within twenty blocks of the original Stumptown location. His first, the Woodsman Tavern, opened within months of the Stumptown sale.

Willamette Week