Caribou Coffee

Caribou Coffee Company is a specialty coffee and espresso retailer. Caribou Coffee is a Minnesota based company that specializes in espresso beverages, roasters of their own blends of coffee, tea, sandwiches and bakery goods in more than 273 company-owned coffeehouses in 18 states and the District of Columbia, as well as 203 franchise locations in 10 countries. Caribou Coffee founder, John Puckett, was working as a management consultant for Boston-based firm Bain & Company, helping develop ideas and strategies for other companies, when he decided he wanted to become an entrepreneur. After a trip to Denali National Park in Alaska, he and his wife, Kim, decided to raise money and start a coffee company. His wife stayed with a job at General Motors while John moved to Minnesota to find the first site and put together financing. The initial concept for Caribou was a five-day-a-week schedule aimed at downtown office workers, mimicking what worked in Boston. Puckett signed a lease for the first location to be in the large Pillsbury Center office building. However, soon afterward the building's landlord decided not to sign the lease, because another of the building's retail tenants had exclusive rights to selling coffee in the building and had threatened to sue them. As a result, the financing for the store fell through because it was dependent on that specific site. Puckett opted to start looking for an available location in the suburbs, and the first Caribou Coffee shop was started in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, in December 1992. Arcapita was Caribou Coffee's majority shareholder. In 2002, Yusuf al-Qaradawi's involvement with the bank led to a protest of Caribou Coffee. That same year al-Qaradawi stepped down as chairman of the bank's Sharia board. On February 28, 2010, Caribou announced a corporate-wide rebranding, and began using the stylized "coffee bean caribou" logo on March 1, 2010. In May 2013, Caribou Coffee announced plans to close 80 stores in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Georgia, Illinois and Eastern Wisconsin, with 88 others in those locations to be converted to Peet's Coffee & Tea during 2013-2014. Caribou locations would remain open in Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Western Wisconsin, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Denver, and ten international markets. The closing and conversion process had been underway for a while beforehand, however, with news of closings beginning at least a month earlier. The company's handling of the closures was described by Forbes as "awkward and inappropriate given that 80 stores’ worth of employees" lost their jobs. On September 29, 2014, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group Inc., operator of Einstein Bros. Bagels and other bagel restaurants, was bought by JAB Holdings, owner of Caribou and Peets.