Peace Coffee, a "fair-trade" coffee company established by a nonprofit in its basement, has been purchased by its longtime CEO and a business partner.
"What's not going to change is our culture and mission of being a great locally owned company," said CEO Lee Wallace. "We're in business for all the stakeholders, including customers, employees and coffee farmers. We're going to invest and continue to grow."
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Wallace is joined in the buyout by Kent Pilakowski, a veteran consumer-food marketer who spent years at General Mills before running his own company, which worked with small, specialty-food producers who needed sales and marketing strategy and services.
Peace Coffee was launched in 1996 by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), and a group of impoverished Mexican coffee farmers during a period when prices had bottomed out.
By 1999, Peace Coffee was one of 24 U.S. "fair-trade" coffee roasters that formed Cooperative Coffees, which worked with farmers from Guatemala to Rwanda to meet fair-trade international certification and bypass coffee brokers. They paid higher prices and also inspired a North American movement among many coffee companies to treat growers better.
This year, Peace Coffee expects revenue to top $8 million, more than 80 percent generated from wholesale sales to retailers, including Kowalski's, Coborn's, Lunds and Byerlys, Target, food cooperatives, coffee shops and colleges.
Wallace said the company is growing sales more than 10 percent annually, a strong showing in a coffee-saturated market, thanks partly to the recent addition of a retail shop near its headquarters in south Minneapolis, and a first-floor and skyway cafe in the Capella Tower in downtown Minneapolis.
