Caribou Coffee exists because of a jealous neighbor. In the early 1990s John Puckett, a Bain & Company consultant in Boston, and his wife Kim decided on a trip to Alaska’s Denali National Park to start a coffee company. The plan was pure efficiency: a weekday-only shop serving downtown office workers. Kim kept her job at General Motors to fund it while John signed a lease in the Pillsbury Center in Minneapolis. Then another tenant with a coffee exclusivity clause threatened to sue, the landlord backed out, and the bank financing tied to that location vanished. Puckett opened instead in suburban Edina, Minnesota, in December 1992, building a cozy Alaskan cabin destination with stone fireplaces.

Growth brought Dartmouth roommate Kent Parker in by 1994, then trouble by 2003 when sales growth turned negative. CEO Michael J. Coles pushed expansion to 337 stores and a 2005 NASDAQ listing under CBOU, after a 2002 boycott over majority owner Arcapita, formerly First Islamic Investment Bank, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s seat on its Sharia board. In December 2012 JAB Holding bought Caribou for $340 million, then closed 80 stores and converted 88 others into Peet’s Coffee & Tea. In August 2021 Caribou, Panera Bread, and Einstein Bros Bagels merged into Panera Brands.

• Al-Qaradawi stepped down from the bank’s Sharia board in 2002, the same year the protests began.
• The 2013 closures hit Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia.
• A 2018 data breach exposed card numbers and CVV codes and also reached Bruegger’s and Einstein Bros through shared systems.
• Panera Brands filed to go public in November 2021.
• By 2024 Caribou had over 800 locations, with nearly 300 franchised outlets from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Morocco and Bosnia and Herzegovina.