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Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Gerald Baldwin: Reflections on the Rise of New Coffee Culture

Interviews conducted by Heather Nelson in 2008

Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Gerald Baldwin dated October 7, 2016. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Gerald Baldwin, “Gerald Baldwin: Reflections on the Rise of a New Coffee Culture” conducted by Heather Nelson in 2007, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2016.

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Gerald Baldwin iv

Gerald Baldwin is a founder of Starbucks and former owner of Peet’s Coffee and Tea. In this brief, student conducted-interview, Baldwin reflects on the emergence of a new coffee culture in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s and two of the most important chains that spread that culture across the country and around the world. v

Table of Contents—Gerald Baldwin

Interview 1: December 6, 2007

Audio File 1

Hour 1 1

Birth in San Francisco, childhood in the East Bay and Marin County — Sparse memories of food culture in the home — Mother’s French-Canadian background — Early immigrants and later cultural impact — College of University of San Francisco in an era of little indigenous American food culture: “It was really European derived” — 1966 ushered in an era of change in the Bay Area, especially Berkeley — Learning to cook in college, shopping at Petrini Foods — Post WWII advent of supermarkets and large household refrigerators: “fresh wasn’t part of the conversation” — Aside on the anatomy of tasting tea — Farming industry and technology changes: increasing efficiency, consolidation, fewer American farmers — Growth and decreasing price of processed foods, Americans prioritize other spending over fresh food — Comparing Seattle and the Bay Area — Pikes Place Market changes as farms are pushed further out of the city — Alfred Peet: background in Europe, learning to roast and sell tea, move to San Francisco in 1955 or 1956 — Work for Freed Teller and Freed, opening coffee shops in Berkeley and San Francisco starting in 1966 — Meeting Peet in 1970, learning to roast coffee from him — Deep vs dark roast, European influences give way to an “indigenous sense of quality and sourcing” — UC Davis’s influence on California wine — Peet’s unique approach to coffee and tea — Changes in American coffee production, quality, and popularity — Changes in produce distribution drive changes in end product — Food prices, prioritizing purchase of consumer goods over high quality food — Comparing Peet’s and Starbucks — Simple beginnings selling beans and cups of drip coffee give way to complicated drinks menus — Home consumption and beans sales — Blending coffee for price and flavor — Searching the world for good coffee: geography, climate, and altitude

Hour 2 18

Changes at Starbucks after Howard Schultz’s arrival in 1982: increase in beverage sales, growth from regional to global — The original Peet’s on Vine and Walnut in Berkeley — Starbucks as a “third place”: “it evolved, it wasn’t part of what happened early on” — The rise of to-go beverages and culture — Increasing portion sizes, 20 ounce lattes: “I haven’t drunk that much milk in the last two years! It lasts forever. People are drinking them till they’re cold.” — Defining terroir — Amy Trubek’s 2004 Gastronomica article “Incorporating Terroir” — American, French, and Italian notions of terroir: “New-Worlders in general, we are the inheritors of the genes of adventurers, people who sought change.” — Global, a-seasonal food availability has transformed modern eating — Designing the interior of Starbucks — Business growth and the idea that if a business isn’t vi growing it’s dying — Keeping core values intact but remaining flexible — Cultivating a respectful and diverse work culture — Increasing business size enabled access to higher quality raw materials — Evolving views on profit: “when we were profitable, we had a lot more to share” — Embracing the positive aspects of change and compromise — Favorite Peet’s blends — White tea, green tea, and brewing technique

Interview with Gerald Baldwin

Interview date: December 6, 2007 Begin Audio File 1

1-00:00:00 Nelson: Hi. My name Heather Nelson. I am an undergraduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. Today’s date is December 6th, 2007 and seated with me is Starbucks co-founder Gerald Baldwin. This interview is being conducted at Peet’s Headquarters in Emeryville, California. So, first of all, I’d like to thank you for agreeing to meet with me and conduct this interview. I know you have a very busy schedule so, I really appreciate it. I want to start more generally just about your growing up and the influences that you experienced in the early part of your life, and then, kind of zero in on some of the more particulars about your involvement in Peet’s and Starbucks, and then hopefully by the end, find some aspect of Bay Area terroir in relation to coffee, tea, and business. So, tell me about your background a little bit, where you grew up, where you went to college, any early experiences you had with coffee or tea. Anything you found interesting out of those questions, we can start on.

1-00:01:05 Baldwin: Well, I was born in San Francisco, grew up principally in the East Bay, and Marin; spent two of my pre-college years outside of Northern California, so, I’m a Northern Californian. There wasn’t much about food in my upbringing. Although I was interested in food, I started my first cooking, experimenting when I was about 11, or something like that. Don’t remember much about coffee and tea, except that my parents switched from coffee to tea when I was in high school. As I recall, it was tea bags, and I have no recollection of the coffee at all. My mother is a French-Canadian, so her father, my grandfather, wasn’t what we think of as modern-day French, preoccupied with food at all. My grandmother was a decent cook. I have no recollection of my mother’s cooking at all. [laughter]

Nelson: Must not have been that memorable, I guess. [laughter]

Baldwin: I don’t think it was. I mean I don’t think it was awful, but I don’t think it was particularly good. But my family on both sides has been in North America since the 1600s. So I have no recent immigrant experience at all. One of my theories about American food, and why we really, until this generation, have lacked a food culture is that immigrants were all poor people. If you had land, or money, or even, for that matter, a good job, you would stay in the Old Country. But people who came here came for opportunity, or for a religious freedom, and that was freedom to practice a more strict form of religion, typically, not a more liberal form of religion, which I think heavily influences our culture.

1-00:03:10 Nelson: That’s interesting that you talk about the immigrant cultures, and the kind of food influences they brought to the U.S. I think we covered a lot of that in the class, and there was one article that we read about how hot dogs, which people now think of as very American, like you bring it to a baseball game, it’s the most American kind of food next to hamburgers. And we were talking about how it was actually a Germanic food, brought over by poor people, and kind of got indoctrinated into our culture and all that, so that’s an interesting topic that you brought up. So, you did grow up in San Francisco, so you’re whole life has been based in California.

Baldwin: Yeah, I spent several years in Oakland, a couple in Alameda, and Marin County, so, I kind of circled the Bay.

Nelson: So you can talk a lot about how the Bay Area has changed in terms of food culture and drink culture and, having lived here for most of your life, you have a really solid base, we can talk about some of those. So, let’s see. The reason that I wanted to ask you about your family, and if coffee and tea was a big part of that experience was because, for me, I grew up in a family where we always had tea at 4:00 every day. My family is from Canada, and you know, the British influence, and so we always had tea at 4:00, and that was a big part of how I grew up and our traditions, and kind of defining how I think of coffee and tea today, and where I shop for coffee and tea and all that. So, I think that early family influences are really important in defining who you are later in life and what you go into. What are some significant aspects of your young life and college years that led you into the tea and coffee business with Starbucks, or where there any?

1-00:05:15 Baldwin: Well, there were food influences; I don’t know that they led me into business, but, I went to the University of San Francisco and there was no American food culture then; it was really European derived. All the good restaurants were French or Italian, or Chinese, a few Japanese, the occasional Indian. That’s really about it. All of the European ones were, especially the French ones, kind of what I call “butter palaces.” The haute-cuisine is quite different from the food from Ile de France, from Paris, are quite a bit different from the south, and this was just getting going. There were very few people interested in it. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Food of France, Waverly Root wrote it, he was a journalist in the 60s, now dead. But wrote that, The Food of France and The Food of Italy, boy, when were they published? I want to say 60s. And he divided France into three segments based on which cooking fat they used: butter, animal fat, or olive oil. So, at the time there wasn’t much here, and I think that the reason that Berkeley was the revolution, instead of San Francisco, and instead of New York, or Los Angeles, is that, because of the University, because people are well-traveled, and because they were accepting of new things. People in San Francisco weren’t looking for anything new, or New York, because they felt they already had great food, great

restaurants, you know “Paris of the West,” all of this stuff. You talk about a sense of place, I think that the food revolution started in Berkeley partly because of those acceptances, partly because Alfred P., partly because of Alice Waters, and predecessors, Darrel Corti, for example. And in 1966, when Peet’s was founded, was also the year that Robert Mondavi started the Robert Mondavi Winery. It’s also the year The Bay Guardian started. There were a lot of things changing in the Bay Area at that time.

1-00:07:55 Nelson: Can I stop you just a moment, and can you go back to The Bay Guardian, and kind of explain how that was important in this—?

Baldwin: Well, I don’t think it was important to food, but it was important that the life in the Bay Area was changing. I mean, the 60s are sort of a code word for lots of different things. But The Bay Guardian, what it wasn’t was The Chronicle, or The Examiner, or The Call Bulletin. But it had a distinctly different point of view.

Nelson: I see, and that was a part of this whole changing Berkeley. I had a few other questions, but I want to skip to this part about California Cuisine, and the kind of California, slash Berkeley, slash U.S. food revolution. We read this book in our class called The United States of Arugula: The Sun Dried, Cold-Pressed, Dark Roasted, Extra-virgin Story of the American Food Revolution. It’s actually a great book; it really kind of covers everything. But it describes the kind of historical, cultural, political, and economic history of food in the United States, and how it changed from beginning in the 40s, until about now. He goes a lot into the inevitable relationship between media, big business and food, and how all those different entities interacted in a way that brought about this California Cuisine, California food style. So, I want to ask you if you could speak a little about the role of Peet’s, and even Starbucks, and this new way of thinking about food and drink that parallels back to the—

Baldwin: Okay, let me back up two decades, and go back to the University of San Francisco where there was a market two blocks from the various apartments I lived in called “Petrini Foods,” a family owned, Italian grocery, where real- live people were standing behind the meat counter. There was a wine shop in it, and you could get good produce. But, you could talk to the butcher, and say “Well how do we cook this?” and they actually cooked, and they had some advice. So, when we could afford it, that’s where we shopped. You know we were paying $2.00 a bottle for Bordeaux, [laughter], and so that was the beginning of it. You know, I was the family cook because I had a job, and the family, typically two or three roommates, and I’d cook, they’d shop. So, early in the 60s, I can recall an argument with a roommate who had grown up in the Central Valley who insisted that canned vegetables were better than frozen vegetables. But the most interesting thing to me is not which of those is correct, although it was easy, is that fresh wasn’t part of the discussion.

Nelson: That is very interesting.

Baldwin: Yeah, so that was what was going on in American food that I saw was heavily influenced by what happened at the end of World War II, or in the late 40s, when supermarkets started up. So, that really changed food. So, there wasn’t the corner grocery store, which we now see as convenience stores, and American refrigerators got bigger and bigger, and fewer and fewer trips to the store. So, instead of the urban European, London, for example, or Paris, where refrigerators are tiny, and you go shopping every day. So, you know I have to re-read United States of Arugula and try to get David Kamp’s reasoned argument from that, because when you said media, what popped into my mind were full page ads in Look or Life or The Saturday Evening Post with, you know, the house wife who was always in a dress, always had an apron on, and always had high heels on, cooking—

Nelson: Food prepared for the husband when they got home—

Baldwin: Exactly. I don’t if I, about the big business part, to some extent, think that’s true. Partly probably defined by our geography, that it’s a big country. Succeeding generations have pushed the farms further and further away from cities. I mean, now they’re in other countries.

Nelson: And farming makes up such a small percentage of people’s occupations and land use, now that it’s—

Baldwin: In 1900, roughly 50 percent of the people were occupied in the food chain.

Nelson: And now it’s—?

Baldwin: Two and a half or something.

Nelson: It’s less. I think, I almost feel that it was less than 2%, just a tiny, tiny amount, which is hard to imagine.

1-00:13:22 Baldwin: Taste your tea it’s getting cool.

Nelson: I am. I’ve been trying to sip it along the way.

Baldwin: So, the acidity you get right on the sides of your tongue, and then you notice what’s happening to your gums. There’s a sensation of tightening or something like that. That’s astringency. And then you can also feel that on top of your tongue, there’s a sort of dryness. And the right up on top, along the side, is where you’re sensing the tannins.

Nelson: You say right up on the top?

Baldwin: [drawing, sketching noises]. Well, this is a cross-section, and here’s a plan, so you do all the tasting along the sides and at the tip. But, there’s other sensations that are taking place up in here, and that’s where I’m getting tannins. You’d get acidity back here, and saltiness, and so on. And then you get sort of a mouth-feel thing so-called the “sixth sense,” umami, the Japanese term. But, those are the tannins, and you get that sort of dryness, and if you like, the harder edge to it.

Nelson: Interesting. I never thought about that when drinking tea. Like, which part of your mouth you actually feel and taste it.

Baldwin: Well, a lot of people don’t, you know you really only have taste buds on the sides. A lot people just go down-the-hatch. So, they don’t really taste what’s going on, and tea as complex as this, I’m sorry about the paper cup. So, I want to keep that going, through that, and into your question, but you’ll have to remind me—

1-00:15:24 Nelson: Sure. We were talking about the role of—

Baldwin: —media and big business. Okay, so well what has happened certainly is that farms have consolidated. Family farms are kind of gone and larger operators who could do it more efficiently. One of the things that it may be a result of how poor the people who came to America are, but when it comes to food, we’re really cheap. And, Europeans spend more than twice their percentage of income on food as we do whether they are poor or rich. And, so you end up with what Michael Pollan observed in Omnivores’ Dilemma is that all the calories, all the cheap calories, are in the center of the store and they’re all packaged and processed. Used to be a lot of sodium, you see quite a bit less of that now. But the fresh edge of the supermarket: produce, meat, so on, is much more expensive. But you look at our consumer society, with Costco and Circuit City, and all the rest of the stuff. I mean every family, poor or not, has got a flat-screen TV. Well, not every family, but many, and they’re much more concerned about TV and Nintendo games, than they are a good meal.

1-00:16:52 Nelson: About organic food and fresh food and—

Baldwin: How ‘bout just real food! [laughter]

Nelson: That’s actually very interesting because as a college student, you really see— obviously college students don’t have a lot of money—how people complain about how Whole Foods is too expensive and they can’t afford to buy organic because it’s just “ne ne ne.” And you know, they seem to think that spending more money on fresh produce is just not something that they can do. It’s interesting because we do spend a lot of money on other things, like cars and the newest gadgets, so it shows a real priority. And I think in Europe, that’s

pretty different. I traveled to France for a summer, and food was just so essential to who they are.

Baldwin: Less and less so, unfortunately. You know, obesity is becoming a problem in France.

Nelson: I think that’s probably an American influence.

Baldwin: Well, you know more fast food. But it’s interesting to see them adopting it. And when you get outside the city, which is very expensive to live in, and get into the ‘burbs, you see—well, they invented the “hyper-marché,” the Costco, that has food and everything else—so you do unfortunately see larger markets, more packaged foods. But anyway, let’s concentrate on the Bay Area. We got a revolution going here.

Nelson: Yeah, get back to that. So let’s see, I want to move onto my next question.

Baldwin: Well, let me say one more thing about the Bay Area, and that is that because of the climate, we can grow food close by; we can grow wine, and we can grow cooking oil, and those are the things that make up the basis of a cuisine.

1-00:18:43 Nelson: That’s a very interesting point, very interesting. Yeah, I think climate plays a huge role in the Bay Area, especially because we have the option of growing something locally, and then being able to eat it fresh. You know, that’s not always an option in other places in the U.S., and my mom never had fresh vegetables, because she lived up in Canada. It’s just not an option. And I grew up thinking that, fresh green beans from my back yard, that was just how it was, and that’s how everyone lives. So, I can definitely attest to that kind of California upbringing.

Baldwin: Well, consider how the North American natives had a hunter-gatherer, not nomadic, not agricultural-based, pastoralist, kept moving. But South American Indians and North American Indians had no food crops native to North America. All the stuff that came from the New World: tomatoes, potatoes, corn, all that came from South America. And, from Mexico, the Aztecs, Incas in Peru, had these very complex, but static, cultures because they had agriculture, and North Americans didn’t. But, it just changed the whole culture. That to me is one of the most fascinating aspects.

Nelson: That is actually really interesting. Anyway, we want to get on. So this is kind of, moving away from the Bay Area, but still the same kind of idea, I’m wondering about, you obviously started Starbucks, in 1971 – I’m sorry, is that the correct date for that?

Baldwin: That’s when we opened yeah. We began the work in ’70.

Nelson: Right, in Seattle. And I wanted to ask you, I kind of see Seattle – we used to travel there quite a bit, for spring breaks and all that – and I kind of see Seattle as kind of the other, this might be going a little far, but kind of the other Berkeley. You know, that’s taking it a little bit far. But kind of, a space where the same kind of ideas about food and drink were kind of happening. Like Pike Place Market, fresh seasonal produce; you go into this outdoor market, you meet with the fish throwers. And, like you were saying with that Italian corner shop, you kind of talk to everyone and it’s this very kind of French, outdoor market kind of feel. So, I wanted to ask you how Seattle is either the same or different from the Bay Area, in terms of, you know, food, and drink, and seasonal produce, and things like that.

1-00:21:38 Baldwin: Well, you know it’s a good question why the Beer Revolution had a substantial foot-hold in Seattle: Redhook, and Grants, then Portland got involved in that, as well. And Sam Adams started in the east coast, but they didn’t actually brew their own beer, and still don’t. The Artisan Movement was really a west coast brewing movement. Wines here, you know, coming after the mid-60s, there’s been wines growing in California since—well there were more grapes growing in Sonoma County before prohibition than there are now. That’s hard to believe, because you look around. And, I don’t know. Seattle is definitely a west coast place. But, when I moved up there in the late- 60s, it was significantly smaller as an urban area. And there were only a couple of decent restaurants, and the Public Market was on the verge of being torn down in the late 60s.

Nelson: Why was that?

Baldwin: Urban renewal. “Get rid of this blight.” No, and many people, the most notable is Richard Steinberg, an architect who started Friends of the Market, who started a movement that saved it, and renewed it, and kept it. Although I’d argue that California farmers markets today are better than the Pike Place market, which has been kind taken over in a way by static merchants, rather than farmers who are trucking in. Partly because they’ve been pushed so far out.

1-00:23:18 Nelson: Can you define static?

Baldwin: Well, a merchant who is not growing it. Static’s probably the wrong word, but, a merchant of produce, rather than a grower and seller of produce. So, it’s always called a Farmer’s market, but there aren’t actually any of the farmers there. I don’t spend much time in Seattle anymore, but from what I understand, there’s like one Wednesday, the local, organic farmers come in.

Nelson: Interesting, because you always just think of it as just like, you know, farmer to consumer, every day.

Baldwin: Most of it comes from whole-sellers. And when I lived there, we never bought fish in the market. That was for tourists. It just wasn’t for us. There were lots of fresher sources of fish. Down in Joe’s Meat Market was good. And if you shopped carefully, you could get produce, especially seasonal stuff. But, I don’t know the answer to Seattle. The reason we started Starbucks there was because that’s where we lived when we got the idea.

1-00:24:29 Nelson: Wasn’t specially chosen for that. Let’s see.

Baldwin: Exactly. Well, Peet’s was. Alfred lived in San Francisco then, and he checked out the west coast for possibilities and he found this place in Berkeley, and this friend of his said, “this is the place,” and she was right.

Nelson: Definitely. She was right about that. I want to talk about Alfred Peet and Peet’s coffee and how you got involved with them. First of all, can you just kind of give an overview of who Alfred Peet is, and how his shop in Berkeley got started and just kind of background information just so we can move on from there?

Baldwin: Well, he was born in Holland, a little village and a little peninsula that sticks out into the North Sea, Alkmaar. And was captured during World War One, he was in his late teens; he was born in 1920. So, I guess middle teens, and then, he was made a machinist and sent to Frankfurt to be a machinist for the German War Machine, about which he had a sense of humor, he said that he helped Hitler. [laughter] After the war, his father was a coffee roaster; his uncle I think was an importer. But, Alfred then moved to London and took tea training from Lipton, and then moved to Indonesia. I mean Lipton used to be a good tea company. I haven’t had a cup of Lipton for a long time. So, he moved to Indonesia, from there, he went to New Zealand, and from there he came to the U.S. where he arrived in ’55 or ’56. Then, did a lot of odd jobs, until he got another job in the trade, traffic for coffee, EA Johnson. Then, he left there, and became a roaster and worked for Freed Teller and Freed, which was the one San Francisco, in fact, I think the only west coast company that survived the depression, was a coffee roaster and shop.

1-00:26:55 Nelson: So, they sold just coffee beans, or—

Baldwin: I don’t know if they sold tea or not, I don’t recall. But, they folded up ten years ago, or something like that. Funny story: they had been a family business and passed down, but the guy that was running it, his mother won the lottery, and they closed the store. It was work; I mean the neighborhood was right on Polk Street in San Francisco, and it was a pretty tough neighborhood. So then Peet’s wanted to start his own; he thought it would be successful here. But, he wasn’t starting in food revolution, he was just starting a business that he knew how to do. So, he got a roaster, and he certainly knew tea, and started

importing tea, started in Berkeley. Opened his second store in ’71, Menlo Park, and his third store in ’78 in Oakland. Sold the business in ’79, and remained on as a consultant for four years, and then, that was just about the time that we were buying the company; we brought him back for a year. I met him in 1970 when we were starting Starbucks, and each year the co-founders worked at the Vine Street store, and he let us observe, get behind the counter, trouble with coffee, and later on, he supplied us with roasted coffee. Then in ’72, when we were getting ready to roast, he helped us get the roaster and taught me how to roast.

1-00:28:47 Nelson: And I wanted to ask you about dark roasted coffee, because this is kind of the Peet’s coffee, the Peet’s brand of coffee. What exactly does that mean? Like dark roasted, how is that different from other coffees?

Baldwin: Well we call it “deep,” not “dark.” And the distinction is intended to talk about taste. Because you know, up until really the ‘80s, most of the coffee in the east was darker than the coffee in the west.

Nelson: And why was that?

Baldwin: Tradition. Most of the Italians who came here were from the south of Italy, and roasts in southern Italy are darker. Now the French, even up to the 30s roasted coffee in the streets, with little hibachi things. And that’s probably how French Roast got its name, was just you know, overcooking it. One of the things that happened in food until not all that long ago, was that we looked for credibility from Europe—all these French words, Italian words—so what I think we have been successful in doing in my generation is establishing an indigenous sense of quality and sourcing, and something legitimate in its own right that doesn’t need validation from Europe. And, in fact, what’s happened in both wine and coffee is that Europeans are now coming to the States, so they can restore their businesses.

9-00:30:36

Nelson: Right, especially in terms of wine, I think, that’s a big thing, because of Napa and of Sonoma—

Baldwin: Well, the University of California [at Davis], more than anything, which brought a couple of things. One is a more disciplined approach to winemaking, where tradition got mixed with science. And a more disciplined approach to vineyard management, and there are still significant differences. You can’t irrigate in France, they’re only beginning to in a couple of places in Italy. But here, nearly all, we produce much more consistent fruit.

1-00:31:19 Nelson: So I want to get back quickly to Peet’s – to Alfred Peet– and ask you what was different about the way Peet’s was making coffee and tea?

Baldwin: I don’t know why he picked that roast, actually, because there’s nothing in his tradition that would have done that; I think that he developed it over time, it certainly was darker than others, and over the years, I think it got darker and lighter, and darker and lighter, even with him. But, the way we talk about it, the way he talked about it, was developing full flavors. I mean, we can spend a couple of hours looking at green coffee beans, and looking at roasted coffee beans, and all of this, but when you apply the heat in a particular way over a particular period of time, you’re developing flavor, body, in our case muting acidity, but what we avoid what most other dark-roast people do is we only caramelize the sugars, polysaccharides, rather than carbonize. And if you were to take a sample of all the French roasts around, and taste them, some would be distinctly burned, carbon-y, and if you taste ours, and all of our lighter roasts, you’d get a full flavor from browning. I mean, the reason we brown meat is for the browning taste, and it’s the same kind of Maillard reaction that affects coffee roasting.

Nelson: So, I kind of think of Peet’s coffee as kind of a specialty coffee; I mean, if we go back to before Peet’s started his coffee shop and we had this whole idea of deep roasts and all that, and America I think was drinking pretty bad coffee, like Maxwell House, and Folgers, and all those kinds of coffees that were pretty much just dirt water, for the most part. I mean, do you have a different opinion about that?

Baldwin: Well not then, but Angelo Pellegrini, whom you may not know, but I think he wrote the forward to Alice Water’s first book; he was an immigrant who came in the early part of the 20th-century to the Northwest. He taught English at the University of Washington and wrote about food, grew a big garden, made wine every year, although he’s now dead. But he talked about how good coffee was in the early part of the century in the United States. And it actually was pretty good, arguably until the 1950s when there was a big frost in Brazil in ’54 and then notoriously cheap Americans didn’t want to pay more for coffee, so Maxwell House, the first, started to put Robusta coffee in the blend to keep the cost down, and that was kind of the beginning of the end. The coffee drinking peaked in 1962; 75% of American adults drank coffee daily.

1-00:34:39 Nelson: Do you have any idea of why that was and why that happened at that time?

Baldwin: Well I think that a couple of things happened. One was the War; people were drinking a lot of coffee then. And then after the war, everybody came home and people could afford it; they drank coffee and it was pretty good. Prices might have been historically low at that point as well. Then, there are various things started chipping away at it. I think that quality started chipping away from ’54 on. And then health concerns; they really didn’t get rolling until the ‘70s and ‘80s. They all turned out to be bogus. I mean now it’s health food. And then competition from other beverages; you know we take in so much liquid, as you’re drinking three Cokes [laughter].

Nelson: I guess what I was trying to get at before was that I feel like Peet’s has a specific image as kind of a high-quality, boutique almost, kind of coffee and tea. And that these other brands weren’t necessarily bad coffee, but that they didn’t have that same image, and that it was very corporate, and Peet’s it seems like was a very kind of regional, local specialty coffee with this loyal following, you know Peet’s-nicks and all that, and just a kind of a different image and I’m wondering how that kind of got started.

Baldwin: I don’t think image had very much to do with it. I think that other qualities did, that Folgers got sold in ’63 to Proctor and Campbell, and the competition in American coffee was really stiff – all the regional roasters just started folding up. But I mean there were still some left in the ‘70s, but there were very few.

Nelson: And this is in the ‘60s you’re talking about, right?

Baldwin: Yeah. At one time General Foods, which was the owner of Maxwell House, had 50% of the American coffee business in supermarkets. Now, Maxwell House itself is down around 20, I think, and Folgers is about 27, but they are consistently losing share to specialty coffee and I think it was more about quality and taste and acceptance of a new generation; it’s not that, you know, my father was looking for good coffee. He’d been drinking the same stuff all the time, and it just kept going. But, one of the things that interests me is how in a culture, how at a time, even in the world, that several different people get the same idea. It’s not that one prompts the other; I mean, you can see this in art, too; at the same time, artists were challenging strict representational art, which led to the Expressionists, and German Expressionists, and people thinking of Kandinsky, Malevich in Russia, somebody else in France at the time, but exactly the same time. You know they couldn’t have been talking to each other, but they all started to come at the same thing. And I think that happened in food too: “enough of this bad stuff.” You know we start to cook; we start to shop, to look for sources. Julia Child, early 60s. The gourmet section of a supermarket would fit on that wall, and that is not an exaggeration, and it was all crackers and mustard; we want food!

Nelson: And you’re talking about pre-1960s, this is how it was you’re saying –

1-00:38:44 Baldwin: Yeah, I’m thinking of that as late 60s, into the 70s.

Nelson: Oh really. Wow. That’s hard to imagine, I mean, I’m sorry go ahead.

Baldwin: No, you talk too. You know both the hot recipes of the generation that precedes me, I mean one that really sticks in my mind was one of its names was “heavenly beans”; it started out to be canned, and then it became frozen green beans with cream of mushroom soup poured over the top and a can of shoestring potatoes sprinkled over the top and then baked. I mean it is –

[laughter] – you would gag! But I had that served to me; I mean, you know, not in 30 years, but.

Nelson: Luckily, right? Not too sad to see that go. If we go on that premise that there was this point before where just the idea of fresh seasonal foods that were grown locally was not something that people had even thought of really, that hadn’t even occurred to them, and then, looking at where we are now—I mean, I might just be in a Berkeley bubble—but Safeway now has an Organic Section where they have organic produce and dairy and all that now, and farmers markets. Where I lived, there was one in every city, on the weekends and that kind of thing—

Baldwin: Where is this?

Nelson: I live in, I used to live in San Carlos, and there was one in Arrow City and Belmont, and Palo Alto so I’m kind of wondering how you think we got from Point A to B, and tying that into coffee, what’s kind of the process for how that happened?

1-00:40:41 Baldwin: Over the last 40 years? Well, coffee is an element in it; you know, wine is an element, restaurants are. And then people starting rejecting what was happening. You know there are only like, accepting the small number of heirloom varieties, planning there were only four clones of corn grown in the United States, or something like that. And fruit has been altered to fit the distribution system, because now the farms are further away. So one of the big breakthroughs in engineering was people kept trying to develop equipment that would handle tomatoes, because they’re so tender. So what they did is they changed the tomato, so it’s as hard as a baseball so it would take handling. Peaches, Epitaferra peach, so there’s a second or third generation farmer in Central Valley who had to pull out his sun crust peaches because they just won’t make it to market, because the market is too far, you got to pick them too early, they’re destroyed. And now if you go through even Whole Foods, you can pick up these baseballs; they’re never going to get ripe, they’re never be soft, they’re never going to be aromatic, but with chosen varieties, I mean why are all the apples – there are 12000 varieties of apples named! 12000! If you walk through, now you can find five, you used to be able to find Red Delicious and Golden Delicious. When I was a kid, that was about it! On the East Coast, you know Macintosh and a Rome Beauty, and few others, but there weren’t many. So I think lots of farmers, people back to the land, the hippies in the 70s will move to the farm and get a commune, and then: “We don’t have any money so we better grow some food,” and so on. You know all of these little threads getting pulled together, but you have to be affluent to shop in a farmer’s market. I mean I go to Ferry Plaza when I’m in San Francisco on the weekends, $4.50, two peaches.

Nelson: I feel like there’s almost a lifestyle, and an income attached to specialty, or boutique, or farmers’ market produce and foods, that it has not really penetrated all sectors of society at all, and I mean it comes to plain economics, I think, that people just can’t afford to spend that much on food.

Baldwin: Well they say they can’t.

Nelson: Yeah, they say they can’t, but I feel like there’s some truth to that.

1-00:43:34 Baldwin: Well, I mean this might be part of David Kamp’s argument, but advertising really changed, advertising and affluence, so that if you look at more primitive economies—I spent a lot of time in Africa and the Third World—and they all want cars and, after television, everybody wants the consumer stuff, like instead of more traditional things, like better food, they want a TV, they want a car. I mean it’s unbelievable, where was I, in the middle of Ethiopia, I mean we were in the boonies, and people were buying generators, and televisions, and satellite dishes; they have dirt floors: mind-boggling to me.

Nelson: That is mind-boggling, and you always hear about just the pervasiveness of the American culture and consumerism around the world, and that’s a really startling example of that.

Baldwin: Yeah and I think if we go through the people who say they can’t afford it, you know there’s some really poor people, but people who have some level of disposable income, you know, probably have gone through a couple of TVs since I bought my last one 15 years ago, and they aspire to cars, car payment, you know, they buy crappy clothes, and crappy food, so they can drive a decent car.

1-00:45:19 Nelson: Actually, sorry, I want to get back to this quickly, because I want to get to certain parts of this before it’s too late. I wanted to kind of compare Peet’s and Starbucks. To me, Peet’s seems more like a coffee and tea retailer, as opposed to a store that sells beverages, for immediate consumption. I think that you mentioned that before, that that’s what you’re into, as opposed to Frappuccinos and all those kinds of things. And according to some of the research I’ve done, Peet’s is still very much based in California, there’s like 96 stores in California, and there’s few in other metropolitan areas on the west coast and on the east coast, but it’s still primarily a California-based company. So, can you speak a little bit about this difference between – and Starbucks, on the other hand, it’s global; there’s like 7000 stores all over the world, in small areas, in small countries that you would never expect to see a Starbucks. So, can you speak a little bit about this difference, and what it means?

Baldwin: Well when we started Starbucks, we based it completely on Peet’s, and it was, and we opened at 10:00 and closed at 6:00. Now, after we sold Starbucks, and

the new group really was interested in beverages, you know, sort of the germ of an idea was an Italian coffee bar.

Nelson: And that was Howard Schultz that was—?

1-00:47:05 Baldwin: Right. And, but Peet’s always has served coffee, I mean, there was always a bar, it was drip-coffee. The first espresso machine didn’t go in until ’84, which we put in, and gradually stores remodeled, we added beverages. So the beverage was always a part of it, and what has happened is that people who used to go to the pie shop or the doughnut shop, or the diner for a cup of coffee, now all those cups of coffee come to the coffee store where they’ll get these other things. There used to chains like Heppler’s Bakery in San Francisco, for example, and there were doughnut shops all over the place.

Nelson: More like Mom and Pop, kind of smaller—

Baldwin: Exactly. Well, these “diners” at a corner, I mean now there are only these replicas, like Mel’s or something.

Nelson: Johnny Rocket’s.

Baldwin: Yes, exactly, and they would be smaller than some of the smaller Johnny Rocket’s, but you’d go in, you’d sit at the counter, you’d have a cup of coffee and a piece of pie or a doughnut.

Nelson: It’s hard to even imagine that now. I haven’t seen a real diner my entire life pretty much.

Baldwin: Yeah, those are all gone. So, those cups just came to the coffee store, so it makes it seem like there’s this gigantic revolution going on, but in fact, we just changed retailers, because the consumption is only now starting to come up. I mean now about 52%, I’ll have to check with the National Coffee Association, but it’s probably about 52% are daily drinkers, and then another 25 or so percent drink coffee occasionally. So, it’s really changed. The way it’s changed is just where you get the coffee; it’s not so much that consumption is rising. Dollar value has gone up hugely, from a quarter for a cup of coffee, which is what it used to be at Peet’s.

Nelson: Oh really?

Baldwin: Yeah, a cup of dirt coffee was a quarter in, say, 1970. And, at Peet’s it cost a quarter, you could get half and half, and you could get sugar.

Nelson: All included.

Baldwin: No, no, that’s it, that’s all you could get.

Nelson: And you couldn’t buy like a little scone or any kind of additional, is that what you’re saying?

Baldwin: Well, there was one coffee cake. But you know now, you can get saccharine, NutraSweet, aspartame, there’s probably Splenda now too in the store, although I wouldn’t pay any attention to it, I mean we have more kinds of milk than we have coffee. You know, soy milk, nonfat [laughter], 2%, whole milk—

1-00:50:05 Nelson: And now you get this kind of idea, where people go into Starbucks and order these, you know, “I want the blahblahblah coffee, with no dadadada,” They have these hugely long, specific lists of everything they don’t want, and how they want it made, and dah dah dah dah dah.

Baldwin: Well there are really different businesses, there’s the drink business, beverages are exactly that. It’s sort of customized for the individual costumer. The bean business, we drive that. Experts in the tasting room, where they’re saying “Yes, this tastes good. No, this isn’t good enough, get rid of this. Let’s roast it this way,” And then we push that out, the customers either take it or don’t; of course, they do. But that was always our point of view, was we’re grocers. I mean, it’s quite different now, and you kind of have to give the customers what they want. You can’t say, “yeah well you can come to my store, but you can’t have that [inaudible] you say, no nonfat milk; it tastes awful.” But a steamed nonfat milk is awful tasting. But you know, got to Los Gatos in the late 80s, and it was just nonfat milk.

Nelson: They wanted it! When you said that you were the grocer, and you went out and did tastings and you find the right kind of beans, and the right kinds of tea leaves and all that; it’s kind of comparable to Alice Waters when she was starting Chez Panisse, she had someone called “the forager,” who would go out that day and find all the fresh produce, and the fresh this and then that, and come back, and they would compose a menu off of what that forager got. Can you talk about what exactly your job is when you go out—is it comparable to that, like you’re going out and you’re trying to find the best and then bringing it back into the store—can you just talk about that?

1-00:52:14 Baldwin: Yeah I don’t think foraging – I don’t know what year it started, but I don’t think it started in ’71; I think that it came later, to look for things.

Nelson: I’m just interested in your role in the home consumption. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it’s different from the beverage area?

Baldwin: Well, the home consumption is what drives this company. I mean we also now sell through supermarkets as well, and that business is larger than our beverage business for sure. Although, if we keep opening stores, the beverage business will be larger as it is with Starbucks. It’s not exactly foraging. One of

the things that’s very complicated about coffee is that most coffee is blended. A lot of commercial coffee is blended for reasons of cost; in our case it’s for reasons of taste.

Nelson: And blended means—

Baldwin: Coffees from different origins put together. For example, we might get coffee from New Guinea, coffee from Guatemala, coffee from Costa Rica, and coffee from East Africa, and put them all together in a blend. That will be greater than its individual parts now; I have friends who will argue with me about that, but never mind. What we have found with our clientele over the years is that they have migrated from single origin coffees to blends, and I think it’s not because of our promotion of it, and it isn’t for price, but it’s because they enjoy the complexity of the flavor more than the usually single-dimension of the single origin. So, that makes coffee quite a bit more complicated than wine. It’s chemically much more complicated. There are 1200 active compounds in coffee. I mean it’s incredibly complicated.

Nelson: That is. So when you go out and look for coffee and making these blends, what do you look for? Where do you go? How does that work really?

1-00:54:31 Baldwin: Coffee has to be grown in the tropics and at some high altitude for it to be any good, so that limits the search to about around 55 or 60 countries, but not all of them have good coffee tradition, so it really starts to narrow down. There have to be a lot of things happening. I mean there are a lot of farmers who’ve never tasted their produce and don’t have a clue what they’re doing; they don’t have the tradition of selling, or excellence, or anything like that. So, when we first started out looking for coffee, we’d go to brokers, we’d say, “Well, what about these different origins: Guatemala, Costa Rica, Columbia, Brazil, you know, Peru, Bolivia, and on and on. And you start tasting the coffees and you put some blends together, you sell them straight, see how you respond. I mean, over the years, we have dropped all the softer, lower-grown, coffees that are grown further north: Caribbean coffees, you know they just don’t hold up for Peet’s. The flavors aren’t really that great. I mean we do Jamaica Blue Mountain at Christmas. Typically, we have not had over the last 15 years any coffee from Mexico because it’s so far north. Kona sort of falls into the Jamaica category, you know, people ask for it so we give it to them in limited quantities, but it’s pretty far north and pretty low to be really good. But, go to Kenya, 5000 feet, the whole Rift Valley is at about 5000 feet, and some incredible coffee is grown at that altitude. Ethiopia is as high as 6000.

Nelson: So coffee needs high altitudes in order to make really good coffee, is that right?

Baldwin: Yeah that’s where the flavor gets developed, is at higher altitudes.

Nelson: And how does that relate to your Deep Roasted?

1-00:57:31 Baldwin: Well higher altitude beans are typically smaller. They are denser and they’ll stand up to our roast, and they often have flavors to develop. I think Guatemala and Costa Rica are running through my mind, but also East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, New Guinea, New Guinea Highlands. But you just keep tasting, but you know things change over time, as re-planning governments take over in Java, the Dutch had planted some plantations there; Indonesia became independent there in the beginning of I think ’48, and they went on and on, yields declined. They replanted them all, but they chose cultivars based on yield. Coffee is nothing like it used to be.

Nelson: Yeah that changed it a lot probably.

Baldwin: You know you can sort of get into – we’re touching on terroir there, but that’s a little more complicated.

Nelson: Actually, we can transition to terroir. I do actually wanted to go back a little bit, before we get to terroir, about Starbucks and its beginnings and how it changed. I feel like there was kind of a change, tell me if I’m wrong, but after Howard Schultz kind of joined in, and he had a very different image of where he wanted Starbucks to go and where you and the other cofounders wanted to go with it. I wanted to actually - Peet’s and Starbucks mentioned in The United States of Arugula in a chapter entitled “The Magic of Thinking Big,” and it mentions Howard Schultz and it says “Even more aggressive was Howard Schultz, a Brooklyn native, who in the early ‘80s had made his living as the U.S. point man for a Swedish houseware manufacturer. He took a job at the Director of Retail Operations for Starbucks, says Jerry Baldwin, whose interests tilted more towards coffee roasting than running cafes, went back to San Francisco, where he had attended college and pilgrimaged over the Bay Bridge to learn at the feet of Alfred Peet’s, himself, to run Peet’s as a regional chain.” The important part of that quote is “regional chain,” and I felt like Howard had more of a big business sense about where he wanted this to go, and beverages offered more of a big business opportunity than just selling coffee beans and coffee equipment. Is that a correct assessment?

1-00:59:41 Baldwin: Well you happened on a pretty important concept there, and that is that we believed in regional food. I mean one point in my lifetime, the beer and the coffee and the breads were different in different regions because of the people who settled there. You went to Chicago, you drink lagers, if you went someone else, you could drink ales. If you went to Milwaukee, you’d get sausage and wurst. But, now who did what to whom is a good question, that’s a book for some business person, not a coffee guy. But people, and I would say that probably media, and business have their part in that for sure because one of the things that we found is that there was less interest in big financial

business in the idea of regional; they wanted national. So, Howard played into that. I mean, Howard, he wasn’t thinking he was going to have 10,000 stores, or 40,000 stores, or whatever the number is right now; I recall talking to him at about 300, and he said, “Well, we’re going to keep going, because it’s successful,” That was important to him. It was important to us to be the best, not the biggest. And, we’re ‘60s West Coast guys, and profit wasn’t even all that important; none of us were thinking about, you know, building wealth or anything like that, we just wanted a job. It was more fun having our own company than working for somebody else. So, to some extent, you know, Howard’s aggressiveness played into that. My idea would be to have all of these regional things, things where they would be slightly different.

1-01:02:08 Nelson: I think globalization plays a big part in that.

Baldwin: Well, just look what happened to Macys. They had, I can’t remember, 20 or 25 brands or something like that. They sold a bunch of them and re-branded all the rest of them: Macys, just to make life easy.

Nelson: Yeah I think some things kind of get lost in that consolidating process. One of the things that really stands out about Peet’s is that it really does feel very local. I’ve often visited the Peet’s on Vine and Walnut and it feels like a real old school – well, it’s changed, but it’s obviously the interior and the aesthetic of the Peet’s coffee shops have changed, and they aren’t the original style—

Baldwin: That one is.

Nelson: Oh really? I heard that the interior was changed to fit the rest of the Peet’s coffee shops, no?

Baldwin: I remodeled that store. We worked as hard as we could to keep it the same. Now, the cabinetry was new, I mean the store had terrible fumes, actually it was dangerous. But, if you walk in the door from the corner, immediately on your left; I mean there are two ways to come in, well actually, there are three doors: there are two of them together at the corner. Coming in either of the doors on the left, directly opposite the coffee bar, is one of the old coffee bins built right into the side, and you can just see exactly what it was.

Nelson: That’s very cool. I thought it had been changed to fit the rest of the aesthetic.

Baldwin: And, it’s not the only store with place to put things up above, but we had specially milled wood to match what was existing, so that all those old coffee makers and all those antiques, so it made the store a little bit larger in two dimensions, so that it stayed the same. I mean the wood was new, and all the weighty 70s oak, which I hated so we changed it to [inaudible].

Nelson: Made a few changes to bring it to the modern aesthetic, to modern days. And actually that brings up another point that I wanted to talk about, about the aesthetic feeling of the coffee shops, because coffee shops have been around for a very long time, dating back to England. And I have a quote that I wanted to bring up about that. And there seems to be at Starbucks, especially, there’s a quote from The Seattle Times article in 2001, and Jeff Parkhurst, who’s inter-brands director of American Brand Evaluation, was quoted in the Seattle Times article saying, “With Starbucks, there’s more of a social experience tied with the brand”—

Baldwin: Compared to someone else? Or just in general?

Nelson: Oh, just in general. And when you walk into the store, they have all those couches and the chairs and there’s magazines, it’s a more to sit and relax and to have a conversation, to have coffee with someone. And, I wanted to ask you about how that kind of aesthetic came about, and how that ties to Peet’s, and if Peet’s has the same kind of feeling in it?

1-01:05:38 Baldwin: Well, okay, how it came about. Well it didn’t exist in our Starbucks. And it evolved, and it wasn’t part of what happened early on, either by—when would that have been, early 90s, maybe—Oldenberg’s idea of this third place, this guy was at the University of West Florida and wrote The Great Good Place, observing the phenomenon, and how it seems to have really glommed on to that. In Italy nobody spends a lot of time. If you’re in the sit-down part of a restaurant, in France or Italy, you know, you’re getting table service, you are going to camp out there. Most of the rest of it, if you go up to the bar, you drink down the hatch, and you’re out of there. I mean if you’re there with someone, you might spend five or ten minutes. And, we were more of that type. I mean, we had a few seats, but the business has changed a lot, because of all these people coming from wherever else they used to get coffee. Well, they used to be able to sit down, so now they want to come to you for coffee, but they do want to sit down. So, there’s this tension between – I mean, the worst one is, excuse me, students, who think that once they’ve occupied a seat, that it’s theirs. I mean you go through Borders in Emeryville, for example, if you go through there on Sundays, with a [inaudible], asleep, one person with all their books. And, people become aggressive: “I’m sitting here, can’t you see I’m working?”; “Can’t you see this is my coffee store?” [laughter], you know? But, it’s really interesting how people, you know, are assertive about their need to sit down, to have nonfat milk, to, you know, “I’m a diabetic for God’s sake, why should,” you know. And “I want sweet coffee” or you know, all of this sort of stuff.

Nelson: “Cater to me!”

1-01:08:01 Baldwin: Yeah, exactly. So, that business is really warped, what happens inside of a store. They’re a little bit larger, there’s more seating. The seating at Vine Street, early on, Alfred had a row of, well they weren’t diner stools at all but, that’s the kind of seating there was at a bar. Then he had to take them out because the store got really crowded, and now that business has changed so that people buy their brewing accessories at Williams Sonoma, much less so at Peet’s, when that was the only place you could get it. So, now, seating comes in to replace that.

Nelson: Right, and just to clarify about The Third Place. What I know about that is that, you know, there’s the home, and then the work place, and then, like, a coffee shop, where you go.

Baldwin: Or, a bar.

Nelson: Or a bar, right. Some social gathering place where you go, you’d have a drink, or you’d have some kind of snack, and then sit down. And, is that a place where you’d sit down for a long time, or is this—

Baldwin: Well, I think it depends. I think it grew out of small apartments in older urban areas, you know New York, or in Europe, where apartments are tiny, and you’d have whole families in these 450 square feet, or something like that. So, getting out of the house was important, and pre-television, you know, for amusement, that sort of thing. I think it probably depended on the people, themselves, did they go, was it a couple? Or was it the guy stopping home for two beers on the way home? I mean, when I lived in San Francisco, you know, in the early ‘60s, there were bars all over the Marina. I mean, they’re gone. But, that’s where we went after work, either had a beer, or hard liquor.

Nelson: Right, and those kind of places have disappeared, you’re saying, and what’s replaced that, then?

1-01:10:05 Baldwin: Coffee stores to a great degree. I should ask you that. I’ve been going home after work for decades, you know, so.

Nelson: I guess what I’ve noticed about Starbucks, and this might not be correct, but that there’s kind of a go-in, go-out feel, sometimes, like it caters to a very high-speed lifestyle, where you’re in and out and you get your coffee to go to work. I feel like that’s changed a little bit, from kind of more local – and I’m not saying that either one is better than the other—but that’s more of a local, you know, this is your favorite coffee shop, you go there every day, you sit down for hours, you read the newspaper, you talk to friends that come in. There’s a different kind of feeling to each different thing. And I’m wondering, about Peet’s, it seems to have more of that feeling of somewhere where you’d sit down, and I’m wondering—

Baldwin: Well, it probably depends on the store and the neighborhood. The place that jumps immediately to mind, that you’re talking about, is Café Roma, in North Beach, where there are regulars, you know there’s a group that sits there every morning, some of whom I know. If I were to walk in there on the way back from yoga, I know who I’d see. And, that certainly happens. When we remodeled Vine Street, as we were talking about, the regulars made their own coffee, because we didn’t have any, we moved the bean store down the street, near the juice bar, but the people made their own coffee at home, but still came to the corner and stood there and drank it, the way they used to. That went on for eight months.

Nelson: Eight months!

Baldwin: Yeah, it took a long time to remodel that – I don’t know if it was exactly eight months.

Nelson: Yeah, there’s some vibe there that they liked.

1-01:12:03 Baldwin: So, yes, that certainly exists, and, there’s certainly no active discouragement of it, but it really depends on the store. If it’s on a commute route, I think it’s more of that in-and-out. But look at American cars: do you have a car without a cup holder in it? My Alfa Romeo didn’t have a cup holder in it.

Nelson: That’s a very of American kind of idea, where, you know, food on the go, and rushing in-and-out, and getting it in to-go boxes.

Baldwin: We’re busy. I don’t think we need to be quite that busy – arguably – we’d do better to sit down and drink a cup of coffee. A small cup, you know café petit, or an espresso, doesn’t take as long, but we have these buckets of coffee, even regular coffee, I don’t know why we’ve got this thing about size, but we were late; in some views, we were the last to change to this 20-ounce cup. But, it’s a third of our latte business, and it went like that.

Nelson: That’s a popular, popular size.

Baldwin: I haven’t drunk that much milk in the last two years! I mean it’s huge. Why do we do that? It lasts forever. People are drinking them until they’re cold.

1-01:13:34 Nelson: And that’s also a very American idea. You know, they supersize everything, and make everything big, and Costco, and you know, and McDonalds, and these huge meals, that’s a very American thing. In a lot of other European countries, there’s a small amount that you sit down and eat, and then when you’re done, you leave. There’s no on-the-go, to-go, rushing around.

Baldwin: No, you couldn’t find a to-go cup in France or Italy, or at least, I never came across it, until the late 90s.

Nelson: Yeah, you know food has a very important part in the day, and sometimes I’m like, “Oh, I’m too busy, I gotta skip lunch.” But, no, you know lunch is from twelve to one, and then you sit down, and you have it.

Baldwin: I remember a great lunch with some Italians who were visiting, and it was about business, and someone tried to bring up the business topic, this Italian guy was yelling, and he said, “wait, let’s have lunch, and we can talk business later.”

Nelson: Right, business and food don’t match. [laughter]. They don’t mix very well. That’s very interesting. So, I think now is a good time to move onto the issue of terroir, and, from your definition, there’s kind of two different ways of looking at terroir, even in terms of the French definition, where there’s one that’s like soil, climate, geography—

Baldwin: Well, where does it come from? Terra, terra, earth.

Nelson: Right, and there’s a really good definition from the Mondavi article that I brought in, that I wanted to tell you about: “Terroir as the cultural meanings of a geographical place.” So, it brings in culture, people’s history, a certain uniqueness, somewhere-ness, vibrations, you know, are different from other places and things like that, I think that we can kind of, with that definition in some sense separate it from climate, soil and kind of take it into [inaudible], and defining how certain places have certain feels. And I also think that there’s two different definitions of terroir; there’s an American definition and then there’s a French definition, and they’re very different I think. So I want to use the French definition of soil and earth, and also the French definition of the cultural meanings of geographical place, but I also wanted to know how you would define the American definition, or how you would, or what goes into defining terroir, in the American sense? I think part of it has to do with business, and the American ideal of land, which goes back to the nation’s founding, is about money and possession, and actually this article does a really good job talking about this idea, and kind of a clash of cultures between the American and the French.

1-01:17:05 Baldwin: Who wrote this?

Nelson: It’s by Amy Trubek. It was in Gastronomica.

Baldwin: Oh, I don’t think I saw it.

Nelson: So, I can sum it up. It’s not too much of a complicated article, but Mondavi wanted to go into this area of France, and wanted to build a vineyard there. And, the people—

Baldwin: In the Langado.

Nelson: I think you’re right, yeah. And the people who lived in that area weren’t necessarily opposed to this American company coming in because California wines are known worldwide, and we also have kind of a wine culture that we could bring. But what Mondavi didn’t understand when he was trying to do this venture was that the French have a different definition of land, and of what it means. To Mondavi, it’s about money, it’s about profit, it’s about terroir more in the sense of the soil, the climate, things like that, and the French, at least in this area, were talking more about it in terms of culture: “this isn’t just a piece of land, it’s about our history, it’s about who we are, it’s about what we’ve traditionally grown there.” There’s one quote that I want to share: “But a closer look at events in Aniane,” which is the area, “reveals that the Mondavi affair involved more than naïve, knee-jerk, anti-Americanism, and anti-globalization. Rather, the citizens were staking claim to the process of economic transformation. Globalization does not have to be a timeless, placeless, juggernaut, erasing all differences in values and practices along the way. Part of having control over the process lies in being able to retain locally important traditions and practices. In the case of Aniane, LaRoussas represents this local knowledge, the terroir of a people, their traditions and identity. Mondavi represented an approach to winemaking in terroir that concerned the soil, but crucially, as it turned out, ignored the place.” So, is that kind of clear how the article—

1-01:19:27 Baldwin: Yeah, I’m just kind of thinking about it, and what I know about those countries, and how they think. Italians are different from French. Italians are a lot more flexible. There are wines grown, especially in Tuscany, called super- Tuscans, that use French grapes, and there are more and more of them, cabernet particularly, although, it’s been grown in central Italy for 300 years, or something like that, in very small quantities. Now, there’s more and more, but you don’t find much of that in France, you see, each of the appellation, well this is true in Italy as well. Dominacione, you can only put certain grapes in a wine, but Italians are a little more flexible, you can jump outside that system much more easily there than in France.

Nelson: So, I wanted to ask you about how our American definition of terroir is different from the French definition.

Baldwin: Boy, it’s harder for me to extend it. American, New-Worlders in general, Americans, Brazilians, mostly South Americans, Australians, we all came from people, Canadians, who said, “We’re out of here, we’re going to the New World,” and so, we are the inheritors of the genes of adventures, people who sought change. The people who stayed in the Old World have inherited the genes of the people who stayed, and who are conservative, and it’s small sea-sense, the French perhaps more so than nearly anyone, about “don’t change this on me, this is mine.” So, I think that Mondavi, who is an Italian- American, and certainly an adventurer, could run into a little bit of change there. I don’t think that the French are against change. But, for somebody who

comes in, I don’t remember his name, but the guy from, this is in Cote de Vente Au, which is east of Rhone, a little north of Provence, a huge firm called the Old Farm, La Vielle Ferme, it’s just cranking out this pretty good wine, that’s not very expensive, but it’s absolutely not traditional to do this in this area. But, you know, he’s made a pile of money. Most of the French wines have either changed vitification techniques; not much change in the vineyard, maybe different oaking, clean things up, got more stainless steel fermentation, and less concrete, you know all those sorts of stuff to clean up their wines, but they’ve done that themselves, and they’ve stayed there. I think if Mondavi went in, bought something, cranked out five vintages of what was there before, and then started to make a few changes, it would have been an entirely different result.

1-01:23:11 Nelson: Oh I see. So going back to my point about how land has different meaning here, historically, how does that play into terroir if we are talking about a sense of place, and sense of regionality, and—it’s a really hard concept to kind of dissect, because I have so many different grey areas that could be interpreted in different ways, but—how do you think business plays a part in our idea of place, and land use, and how does that all tie together?

Baldwin: Well, good question about land, I mean what’s interesting is America and France, since Napoleon, have the same attitude about land passing from generations, all of the children inherit equally, you know, in the absence of a will, and Napoleon changed that from first born son, pretty much geniture, to distribute it. But you find part of this tradition, too, because in Burgundy, you’ll find vineyards that have been really carved up so that two rows of one tiny vineyard belong to this daughter and her descendants, and then the next two belong to her brother’s descendants; this division happened generations ago. See lots of that in Bordeaux, and in the Rhone, where holdings are larger, so I don’t know, it’s difficult in generalize. But, I would certainly say that, except for farmers, in America, it doesn’t seem to me that people have the same sense of tradition. Sell the farm, you want to develop it, yeah sure, you know, but it’s an economic proposition. But French are unique because they have fooled themselves into thinking they are an agricultural economy, and they don’t have any more people who farm than we do. But, there’s a hole in both countries, in protectionism for local farmers, you know, import barriers, and that sort of stuff, that’s really political; it has less to do with the land, so I don’t know, you almost have to take French out of it. If you take French out of it, I’m not sure we’d look all that much different from Germany or Italy, or Spain.

1-01:26:14 Nelson: So, yeah, that actually clarifies that. So, in talking about terroir—

Baldwin: Can I circle, can I go back—?

Nelson: Sure.

Baldwin: But there is a difference, and I like to see differences in regional food that hits the plate, and there are differences, there are absolutely differences in France and Italy, that traditions have remained. You can find them having gone to Paris and gone to Rome, as well, but they’re identified as restaurants of a region, and the cooking’s different; the cooking fats are different, for example. And, in America, now you see a West Coast, North East in Chicago, I don’t know, we’ll call it New World Cuisine, but you’re not going to find as much of that in the South, or the rest of the Mid-West. And certainly, you go to Montana, spend four days there, and can’t find a decent cup of coffee, you can find red meat: beef, you know; and iceberg lettuce, and that’s about it, potatoes. That’s it.

Nelson: So, going back to your point a while ago about different places having different specialties and different regional delicacies and different foods and different ways of cooking it, I think that kind of plays into the whole idea of terroir, of having a certain unique vibration to this place, that only happens in this place, that you can only find in this place. And, I feel like in a lot of ways, in America, that kind of regionality and sense of place and sense of terroir is kind of disappearing.

1-01:28:16 Baldwin: Yes. But, I think it’s probably because of the distance from the farm. A friend who was a Hungarian grew up there, and went back in later years, and this is in summer, and he walked into a shop, and he asked for apples, and they looked at him like he’s from another planet; “there are no apples in the summer, you fool. We don’t harvest those until the fall.”

Nelson: Yeah, seasonality, right?

Baldwin: Right, but, I mean we don’t think about that. I mean where does a kid who grows up in an environment think that milk comes from? Cows? No, it comes from the supermarket. Now, you can buy fruit all year round, and you don’t think, unless you’re looking at, “Oh this came from Chile, or New Zealand, or Argentina, or Mexico,” unless you’re looking at that, you know, you tend to think that it just came off the farm and they trucked it in. I mean never mind that there’s nothing growing out there right now.

Nelson: Right, so there’s this kind of disconnect between natural processes almost.

Baldwin: No, when you want it.

Nelson: Right, and that’s also very American. [laughter]

Baldwin: No, it’s the same in all urban environments, the same disconnect. I mean, you go into a market in France, they have apples in the winter; they didn’t grow

them. They might have been grown in Washington State. Best pear I ever had was an Oregon pear I bought in Munich.

Nelson: That’s disconnected a little bit. So, this might be a little tricky, but I want to apply that same kind of idea of, you know, regionality and uniqueness, to the coffee shops. How do you maintain that kind of small regional feeling within the coffee shop, when the company is huge, and global and corporate – you know, corporately owned. How do you maintain that sense of, you know, place, where people go every day—

Baldwin: Oh I can’t speak for [inaudible]. But, I can speak to different parts of California, which are very different. I mean, neighborhoods in Berkeley are different from San Francisco, and certainly different from Los Angeles, or San Diego. What we try to do architecturally, was provide a tableau, a background, so that the customers are defining the sense of place, by who they are. If you went into our store in Santa Monica, where, you know, all women over 40 have had plastic surgery, and everybody’s in running shoes, and they’re all driving SUVs and all of that, totally different from people in Berkeley. Their relationship is with the coffee, but they’re the ones who have provided the surrounding. Believe me, we didn’t do it. What we have tried to do is make a place that is timeless. You know, Peet’s kind of happened on this thing because he liked wood, and developed this, sort of, Old World craftsmanship-look. But, if you look at our stores, I mean even the newer ones, you know even if the colors have shifted or something like that, is that there’s nothing there that tries to speak to a specific place; it more talks about a sort of timeless design, that if you opened it in Paris, it’d look fine, because they’re natural materials. And, for a long time one of the things that I really was able to hold onto until the end of the 90s, was a customer never touched an artificial surface; it was either stone or wood, but it wasn’t laminate, which is paper. But it just got to a point where it was impossible to do. Well they’d just fall apart. Especially around a bar with all that water, it was just completely impractical.

Nelson: And, so that kind of segues. In our class, we learned that unless a business is growing, it’s dying, or it’s in the process of dying. So, I kind of want to get back to the idea of the compromise, and how to make a big company feel small within the store. First of all, do you share that view that if a business is not growing, it’s dying, and secondly, how can a business such as Starbucks or Peet’s survive profit-wise, but still craft a quality product?

1-01:33:36 Baldwin: Well, let’s go back to growing or dying. I think it’s more nuanced than that, because stasis is kind of an unnatural chemical state. And in a business, or a culture, or even an individual’s life you could stay the same from today until tomorrow. But, in five years time—

Nelson: That would be a bad thing if it hadn’t changed at all. [laughter].

Baldwin: Well, even, no. Let’s say that the business hasn’t changed, the surrounding— to go back to your extended version of terroir—the world has changed; and if the world has changed, and you think you’ve stayed the same, have you stayed the same? Because, the milieu that you have existed in has changed, so I would argue that you have changed, but in a negative way. One of the things that I was conscious of is picking up Alfred Peet’s legacy and trying to carry it forward, is that I didn’t want to be the person who kept it the same to its detriment.

Nelson: Right, right, there’s a certain point where—

Baldwin: I was giving a talk in Berkeley, this is maybe, oh when would that have been, probably in the early 90s, and somebody said, “When are you going to get a drink like a Frappacino?” And I said, “Well, you’ll probably be happy to learn” – well what she went on to say is “I hate walking past your store to go to Starbucks to get this drink that I want,” and I said, “Well, you’ll be happy to know we’re introducing one next month,” or in May, or whenever it was, and they broke into applause. I mean this is a tiny group; this is thirty people, you know, and so what really struck me is how my naturally conservative, preservative approach wasn’t happening to what I really wanted to do, which was to keep Peet’s a viable part of the community. These people wanted a cold drink and they wanted it from Peet’s, so who am I?

Nelson: Because they like what Peet’s represents, and the environment, and—

Baldwin: —tastes better, you know, wasn’t as sweet; there were a lot of things in that drink that some people would like over others. So, the idea of stasis, I think, is unnatural. It’s unnatural for people, it’s unnatural for cultures, it’s unnatural for language. So this thing, this constant fighting of change, I mean, the only constant in life is change. If you’re trying to oppose that force, you’re kidding yourself.

Nelson: Yeah, and it’s probably not good for the business at all, because keeping up with the times is probably an important aspect of selling to—

Baldwin: Well, it’s hard to interpret, I don’t know about keeping up with the times, but I would say being consistent with your ideals in changing the business – you know, making it flexible. I mean, it’s really interesting, [I had] an interesting discussion yesterday with someone who used to work at Williams Sonoma, and when it was changing, they tried to say which are the absolute core values of the company, and which are the sacred cows, that we can actually—

Nelson: Sacrifice—

Baldwin: Right, exactly. I mean, what’s important about Peet’s; well, it’s the coffee and the tea, and the work environment, the way we treat one another, you know,

the way we take care of employees. All the rest of the stuff is available for change.

1-01:37:35 Nelson: Right, could you speak more about how you treat employees, and the kind of interactions you have. How is that unique to—what’s the Peet’s way?

Baldwin: I don’t know if it’s unique, but it’s—well that’s a complicated question, I mean there’s a lot that goes into that, but, my hierarchy of values, as it evolved, was quality of products, of people in the work environment, and of customer service; all the rest of it will take care of itself. I mean there are other tenants, you know, as part of the statement of values, but you take care of those three things, and the business is going to keep going. Taking care of people principally means respect. We build a whole communications model, that was not unique to us, but it derived out of some work that was done in the 60s, a psychiatrist named Eric Berne wrote a book called Games People Play, and that was a popular version of how people learn roles, speaking and communication roles. A student of his, his name escapes me for the moment, wrote I’m Okay, You’re Okay. Transactional analysis was the thing that came out of Eric Berne’s work, so that all comes into a communication model that has me speaking to you as an equal, that’s how this conversation has been going on, despite our difference in age. And, that is the communication model that we use at Peet’s, that we taught. If I put you in the store to manage people, the first thing that you would think about is people who have been in positions of authority in your life: your parents. So, I don’t know of very many parents who speak to their children as equals. So, Eric Berne said you learn how to be a child, and you learn how to be a parent before you are six years old. You don’t learn how to be an adult until much later. So, what we try to do is speak as adults.

Nelson: And leave that whole parent-child dynamic out of it—

Baldwin: Listen to me, Heather, I’ll tell you, you know, I’ve got a lot more experience than you do, and I’ll tell you about this. You know what do you say?

Nelson: That’s alienating for sure. Doesn’t create a great work environment!

Baldwin: Yeah, well, if I’m a parent, then you are going to respond childishly, in all likelihood, unless you are really skilled, and some people are, they can come back and you know. And so, you look up those, and you can also look up Howard Gardener, who’s probably emeritus by now at Harvard, but he is now up to seven, sorry, eight, he’s up to eight – be there were seven intelligences, and if you start thinking about the way people learn, and the way people respond, I was fortunate, poor kid, but one of my sons is dyslexic, and he really struggled for a while – he’s my stepson, and when I first met him, I said, “this kid is smart, why isn’t he—” yeah, but then the more I understood that—you see, he’s gifted at observing people, and he can nail you in twenty

seconds, or me, but that’s his gift, and that’s how he learns, and it’s just different. So, thinking about those differences, and respecting them is what makes, creates this work atmosphere. I mean, it’s not perfect, you got people in from the outside who don’t get it, you know—

Nelson: That’s very interesting, especially about the multiple intelligence, I think that’s a very important point. Actually, my dad has taught at a school for kids who are dyslexic for 30 years now, and he always brings up that point where it really is about so, you know, they aren’t so good at this, but they are great at this, and they can do this really well, and this is how they learn, this is how they kind of see the world, and that’s an interesting point, kind of hit home with me, because I’ve had a lot of experience with that, too, where having different strengths, and kind of capitalizing on those, it makes a really good work environment and all that.

1-01:41:59 Baldwin: Right, and well if you’re hiring, I mean what I should be hiring is people who are different from me, who have a different set of strengths; I mean, I have mine, but recognizing my weaknesses is crucial, is a lot more important than my strengths, actually, because that’s what I need to compensate for, so all of that went into this. I mean this was decades of work, so, synthesized into few minutes.

Nelson: Let’s see, I’m not sure, let me just check in on the time; I don’t want to be keeping you longer than was assigned.

Baldwin: It’s five to three now.

Nelson: Oh, okay, let’s see. I guess I wanted to lastly touch on the question—this is complicated, again, because terroir has so many definitions, but—are business and terroir in opposition to each other, and how can you maintain a sense of place in a business while still surviving as a business, you know, profit making? And, especially with coffee shops, which do have this sense of—I think that Starbucks, there’s a tension between wanting to appear like a smaller local coffee shop where people go, but also, they are a really huge business. So, what are the compromises and ways that you can maintain product quality, and also, still survive profit wise? How do all these things all kind of interplay, and coexist?

1-01:43:48 Baldwin: Well, let’s see, let’s talk about compromise for a second. There’s a perception that size requires compromise, and maybe, in some places, it may. You could argue that unless Alfred Peet bought it, roasted it, and was right there across the counter from you, selling it to you, and brewed your coffee for you, that it’s a compromise. I mean, why should one of his disciples, his accolades be delegated this, and I have since delegated it to many others. Is it as pure an experience? Well, I suppose not. But one of the things that we were able to do

is as we grew is we got access to much better coffees, we could ship in full container loads instead of partial container loads, I mean, I can recall a shipment that Alfred actually helped us buy from India that arrived with chicken droppings all over the bags, because it wasn’t in a closed container. Well, it got dumped, and it was insured, and all that, but we got access to much better coffee. I mean we have much better coffee today, and for the last twenty, twenty-five years than we did before because we could afford to travel to look for it, and as I say, we could ship it in full containers. We have relationships all around the world; we couldn’t have that before.

Nelson: As a smaller—

Baldwin: As a much smaller company. One of the things about our coffees is that across the board, they are excellent. And, there are few businesses that can say that. And, if you are smaller, you just can’t get at the coffee.

Nelson: Yeah, you need to have that kind of profit in order to make those relationships and have those, you know—

Baldwin: Now, the thing about profit is pretty interesting because, as a 60s kind of guy, I didn’t actually believe in profit, maybe for the first, I don’t know, 15 or so years. But, let me turn it around. What I discovered was that when we were profitable, we had a lot more to share, that we could give bonuses, that we could provide incentives, that we could provide better benefits. But if you go in with the idea that says we shouldn’t make a profit, so you end up burning what it seems is inefficiency. I mean, it’s unproductive. Then you get into this—well, even workers co-ops are quite different—you get into this idea that things are finite. Well, look at the difference between—this is even changing here—but one of the things that has been true about America in the post- World War II time is that you can get a job, you can go to school, you can absolutely do better than your parents, and on and on and on. But that wasn’t true in Europe; it’s really hard to start a business in Europe, and you certainly couldn’t—I mean, our European friends, was that you didn’t know anything about coffee, and you didn’t know anything about business, and you started this business, it could never happen in Germany or France.

1-01:47:31 Nelson: And, after World War II, especially, we’re the only ones left standing, and we had a lot of disposable income, and—

Baldwin: So, Ben Cohen, Ben and Jerry’s, you know, probably said it most succinctly, he said, “business is a very powerful entity, and we can make money, and we can do stuff with it.” You know, part of the guiding principles that I left out were social and environmental, and community involvement, which are part of it, but you have to have a profit to give it away. You have to have a profit to have bonus, so I’d argue that socialism, I think we have concluded, I think

that we can conclude that socialism doesn’t work very well on any sort of large scale.

Nelson: In reality, yeah, sure.

Baldwin: I mean, the Cheese Board, it works fabulous. It’s a worker-owned co-op. Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, you know, the same. But they’re small. Consumer-owned co-ops, like REI is a whole different kettle of fish. But the idea that you develop some efficiency, I mean the thing—these are old ideas though, about business, I mean they go back to probably the 50s, certainly by the 60s, I’m thinking of Rene McPherson, who was the CEO of Dana Corporation. He is the one who articulates some of these—a guy started Henry Miller, who, something about leadership, I don’t remember his name – anyway, google Herman and Miller Leadership and you’ll have his book, he wrote to the second one, Leadership Jazz, or something like that, it wasn’t very good. But, these guys, and well others, Douglas McGregor, wrote a whole series of books about management—predecessor of Peter Drucker— and people, and how to think about people. You know, it wasn’t until much later that we started bringing in things like Meyers Briggs tests, and other more complicated forms of identifying. In a way, it’s sort of Howard Gardener’s work coming back in a different way, what do you prefer to do, that sort of stuff. So, I think that the compromise is a hard one. A lot of times people choose compromise as a pejorative to identify a change, because as much as change is constant, we don’t like to change. I hate new software. You know, why in hell did they change that, I liked that. And this sort of stuff. You know, I’m as resistant to this new thing, you know; somebody gave me a new version of Mac, Mac Operating System, and I just put that baby aside, till they update it for a while.

1-01:50:53 Nelson: That sounds like my grandparents are like, “We don’t want to keep up with anything you guys are doing in technology. You know, we like writing letters by hand!”

Baldwin: But, semantics are really important, and identifying the, you know, the Indian thing about the three blind men describing an elephant. It’s sort of the same thing. Is this a change? Is this an improvement? Is this a compromise? Well, you know, you can talk about it in a lot of different ways.

Nelson: I think often times we do tend to frame change, and you know, big business objectives as like, bad, and, you know, stay small, and stay local, and stay this, but I think there is a very important aspect of that, where change is what you need in order to be able to stick with your values, and have more of a global audience for them.

Baldwin: Well, I would rather have a company that has good values expanding than creating a void for someone who has different values to expand into.

Nelson: Yeah, that’s an interesting point.

Baldwin: But, I think that my central thing about change, though, is that if you stayed the same, the situation has changed, and to go back to terroir, if I plant a vine and the climate changes, has it stayed the same? Of course not, that fruit is not going to taste the same, period. The same thing with coffee: if I plant a different one because it yields more, or if I plant it because it tastes better.

Nelson: So, things are changing and you can’t stop that, so.

Baldwin: Right, so, I think to stay the same, you have to choose what element, or what elements you want stay the same; what are the core values that you want?

Nelson: Right, right, so you know, keeping the core values, even through changes is, I think, a really important, that is kind of what you’re saying, essentially. That change does not mean compromising values, and your core ideals of your business.

Baldwin: Well, part of that is just discussion and communication, though, too, because we all have these responses, and the amount of communication that one gets. At the executive level, everybody gets to participate in the decision. If it’s coming down—have you heard of the Mushroom Syndrome?

Nelson: No, no.

Baldwin: Keep them in the dark, and fertilize them. Or, feed them bullshit. But, if you’re at the end of this communication, you tend to resist it more because you haven’t participated in the decision. I mean you can see that at the University, you know something changes, or the price goes up, or they, I don’t know, they’ve eliminated something—

1-01:53:57 Nelson: Right, students are almost like immediately against it just because—

Baldwin: Just because!

Nelson: Yeah, and we weren’t involved in hearing their discussions on why they’re doing this, and the larger schemes that play into it. That’s very interesting. So, I wanted to end with just a fun question. I know I have my favorite tea and beverage at Peet’s and Starbucks, as you know, my favorite tea is Assam Golden Tip, and I used to really like those Mocha Coconut Frappacinos, which you don’t have anymore, that was like a few years ago—

Baldwin: We’ve never had a Frappuccino, but we do have a fredo. What was yours that you liked?

Nelson: It was Mocha Coconut Frappuccino, at Starbucks.

Baldwin: Oh, it was at Starbucks, oh that was long after—

Nelson: Assam Golden Tip is my favorite at Peet’s. So I wanted to ask you, if you had to choose, what would be your favorite coffee or tea drink at Starbucks and Peet’s?

1-01:54:53 Baldwin: Well, I wouldn’t have a clue at Starbucks, I don’t go in there very often, and, I make my own coffee, because I can do it better than most people. I mean the idea of driving and finding a parking place and paying four bucks for a cup of coffee, it just makes no sense to me at all. When I’ve asked costumers that, I say, “Why do you do that? Why don’t you make it at home?” They’d say, “Well the social aspect,” this sort of stuff.

Nelson: Right, is there a particular blend you particularly like? Or—

Baldwin: Well, you know, it moves around. My favorite blend right now, hmm—

Nelson: It’s probably hard, there are so many.

Baldwin: Well, it’s sort of like choosing among your children. I’d probably say Blend 101 for press pot, which is how I make coffee, or our Espresso Forte makes a pretty nice espresso. Those are the coffee drinks. Tea, I tend toward Jade Oolongs—oolongs are semi-oxidized—so the ones that are lighter tend toward the green more, which I like, and some of our green teas. White teas don’t have quite enough flavor for me.

Nelson: And, white teas are what exactly? I’ve never heard that term.

Baldwin: It’s just, they’re much lighter green teas. The leaves are plucked younger – the flavors are very delicate. I was talking about brewing temperature earlier. Like, that temperature might be a little light for this tea. That’s probably 195 degrees, or 190 degrees, and ideally, you’d be brewing this tea at about 208 or something like that. Not longer, but hotter. But a green tea, I typically brew at 175, or 180 degrees or something like that. But there are some white teas, that that’s just too hot, it extracts too many tannins. You need to come down to like 160, 165 Fahrenheit to really bring out the flavor of the tea. The nuances of these beverages are just—

Nelson: I know, I feel like I’m almost making tea wrong now. That’s very interesting. Well, I think I’m going to stop the tape recording at this point. Let me see, if I’m doing this right.

[End of interview]