Olivier Goudet — along with Bart Becht and Peter Harf — oversees JAB Holding Co., one of the biggest restaurant acquirers in the world.
We put Goudet, CEO of JAB Holding, on The Power List because he is chairman of many of the brands the company has acquired in recent years.
JAB Holding is a private investment firm owned by the German Reimann family, whose wealth dates back several generations and is now worth billions of dollars.
In recent years, JAB Holding has gone on a major shopping spree, acquiring Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Caribou Coffee, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Intelligentsia Coffee, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group and Keurig Green Mountain.
But JAB Holding wasn’t done yet. In 2016, it acquired 1,100-unit Krispy Kreme Doughnuts Inc. for $1.35 billion. JAB Holding paid a multiple of about 19 times cash flow for the quick-service chain — a high price.
In just a couple of years, the company has become a major player in the market for coffee and doughnuts, and has given those brands routes to find other sales strategies.
Take JAB Holding’s acquisition of both Caribou Coffee and Einstein Noah. In 2015, JAB Holding agreed to pay $374 million for Einstein Noah, two years after it agreed to pay $340 million for Caribou Coffee.
Since then, JAB Holding has used a merged concept model with Einstein Noah and Caribou Coffee — a model Caribou Coffee had pursued with Einstein Noah rival Bruegger’s Bagels.
The joint Einstein Noah–Caribou Coffee experiment appears to be working: More than 40 such locations sell more coffee than a standalone Einstein Noah unit and more food than a solitary Caribou Coffee outlet.
It seems very possible that JAB Holding could help its newest acquisition, Krispy Kreme, finally crack the code to selling more coffee.
Contact Jonathan Maze at [email protected]
Follow him on Twitter: @jonathanmaze
