Peaberry Coffee was a coffee shop chain that was started in Denver, Colorado in 1990 by Bill Tointon. The store’s concept was founded on serving a variety of coffee from all over the world and roasting it in Denver. It was categorized in a menu format called the “Peaberry Profile System”. The system offered four selections of coffee roasting styles, Light & Mild, Rich & Creamy, Extravagant & Exotic and Dark & Intense.
Peaberry coffee was a franchise which is a business model where each chain is owned by an individual business owner who pays a fee every year to the main corporation or franchiser, in order to use their branding and benefit from their experience, training and support. Other examples of famous franchises would be Dunkin’ Donuts, Subway and Burger King.
The Peaberry Coffee franchise model is in contrast to a business like Starbucks which is not a franchise but rather owns all of the chains outright.
In 2009, Peaberry coffee closed all of their branches due to legal complications and the company was therefore dissolved.
The name Peaberry coffee comes from the peaberry coffee bean, known as caracolillo in Spanish, which literally translated means snail in english. The peaberry isn’t a gene of bean but rather a shape that occurs when only one side of the bean is fertilised which causes a strange bulging shape to occur in the bean.