-
The largest coffee brand in the U.S. is Starbucks, with a revenue of $32.25 billion.
-
As of 2022, the retail market for coffee in the U.S. has a market size of $48.7 billion.
-
Americans collectively drink 146 billion cups of coffee each year.
-
The U.S. coffee market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 5.12% through 2030.
When waking up early in the morning, there are a few things that dawn on your mind first. Shutting down the beeps of your alarm, brushing your teeth, and above all, getting to that morning cup of coffee as fast as humanly possible. That burst of caffeine can brighten a drinker up for the day ahead.
For the people who rely on a cup of joe to get them going, coffee is a necessity of life. That’s why the largest coffee brands in the United States collectively bring in billions of dollars in revenue annually and sell at thousands of grocery locations around the world.
The largest coffee brands sold in America include:
10 Largest Coffee Brands in the United States
-
2022 Annual Revenue: $32.25 billion
Year Founded: 1971With over 30,000 locations in 78 countries, it’s impossible to overlook Starbucks ’ impact on the global coffee market in 2021. According to revenue by a wide margin, Starbucks is currently the largest coffee brand globally, and its size is only estimated to grow more in coming years.
The coffee chain opened its initial location in 1971 at the Seattle Pike Place Market. Its three founders were inspired by the success of Peet’s Coffee and Tea when creating the concept for Starbucks.
After their first decade in business, Starbucks had opened four locations across Seattle that were becoming increasingly popular for their high quality, fresh coffee.
Their expansion era slowly continued throughout the nineties, with stores trickling throughout North America when the company changed hands from the founders to Howard Schultz. By the 21st century, Starbucks had gone global and secured its position as the largest coffee producer in the world. A title that the company has kept ever since.
Starbucks has achieved their incredible level of success because of the powerful brand and customer experience that they’ve built. A customer can go to Starbucks in New York City or Bangkok and receive an identical experience.
In recent years, the Starbucks coffee brand expansion had spilled over into grocery stores when Nestle took over this faction of the company.
While the company was initially hesitant to sell its brand of coffee in other stores, Starbucks has been successful in this arena for similar reasons. Customers know what they’re going to get when buying a bag of Starbucks coffee grounds anywhere.
-
Keurig Dr. Pepper Snapple Group (Green Mountain Coffee Roasters). Plano, TX
2022 Annual Revenue: $14.057 billion
Year Founded: 1981The early history of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is best told by explaining its founder, Robert Stiller. Stiller somewhat stumbled into the coffee business after founding the cigarette rolling paper company E-Z Wider. He bought out a retail coffee shop location in Vermont on a whim upon tasting their delicious brew.
A few years before Green Mountain Coffee Roasters turned a profit, it eventually got off the ground. However, the company started moving away from storefront locations and leaning more towards wholesaling 80 varieties of coffee to their over 2,000 clients along the East Coast in the 1990s.
By the following year, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters was shipping internationally and putting all their energy into ground coffee products.
In 1997, Green Mountain Coffee partnered with a company called Keurig to become the first roaster offering their revolutionary single-serve technology in the form of K-Cups that would be sold in grocery stores.
Within the decade, Green Mountain acquired Keurig, Inc. completely and changed its name to Keurig Green Mountain to reflect both ventures.
The most recent occurrence in the company’s timeline has been the procurement of Dr. Pepper Snapple Group for $18.7 billion and changing its name to Keurig Dr. Pepper. As a whole, this conglomerate of beverages makes over six billion dollars annually, but the coffee portion of its operations only makes up a small percentage of this revenue.
Due to the organization’s ties to the coffee industry and their continually popular K-Cup products sold in grocery stores, they’re still considered one of the largest coffee brands in the world.
-
Lavazza. Turin, Italy
2022 Annual Revenue: $2.97 billion
Year Founded: 1895Established over a century ago, Lavazza is one of the longest-running and most popular coffee brands sold in the United States. The two-billion-dollar brand started as a single grocery store in Turin, Italy, opened by Luigi Lavazza. The espresso company is still run by fourth-generation Lavazza family members today.
By the turn of the century, the single Lavazza grocery store set its sights on taking over Italy’s coffee scene. It was a big goal, but Lavazza became a big contributor to espresso culture taking over Italy.
The brand eventually began exporting its packaged coffee across the world. Their use of canned packaging allowed their products to stay fresh throughout long journeys of being imported to other countries.
The Lavazza name is synonymous with Italian espresso around the globe, thanks to the company’s diligence in the mass exportation of their products. The brand allows you to enjoy the traditional taste of espresso from Italy from the comfort of your home in America.
Lavazza continues to be one of the most expansive coffee brands in the world after 126 years in the business by shipping their coffee grounds and beans to over 90 countries.
-
Dunkin Brands Group. Canton, MA
2021 Annual Revenue: $1.25 billion
Year Founded: 1950Dunkin’ Donuts was founded by William Rosenberg in Quincy, Massachusetts, when he saw a hole in the market for feeding shipyard workers on their lunch. He sold a variety of items but noticed that the top sellers were donuts and coffee.
He cashed in on this trend by opening a storefront called Dunkin’ Donuts with these specialties. The store quickly saw enormous success. Dunkin Donuts started opening locations across Massachusetts and soon would become a prevalent coffee force globally.
It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Dunkin’ started selling their brand of ground coffee and beans in retail store locations like Wal-Mart, Kroger, and CVS. This was done to expand their brand into the grocery sphere like their competitors were doing at the time.
The expansion proved successful, as Dunkin’ Donuts remains one of the largest coffee brands sold in the United States, offering their customers nearly twenty varieties of bagged ground coffee to purchase.
-
2021 Annual Revenue: $983 Million
Year Founded: 1966Peet’s Coffee began its brand in California and expanded from there. It was established as a single location near the Berkely’s college campus by Alfred Peet, a Dutch immigrant to the United States who had familial ties to the wholesale coffee bean and roasting business.
Unlike many storefronts, Peet’s Coffee only sold their hand-roasted beans to customers by the bag instead of cups of brewed coffee. This business model proved fruitful, as Peet’s Coffee quickly opened up more locations to peddle its products.
Peet’s Coffee has changed hands several times over the years, including falling into the hands of the Starbucks co-investors for a while. Throughout it all, the brand has managed to maintain its business steadily.
Today, there are 236 Peet’s Coffee retail storefronts in the United States, and the bean wholesale sells it in 14,000 grocery and university locations.
-
Caribou Coffee. Minneapolis, MN
2021 Annual Revenue: $262.0 million
Year Founded: 1992Caribou Coffee is one of the youngest competitors in the roasting market at barely thirty years old. Kimberly and John Puckett founded Caribou Coffee after a backpacking trip in Alaska that inspired them with exhilaration. They came up with the brand’s name after seeing a herd of wild caribou on the descent of their hiking journey.
The goal was to get in on the flourishing gourmet coffee market that had penetrated the United States and the rest of the world. They met this objective.
Caribou became another huge coffee brand that sprouted from a single location in a tiny city. Today, there are 443 Caribou Coffee locations across the United States and about 200 more globally. In addition to its store locations, Caribou Coffee also sells its products in grocery stores to gain a competitive edge on the homebrew scene.
-
The Folger Coffee Company. Orville, OH
2021 Annual Revenue: $204.7 Million
Year Founded: 1850Folgers is the largest producer of ground coffee products in America. The brand’s origins date back to 1850, when James A. Folger began a unique coffee importing company because of its quality standards. Folger’s started growing dramatically during the 1900s when marketing Frank Atha enhanced marketing operations.
Folgers was on the cutting edge of advancements in the grocery store coffee market throughout history, such as the rise of instant coffee in the form of ‘Folgers Crystals.’ The company’s growth was bolstered by excellent branding like their famous advertisement jingle, “The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup.”
In 2008, Folgers was acquired by The J.M. Smucker Company and has continued to experience steady success ever since.
-
Café Bustelo. New York, NY
2021 Annual Revenue: $150 Million
Year Founded: 1928Café Bustelo was founded nearly a century ago by Gregorio Bustelo in Harlem when the robustness of Latin American espresso inspired him. The coffee brand started as a simple endeavor to bring the bold taste of Cuban coffee to a tiny corner of New York.
The brand’s success quickly accelerated, and Café Bustelo began distributing its products to convenience stores around the nearby boroughs.
The Café Bustelo brand continued to expand its network of availability in small stores slowly. In 2011, Café Bustelo was obtained by The J.M. Smuckers Company, and the brand started being pushed to households on a national level.
While the Café Bustelo brand came into existence many years ago, today, their brightly yellow can-packed espresso sitting on the shelves of convenience and grocery stores around the country is still hard to miss.
-
Eight O’Clock Coffee. Montvale, NJ
2021 Annual Revenue: $106 Million
Year Founded: 1859Eight O’Clock is the oldest coffee brand that continues to participate in the market today. The company was established by The Great Atlantic Pacific Tea Company to sell bags of whole beans to consumers. In its first few decades, the Eight O’Clock brand had won over more than a quarter of the American market.
Eight O’clock has continued to diversify its products in the twenty-first century to include ground coffee to compete with the other big brands selling in grocery stores. They’ve managed to accomplish this task because Eight O’Clock is still one of the largest coffee brands available in the United States.
-
Maxwell House. Tarrytown, NY
2021 Annual Revenue: $20 Million
Year Founded: 1892Founded in 1892, Maxwell House is another long-standing coffee brand in the United States. The brand was named after one of the coffee’s first loyal customers, the Maxwell House Hotel in Tennessee. After receiving an overwhelmingly positive reaction from customers, Maxwell House started defining and expanding its coffee brand.
A great deal of Maxwell House’s success is attributed to their early days of marketing in the 1920s. The brand began using the catchy slogan “Good to the last drop” to market their coffee and put much of their capital into radio, television, and print advertising.
Maxwell House broke a record for its immense spending on advertisements and quickly became the most well-known coffee brand of the day in America.
Maxwell House was also in tune with the advancements in technology that arose during the late 1990s, such as automatic drip coffee makers. They made necessary adaptations to their products to accommodate these innovations.
While they aren’t as influential in the market today, their approach to the coffee business has solidified Maxwell House as one of the largest coffee brands in America over a century later.
Find Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Jobs Near Me
Find Dunkin Brands Group Jobs Near Me
Find Peet’s Coffee Jobs Near Me
Find Caribou Coffee Jobs Near Me
Find The Folger Coffee Company Jobs Near Me
Find Eight O’Clock Coffee Jobs Near Me
Largest Coffee Brands in the U.S. FAQ
-
What age drinks the most coffee?
People age 70 and older drank the most coffee with an average of 2.18 cups of coffee per capita. Individuals ages 25 to 29 drank an average of 2.15 cups per day. The average American coffee drinker has approximately 3 cups of coffee per day.
-
Who leads the coffee industry?
The United States leads the coffee industry with $90.2 billion in revenue as of 2022. However, the US doesn’t produce the most coffee in the world, mostly due to the climate, with these being the top coffee producers:
-
Brazil (37.4% market share)
-
Vietnam (17.1%)
-
Colombia (8.4%)
-
Indonesia (7.1%)
-
Ethiopia (4.3%)
-
-
How much coffee does the average American drink per day?
The American average coffee drink has 2.7 to 3 cups of coffee per day. That means that there are around 400 million cups of coffee consumed in the United States every day. Americans collectively drink 146 billion cups of coffee each year.
Author
Sky Ariella is a professional freelance writer, originally from New York. She has been featured on websites and online magazines covering topics in career, travel, and lifestyle. She received her BA in psychology from Hunter College.
