Peet’s swallowed up by German conglomerate

Peet’s Coffee and Tea, the Emeryville-based namesake of the late coffee roaster Alfred Peet, who founded his first coffee shop in Berkeley in 1966, is about to be swept up by a German conglomerate. Joh. A. Benckiser is paying $73.50 a share—or about $978 million—to take the home-grown coffee chain private. AP