The Holiday Push
Peet's Coffee is deploying its broadest holiday activation in recent memory, adding five limited-time beverages, two seasonal food items, a sweepstakes tied to Southwest Airlines travel vouchers, and a cross-category fragrance collaboration with LAVANILA — all going live November 4 across its 465-plus coffeebar locations in the United States, China, and the Middle East, as well as national grocery and mass-retail channels.
The move signals a deliberate push by the Emeryville-based roaster to extend its brand surface area beyond the coffeebar during the highest-traffic gifting period of the retail calendar. By anchoring a beauty collab at Ulta and Amazon alongside in-store seasonal merchandise, Peet's is competing for discretionary holiday spend on two fronts simultaneously — foodservice and specialty retail — a strategy increasingly common among specialty coffee operators navigating flat traffic growth in core dayparts.
Menu and Merchandise
The new beverage roster leads with Peppermint Bark Matcha — a white chocolate, peppermint, and cold-milk build topped with a "Peppermint Matcha Dream Top" — alongside a Holiday Spice Latte, returning Peppermint Mocha, and a Sparkling Black Cherry Energy drink formulated with approximately 80 milligrams of plant-derived caffeine, L-theanine, and 100% of the daily recommended value of Vitamin B-12. The chain's limited-edition Holiday Blend is available both at the coffeebar and in bagged and K-Cup pod formats at national retailers, broadening margin-accretive packaged-goods revenue during the season. Food additions include an Iced Gingerbread Loaf and a Mini Apple-Cran Queen Croissant.
On the merchandise side, Peet's is releasing a 16-ounce Color Block Tumbler and a matching Cold Brew Sleeve, both referencing the brand's 1966 founding-era heritage logo — a design language that plays well in a gifting context and reinforces premiumization positioning. The giftable lineup also includes two Chuao chocolate bars and a GooGoo Cluster, extending the brand's in-store basket size potential for holiday traffic.
The LAVANILA Angle
The most commercially distinctive element of this year's program is the LAVANILA partnership. The two-SKU collection — a Vanilla Latte Candle made with 100% soy wax and a 50-plus-hour burn time, and a Vanilla Latte Body and Hair Mist infused with jojoba oil — translates the coffeehouse sensory experience into a take-home beauty format. LAVANILA, which counts more than 2 million fragrances sold and 10 Allure Best of Beauty Awards over its 20-year history, distributes through Ulta and Amazon in addition to its own direct-to-consumer channel. The candle will also be sold inside participating Peet's coffeebars, giving the chain a rare beauty-as-impulse-purchase play at the point of coffee sale.
Cara Schlanger, Director of Retail at Peet's, framed the program around experiential continuity. "This year, we're leaning into that feeling of home while giving Peetniks new ways to enjoy the season," she said, citing both coffeebar occasions and at-home rituals as target use cases.
Sweepstakes Mechanics
The "Home for the Holidays" Giveaway runs weekly from November 23 through December 14, with entry via QR code on holiday packaging at participating coffeebars and retail locations, or online. Each weekly winner receives a Southwest Airlines e-voucher for holiday travel. The sweepstakes structure — short weekly windows rather than a single grand-prize drawing — is designed to sustain repeat engagement and packaging interaction across multiple purchase occasions during the peak gifting window, a tactic that trade observers have noted drives incremental scan rates in the specialty coffee segment. Full rules are posted at peets.com/holiday2026.
For operators and retail buyers, the program illustrates how legacy specialty-coffee chains are broadening their holiday revenue mix beyond hot beverages, using limited-time offers, lifestyle brand partnerships, and gamified consumer engagement to defend share against both quick-service rivals and direct-to-consumer subscription roasters. Similar cross-category strategies have been documented across the specialty beverage sector and tracked extensively in foodservice retail partnerships coverage here at F&B Industry News.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
