The Family That Sold the Coffee

In March 2019 Americans found out who owned their morning cup. Seven years later the sentence has expired — and what is left is 43 per cent of a doughnut chain and six million insured pets.

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In March 2019 the family’s money was in coffee. By June 2026 all of it had been sold, and the largest lines in the portfolio were insurance and pet care.

The sentence that expired

On 24 March 2019, the German paper Bild am Sonntag published the contents of a document it had obtained. It was an interim report, delivered that January, by Paul Erker, a business historian at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. The Reimann family had commissioned him to examine the wartime history of their company, the chemical works Joh. A. Benckiser in Ludwigshafen. The report was not published. It was acquired.

What it contained: Albert Reimann Sr. and Albert Reimann Jr. were both Nazi supporters. Senior joined the NSDAP in 1931 and was funding the SS by 1933. By 1943 the firm was working roughly 175 forced labourers — Russian civilians and French prisoners of war — about a third of its total workforce. Forced labour was used not only in the plant but at the family's own house. Women from the occupied East were beaten and raped at the Ludwigshafen site. Albert Jr. complained to the mayor that the French prisoners were not working hard enough.

The family confirmed it the next day. Their spokesman was Peter Harf, who had spent four decades building the family's money into an investment house called JAB.

"It is all correct. Reimann Senior and Reimann Junior were guilty. The two men have passed away, but they actually belonged in prison."

American newspapers ran it because of what the family owned by 2019. Peet's. Stumptown. Intelligentsia. Caribou. Keurig. Krispy Kreme. Panera. Einstein Bros. Pret A Manger. The headline wrote itself, and it was true: the money behind a great deal of the American breakfast had been enlarged by forced labour.

Seven years on, that headline no longer survives a fact-check — not because the history changed, but because the portfolio did. On 1 April 2026, Keurig Dr Pepper completed its acquisition of JDE Peet's, the Dutch company that held Peet's, Stumptown and Intelligentsia. The price was €31.85 a share in cash; 96.22 per cent of shares were tendered — 466,712,270 of them — for roughly €14.86 billion. Acorn Holdings B.V., the JAB entity that controlled 69 per cent of the voting rights, had agreed to tender. JDE Peet's last traded on Euronext on 29 April 2026 and was delisted the next day. JAB walked away with about $8.5 billion in net cash and what it described as a $6 billion investment gain.

That left one coffee position: a residual stake in Keurig Dr Pepper itself, bought back when a JAB-led group took Keurig Green Mountain private at $92.00 a share in 2016. On 11 June 2026, JAB sold the last of it — roughly 59.1 million shares, about 4.3 per cent. The coffee is gone. So, for the avoidance of doubt, is Dr Pepper.

What replaced it

Here is what a rating agency saw when it looked at JAB on 18 June 2026, after both sales cleared:

Asset	Share of portfolio
Insurance (Prosperity)	24%
Pet care (NVA, Ethos)	23%
Pet insurance (Pinnacle Pet Group, IPH)	22%
Fast casual (Pret, Panera)	21%
Beauty (Coty)	8%
Indulgence (Krispy Kreme)	2%

Loan-to-value fell from about 23 per cent to somewhere between 1 and 2 per cent on a year-end 2025 pro forma basis, against a self-imposed ceiling of 15 per cent. The share of the portfolio held in listed assets dropped to around 10 per cent, which S&P expected to climb back toward 40 per cent within eighteen to twenty-four months. JAB's own 2025 annual report, written earlier, put the listed share at 44 per cent. Both are correct for their date; that is how fast this changed.

On 29 June 2026 the group launched Doubtless Pet Care, folding Independence Pet Holdings into Pinnacle Pet Group: six million insured pets, ten markets, more than 4,000 staff, chief executive Dirk Beeckman. The launch press release does not contain the word JAB.

Six cells, one doughnut

This publication asks the same six questions of every brand. Krispy Kreme answers them six different ways.

Cell	Answer
Born	1937, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
Incorporated	Krispy Kreme, Inc. — Delaware corporation, Nasdaq DNUT
Headquarters	Charlotte, North Carolina — not Winston-Salem
Shareholders	JAB Indulgence B.V. (Netherlands), 74,190,990 shares = 43.03% as of 30 April 2026. Second largest: BNP Paribas, 8.88%
Factories	Own "hub" doughnut plants plus a fresh-delivery network, in more than 40 countries
Payroll	Direct subsidiaries in the US, UK and Australia; in Korea, Japan and elsewhere, local franchisees pay the staff

JAB Beech Inc. took the company private on 9 May 2016 at $21.00 a share, an equity value of about $1.35 billion. It came back to the Nasdaq on 1 July 2021, priced the night before at $17.00 for 29,411,765 shares, roughly $500 million. On 7 August 2026 the stock closed at $3.335, a market capitalisation of $576.1 million — down 80.4 per cent from the IPO price (my calculation: 3.335 ÷ 17.00 = 0.1962). At that price JAB's 43.03 per cent is worth about $247.4 million (my calculation: 74,190,990 × $3.335).

Resist the arithmetic that suggests. The 2016 figure bought 100 per cent of the company; what remains is a minority stake after an IPO, debt raised against the business, and the sale of Insomnia Cookies. FY2025 was ugly on its own terms: net revenue $1,522.6 million, down 8.6 per cent; a net loss of $523.8 million against $3.8 million of net income the year before; global points of access down 13.5 per cent to 15,194; net leverage 6.7 times. The proximate cause is on the record and it is not history. On 24 June 2025 Krispy Kreme filed an 8-K terminating its Business Relationship Agreement with McDonald's USA effective 2 July: "After careful consideration, the companies have jointly decided to end their partnership." Roughly 1,900 McDonald's doors came out in the third quarter. Second-quarter 2026 results, reported on 6 August, showed revenue down another 12.8 per cent to $331 million but the net loss cut to $19.8 million and leverage down to 5.4 times.

Nobody has produced evidence that the 2019 revelation cost this company a dollar of revenue. The collapse belongs to McDonald's and to closed stores.

Follow the American disclosure regime to the end of Krispy Kreme’s Schedule 13D and you do not arrive at a person. You arrive at a door.

The chain ends in a doorway

Krispy Kreme's Schedule 13D lists seven co-filers. Read in order, they are a ladder:

Agnaten SE (Luxembourg) ─┐ ├→ Joh. A. Benckiser B.V. (Netherlands) Lucresca SE (Luxembourg) ─┘ │ ↓ JAB Holding Company S.à r.l. (Luxembourg, RCS B164586) ↓ JAB Investments S.à r.l. (Luxembourg) ↓ JAB Holdings B.V. (Netherlands) ↓ JAB Indulgence B.V. (Netherlands) ── 43.03% of Krispy Kreme

Item 2 of that filing, the section headed identity and background, never names a natural person as the ultimate beneficial owner. It describes the group as "a Luxembourg-based and privately-held group focused on long-term investments." Schedule A lists directors and officers of Agnaten SE and Lucresca SE — Peter Harf, Joachim Creus, Martin Haas and others — but as officers, not as owners.

Agnaten SE and Lucresca SE are registered at the same address as JAB itself: 4, Rue Jean Monnet, L-2180 Luxembourg. Follow the American disclosure regime as far as it goes and what you arrive at is not a person. It is a door.

Two further details belong here. S&P's June 2026 report states that Agnaten SE and Lucresca SE hold about 90 per cent of the company, the balance sitting with management and other investors. And the public documents disagree with each other about the top of the ladder: the SEC filings of 2021 and 2026 call it Joh. A. Benckiser B.V., a Dutch entity; JAB's own 2025 annual report calls the main shareholder Joh. A. Benckiser S.à r.l., a Luxembourg one; the Alfred Landecker Foundation uses the Dutch form. A Dutch B.V. and a Luxembourg S.à r.l. are different legal persons. A migration between them is plausible and this publication could not confirm one in the registries. What can be reported is the discrepancy itself.

Meanwhile the operating scale: consolidated assets of $71.94 billion at end-2025, run, per the annual report, by a team of "50+" investment professionals across six offices.

Caribou Coffee, bought twice in one afternoon

JAB bought Caribou in December 2012 at $16.00 a share, about $340 million, roughly a 30 per cent premium. Caribou was born in Minneapolis in 1992. Then, on 26 March 2024, it completed a long-term CPG licensing agreement with JDE Peet's. The Minnesota roasting operation, the office-coffee business and the foodservice contracts went to JDE Peet's. The 800-plus cafés stayed.

Two years later JDE Peet's went to Keurig Dr Pepper. So:

Buy a latte at a Caribou café in Minneapolis and the money runs to a family holding company in Luxembourg. Walk to a supermarket the same afternoon, buy a bag of Caribou beans, and the money runs to a listed company in Texas. The logo is identical. The six cells have split down the middle of a single brand.

175, 200 and 870 are not the same measurement. Substituting one for another is the commonest error in coverage of this story.

Ludwigshafen, 1937

In July 1937, Albert Reimann Jr. wrote to Heinrich Himmler.

"We are a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old. The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory."

Three numbers circulate about the forced labour and they are not interchangeable. 175 is a headcount for 1943, about a third of the workforce at that moment. 200 is a headcount for spring 1942 at the Benckiser plant, cited by the Claims Conference, which also described the two Reimanns as "vocal antisemites and Nazi supporters." 870 is not a headcount at all: it is the number of individual forced labourers whose names the Alfred Landecker Foundation says have been identified across the whole period. The foundation also records that the labourers worked "under sometimes life-threatening conditions, and that some of them died in accidents."

The money that followed: €10 million announced by Harf in March 2019; €5 million to the Claims Conference, paid €2 million in 2020, €2 million in 2021, €1 million in 2022; and a commitment of €250 million over ten years to the renamed Alfred Landecker Foundation, funded by Joh. A. Benckiser B.V. The euro figures are the originals. Some English-language coverage converted them to dollars; the conversions are not the record.

Emilie Landecker's children

Alfred Landecker was Jewish. In 1942 he was deported to the Izbica ghetto. What happened to him after that is not on the public record.

His daughter Emilie Landecker (1922–2017) took a job at Benckiser in 1941, at nineteen, after her father was taken. She had three children by Albert Reimann Jr.

Albert Jr. adopted nine people. On his death in 1984 each inherited 11.1 per cent of Joh. A. Benckiser GmbH. Five later sold. Four remain: Renate Reimann-Haas, born 8 October 1951, and Wolfgang Reimann, both children of Emilie Landecker and Albert Jr., adopted in 1965 because they were born outside marriage and needed the legal standing; and Stefan and Matthias Reimann-Andersen, sons of Albert Jr.'s nephew Otto Andersen, adopted in 1967. So it is only half true that the Reimann name was handed to strangers. Two of the four are the founder's biological children, and the adoption was the mechanism the law required. Emilie Landecker's third child, Andrea Reimann-Ciardelli, sold out in 2003 and lives in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Which means that two of the four people who own this fortune are the grandchildren of a man deported in 1942 and the children of the man who used the forced labour. Wolfgang Reimann wrote of his mother, by email, to the Irish Times: "She was living amidst that horrible scenery inside our company." His nephew Martin Reimann, then thirty, put the third generation's position more bluntly: hearing and reading about the atrocities at Benckiser that his grandfather approved, he said, made him feel sick.

Five hundred and twelve pages

Erker's finished study — Die chemische Fabrik Joh. A. Benckiser im Nationalsozialismus, Wallstein Verlag — appeared on 26 July 2023, four years after the leak, at 512 pages. It is not the 2019 interim report and it is not a 2020 or 2021 document, as is sometimes written.

According to German-language coverage of the book — this publication has not read the original — it goes past the 2019 admissions in specific ways. The firm leaned Nazi before 1933 and was later designated an NS-Musterbetrieb, a model National Socialist enterprise. It documents the structure of the company's cooperation with large firms including IG Farben and with military procurement bodies. It names the head of the plant guard, Paul Werneburg, employed since 1910, as having kicked, punched and whipped foreign workers and committed sexual assault, and records that Albert Jr. shielded him and dismissed complaints as an internal company matter. It finds that Albert Jr. believed in the Endsieg until the end of the war, that both men afterwards presented themselves as victims and were graded Mitläufer — fellow travellers — in denazification, and that the workforce grew from 181 in 1933 to 650 in wartime. It also establishes that Albert Jr.'s sister Else Dubbers joined the NSDAP on 31 December 1931 and led a Heidelberg BDM unit from 1932, and that her husband Hans Dubbers was an SS-Unterscharführer who joined the party in May 1933. Four of the nine adopted children were theirs.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the book thorough and factual and its conclusions precise and revealing. It also described the family's earlier handling of all this as "as forward-leaning as it was downright naive."

Not the Albrechts

This series has already written about another secretive German family that owns something Americans think of as American. The temptation to file the Reimanns beside the Albrechts of Trader Joe's is strong and should be refused, in both directions.

What genuinely rhymes: German family wealth; American brands; extreme privacy; founders who almost never spoke in public; inheritance routed through foundations and holding entities; and, in the end, American consumers who did not much care.

What does not rhyme is the history. Against the Reimanns there is a documented record — party membership in 1931, SS funding in 1933, forced labour in the hundreds, 870 named individuals, assaults, a letter to Himmler pledging allegiance to race theory. Against the Albrechts, Karl and Theo were conscripted soldiers, the family business was one small grocer's shop in Essen, and this publication found no primary evidence of party membership or forced labour, nor an enterprise of a size that could have used it. Putting the two families in one sentence would smear one and dilute the other.

The more interesting asymmetry runs the other way. We know what we know about the Reimanns because the Reimanns paid a historian to find it and let him publish 512 pages. No comparable commission by the Albrecht family is on the record. The dirtier fortune has the cleaner archive.

Do not end there, though. The commission dates from 2014 or 2016 — the foundation says 2016, the Irish Times reported 2014 — and the disclosure came after Bild obtained the interim report. Whether the family would have published without the leak cannot be established from the record.

And the difference that governs everything else: the Albrechts have not sold Trader Joe's in forty-seven years. JAB bought and sold for fourteen. Peet's, Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Keurig, Dr Pepper — all gone. One family holds. The other trades.

What's left

Peter Harf retired on 28 April 2025 after more than four decades, replaced by Joachim Creus and Frank Engelen as co-chief executives. He remains an investor in JAB and chairs the Alfred Landecker Foundation. Krispy Kreme's board is chaired by Patricia Capel, a senior partner at JAB; under an investor rights agreement struck at the 2021 IPO, the company "consults with JAB, and gives good faith consideration to JAB's views" on who sits on that board. In 2025 JAB paid Krispy Kreme $1.6 million in short-swing profit disgorgement under Section 16 — a small line item, and the plainest available proof of who is inside the tent.

Our first instalment was about a brand whose nationality became a controversy: 11,449 people signed about Budweiser. The second was about a brand whose nationality never became a controversy at all. This one is about a brand where something much heavier than nationality came out, was confirmed by the owners within twenty-four hours, and stopped being news inside a week.

The family is still there. The coffee is not. What they sell you now is insurance against your dog getting sick.