Keurig Dr Pepper CFO Sudhanshu Priyadarshi is set to play a key role in the beverage giant’s newly unveiled plans to spin off a separate, publicly traded coffee company.
On Monday, Keurig Dr Pepper announced plans to acquire Dutch multinational coffee company JDE Peet’s in a roughly $18 billion, all-cash transaction. Once that deal goes through, the company plans to cleave its coffee business into its own separate company that would be led by Priyadarshi.
This will be Priyadarshi’s first time as a CEO.
Current Keurig Dr Pepper CEO Tim Cofer, meanwhile, will lead the company’s other division focused on “refreshment beverages,” including Dr Pepper.
The new business to be led by Priyadarshi will be a “new global coffee champion,” Cofer said in a news release.
“Through the complementary combination of Keurig and JDE Peet’s, we are seizing an exceptional opportunity to create a global coffee giant,” Cofer said in the release. “This is the right time for this transaction, with KDP in a position of operational and financial strength, momentum across our evolved portfolio, and increasing coffee category resilience. By creating two sharply focused beverage companies with attractive and tailored growth propositions and capital allocation strategies, we are poised to generate significant shareholder value in both the near and long term.”
By revenue, the coffee side of Keurig Dr Pepper’s business today is notably smaller than its refreshment business. In its 2024 fiscal year, the company’s U.S. coffee division pulled in $3.967 billion, down slightly from $4.071 billion in the prior year. That compares to total revenue of $9.3 billion in Keurig Dr Pepper’s refreshment beverages business. The coffee trade has seen rising prices due to things like inclement weather and shifting supply chains, and its existence as a staple in offices around the U.S. is currently under threat from recent legislative changes.
JDE Peet’s itself is the result of an earlier merger coordinated by Luxembourg conglomerate JAB Holding Co. In 2012, JAB bought predecessor company Peet’s Coffee & Tea. Seven years later, JAB merged Peet’s with Jacobs Douwe Egberts and took the combined company public as JDE Peet’s in 2020.
In an interview with CFO.com earlier this year, Priyadarshi noted that the company was continuing to navigate the effect of tariffs, like many other consumer businesses. “We rely on a global supply chain like everyone else and are not immune to tariffs, but we have a lot of production for both the beverage and coffee business being done in the U.S. already,” he said at the time.
Priyadarshi isn’t the only CFO to get a promotion tied to spin-off. In Warner Bros. Discovery’s recently announced plans to split itself in two, for example, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels is expected to become chief executive of the company’s cable division.
CFOs stepping into the role of chief executive certainly isn’t unheard of, either. Most recently, Target, for instance, recently announced plans to promote its COO and former CFO Michael Fiddelke to chief executive.
