Emeryville, Calif. — And that’s a frappe! Just days after PETA launched a national campaign pressing Peet’s Coffee to stop charging extra for vegan milk, with longtime PETA pal Sir Paul McCartney part of the push, the chain has announced that it will stop penalizing conscientious consumers for choosing plant milks that are kind to cows, their calves, and the planet. Sir Paul wrote to Peet’s Coffee CEO Eric Lauterbach, and the chain knew that PETA was planning a blitz of targeted billboards near stores across the country, a stirring social media campaign, protests outside its stores, and had already received letters from more than 40,000 PETA supporters urging the chain to join Starbucks, Dunkin’, and other coffee giants that had dropped the punitive plant milk price hike.
“Coffee chains are waking up to the fact that kind customers are ditching dairy and won’t tolerate being punished for making humane and climate-friendly choices,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is celebrating Peet’s adoption of the new industry standard and is urging the few remaining holdouts, like Caribou Coffee and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, to join in to save mother cows from being separated from their beloved calves and reduce methane emissions.”
Cows have deep maternal instincts and, like all mothers, produce milk only to feed their babies. In the dairy industry, cows are repeatedly forcibly impregnated, and their calves are taken away from them within a day of birth so that the milk meant to nourish them can be stolen and sold to humans. Once their bodies wear out from repeated pregnancies, they’re sent to slaughter. In addition to causing these animals immense suffering, the dairy industry is a major producer of the greenhouse gases fueling the climate catastrophe.
Peet’s joins several other chains—including Starbucks, Dunkin’, Dutch Bros, Blue Bottle Coffee, Panera Bread, Philz Coffee, Pret A Manger, Stumptown Coffee Roasters, and Tim Hortons—in offering dairy-free milk at no extra charge.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy kits for people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
