Caribou Coffee Goes Public

Brooklyn Center, Minn., The nation’s No. 2 coffeehouse chain is seeking to raise $90 million in an initial public offering. Caribou Coffee Co., with 322 stores and 2004 sales of $157.5 million, is a distant second to No. 1 coffeehouse purveyor Starbucks, but hopes to gain ground by paying off $22 million in debt and using the remainder of the IPO money to fuel expansion.

Caribou is bigger than Starbucks was at the time of its IPO; the Seattle-based Starbucks had about 165 shops and annual sales of $60 million when it went public in 1992.