Last cup for Wolf Coffee

Wolf Coffee Co., once the largest independent coffee house chain in Sonoma County, has drowned in a sea of Starbucks.

Nineteen years after its first cafe opened across from Santa Rosa Junior College, Wolf Coffee last month sold its final cafe at Coddingtown Mall and transferred its wholesale coffee business to a former employee.

The transactions complete the retreat that owners Rick and Jeanne Mariani began several years ago following increased competition from larger rivals and a shift in coffee drinkers’ habits.

Starbucks in particular began expanding aggressively into the county about six years ago, Mariani said, often opening locations close to existing Wolf cafes.

“We thought they were done expanding in Sonoma County, and we felt we could hold our own even though there were Starbucks on either side of our stores,” Mariani said.

But the Seattle-based mega-chain kept steaming across the county, adding standalone stores as well as coffee shops inside other businesses, like Safeway supermarkets. Today, it operates 42 stores in Sonoma County, according to Starbucks’ Web site.

“People used to come across town in Santa Rosa to come to our stores,” Mariani said. “Now they’d run across 10 Starbucks before they even get to my stores.”

Coffee drinkers also seemed to turn their backs on Wolf’s coffeehouse culture in favor of shops emphasizing coffee-to-go, such as drive-thru windows and a focus on filling orders as quickly as possible, Mariani said.

“Our culture was more of a sit and enjoy a quiet cup of coffee,” Mariani said.

Squeezed on all sides by Starbucks — and to a lesser degree by Peet’s Coffee & Tea, the Emeryville-based company with four locations in the county — Wolf began closing or selling its eight cafes about four years ago.

“With three or four Starbucks around our stores, it really hurt our sales,” Mariani said.

Last fall, the company closed its Rohnert Park headquarters and roasting facility, contracting out the roasting of its full-bodied coffee blends to a roaster in San Rafael.

Then early this year, Mariani began divesting the two remaining pieces of the company — the Coddingtown Mall cafe and the wholesale coffee distribution business.

Last month, he completed the sale of the cafe to a doctor from San Jose, whose family has reopened it as Black Wolf Coffee. The cafe continues to sell Wolf brand coffee, according to manager Farzin Dehghan.

Also last month, instead of just shutting it down, Mariani transferred the wholesale operation to Sarah Powell, a 30-year-old former Wolf employee.

“I’ve always had a love affair with coffee,” said Powell, who now runs the small company out of an office near the Charles M. Schulz-Sonoma County Airport.

Her new company, Powell Coffee, continues to distribute the Wolf brand to grocery stores, restaurants and offices in Sonoma and Marin counties.

It’s a small operation. Powell has one employee who helps her distribute about one van-load of coffee a week, she said. But she’s recently landed some new accounts, and hopes the Wolf name and her low overhead will allow her to expand distribution, including online.

Powell doesn’t plan to distribute anything other than Wolf branded coffee at the moment, noting that the Wolf brand is well known in the area and customers remain loyal.

“Rick and Jeanne did something that worked really well, so why mess that up?” she said.