Acre Coffee changes name to Avid Coffee a year after sale to new local owner

Acre Coffee on Wednesday announced it will change its name, though to a new one that’s in the same phonetic ZIP code.

Acre Coffee is becoming Avid Coffee as part of an agreement that new owner Rob Daly had with the previous ownership group, which gave him a year to come up with a new moniker. The former ownership group led by Steve DeCosse operates Acre Pizza, a spinoff of the coffee business that opened early last year before the sale and has since become a lucrative business operating out of The Barlow in Sebastopol.

Daly said that instead of hiring branding consultants, he reached out to his 42-employee staff and longtime costumers to get their views along with his hourslong Google and thesaurus searches. The Avid name was sealed when he found one definition that said the word was “having or showing a keen interest in or enthusiasm for something.”

The signage will change over the next few days at Avid’s three locations and all customers will get 10% discount on Oct. 1 to celebrate the new name when it becomes official. “We are moving like crazy for sure,” Daly said of changing signs. The current logo of a “A” inside a drop will remain the same.

Name changes to local businesses are rare but not uncommon. In 2017, Petaluma’s Clover Stornetta Farms, the Bay Area’s largest dairy producer, changed its name to Clover Sonoma to take advantage of the geography as its sources from local dairies.

The name change will allow Daly and his staff to “continue to improve from the high level we currently maintain.” It will also give him more freedom to start thinking about future plans for new drinks and food as well as possible new locations. During the pandemic, Acre moved its main processing facility from Petaluma to a warehouse in Windsor where it treats its beans on a 1965 Probat roaster.

The name change comes as local coffee shops were forced to recalibrate during the pandemic with more at-home work. Acre closed two locations in downtown Santa Rosa and east Petaluma while Flying Goat Coffee closed its downtown Santa Rosa location and one in Healdsburg.

Daly has had a lengthy career in the coffee business starting at Wolf Coffee, then Starbucks and later served as CEO of Taylor Lane Organic Coffee, which itself changed its name in 2018 as part of ambitious effort by new owners that later failed.

With the rebranding finished, Daly said he will work on efforts to strengthen the store’s ties within the community and local charitable efforts. He also has empowered his staff to create new drinks, including a new one that will be unveiled on Friday that will be Gravenstein apple flavored drink with cinnamon.

“That was just the creative juice flowing with the team, putting all these things together and giving them that freedom and flexibility to do that is pretty awesome,” Daly said.

You can reach Staff Writer Bill Swindell at 707-521-5223 or bill.swindell@pressdemocrat.com.