It’s been a while since Seattle’s Best Coffee had a lot to do with its namesake city. Founded in the 1960s by Jim Stewart on Whidbey Island, the company was first called the Wet Whisker, then Stewart Brothers Coffee before changing its name in 1991 to Seattle’s Best. It was bought by Starbucks in 2003, then sold to multinational food and beverage giant Nestlé in 2022. Though Seattle’s Best used to operate cafes all over the world—including one in Pike Place Market’s Post Alley—most if not all of those have closed, and today it primarily sells coffee beans and coffee drinks at grocery stores.
But SBC is still involved in the coffee scene in one way: For over a year, Nestlé has been trying to force local canned cold coffee maker Seattle Strong to change its name, claiming that the name “Seattle Strong” infringes on its “Seattle’s Best Coffee” trademark. In March, Nestlé opened another front in the conflict, filing a notice of opposition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that claimed that Seattle Strong’s logo, not just its name, infringed on SBC’s trademark.
“Originally, it was about just using the words,” says Seattle Strong founder Evan Oeflein. “It has essentially been consolidated into one larger case that targets the whole brand.”
Oeflein has spent years building a cold brew brand that represents his hometown. “We’re the city of coffee,” he told Seattle magazine in 2024.
Courtesy of Seattle Strong Coffee, Co.
Oeflein started the company in 2017 as a class project for the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, where he was a student. He has grown it slowly—surviving the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the company to pivot from home delivery to grocery stores—and applied for a trademark in 2024. “We filed our trademarks in the light of day,” Oeflein says, noting that Nestlé owned SBC at the time and could have challenged that application. “They had their time to oppose it when it was published for opposition.”
Oeflein has been in touch with Nestlé about negotiating some kind of settlement, but at this point he’s planning to go to litigation and fight it out. He’s committed to fighting partly because changing the name and branding of Seattle Strong would be a major setback, but also because he doesn’t think Nestlé has a case.
“‘Strong’ doesn’t mean ‘best’” when it comes to coffee, Oeflein says. And beyond the adjective, the only thing the two brands have in common is the word “Seattle.”
“We’ve basically held our ground because you can’t own Seattle,” Oeflein says.
Nestlé did not respond to a request to comment.
Responding to Nestlé’s challenge has cost Seattle Strong tens of thousands of dollars already, says Oeflein. If the case ends up in litigation, which involves getting an expert to testify about the likelihood of Seattle Strong products being confused with Seattle’s Best Coffee by consumers, the costs could reach $150,000—which a multinational corporation can more easily afford than a small business. In response to the new filings, Oeflein has relaunched a GoFundMe campaign to help defray Seattle Strong’s legal costs. It has raised $13,000 so far.
Fighting Nestlé has been difficult, Oeflein says, because the company is roughly 100,000 times larger than his business. Even trying to get people to pay attention to the case has been like “yelling into the wind,” he says. “But I think it does matter not only for us. I think it matters for other companies and for the precedent it sets. And I think it matters to stand up to these companies that think because they have all this market power and money that they can kind of do whatever they want.”
