"Chinese concept" set off a new outlet for coffee track?

Recently, Chinese coffee has once again become a hot
spot in dining.
According to data from relevant life service e-commerce platforms, since 2022, users' search volume for "special coffee" has increased by 207% year-on-year, and the search popularity of "Chinese coffee" has increased by 4713%
year-on-year.
At present, the market explores the coffee track in a variety of ways, what is Chinese coffee? Is it the future of China's coffee circuit today? Is the Chinese coffee business a gimmick or a vent?

Chinese coffee is on fire

At present, the coffee track seems to be splitting into two trends, one is the professional school, insisting on roasting, extraction, siphon, hand brewing and other elements that represent the professionalism of coffee; The other is the fusion school, which advocates abandoning tradition and using various bold, fun and quirky new ideas to integrate coffee elements and play new tricks
of Chinese coffee.
In the fusion school, the addition of national tide elements and Chinese taste of "Chinese" coffee is the main trend
at present.
Xiaohongshu searched for "Chinese coffee" with nearly 60,000 related notes; Douyin's search for Chinese coffee-related topics also has more than 1.
4 million views
.

According to the person in charge of a coffee shop, his store can sell more than 400 cups a day at its peak, basically covering more than
90% of the day's turnover.
Products that combine some traditional elements and culture with coffee are increasingly popular with consumers
.
In April 2022, an instant coffee brand named "Huatian Cui" and positioned as "Chinese Style Coffee" received one million yuan financing
from Tsingshan Capital.
Around August of the same year, Chayan Yueshi entered the coffee track and launched the Chinese coffee brand Yuanyang Coffee
.
At the end of November of the same year, Nai Xue's tea even invested millions of yuan in the Chinese coffee brand "Monster Sleepy"
.
Recently, Zhongyi Culture's new Chinese tea and coffee brand, "So Many Jiao", announced that it has obtained an angel round of financing of tens of millions of yuan, led by Qifu Capital and followed by Huagao Software
.

Judging from the above data and investment trends, Chinese coffee is growing into a promising track
in the current coffee market.
From the perspective of brands, Chinese coffee is currently presenting two forms of expression: first, Chinese in a narrow sense, that is, the overall "Chineseization"
of coffee shops.
From the scene, menu design, to the products all integrate "Chinese style elements", go pure Chinese style
.
A typical representative is the pleasantly colored Yuanyang coffee; Foshan's Internet celebrity "corner coffee" that uses old objects to design scenes; Tianjin Laixier coffee with a lid bowl and blue and white porcelain cups
.
In July last year, Shenzhen also appeared a Chinese style coffee net red coffee coffee, the store style is mainly Chinese elements, bright Chinese red, red eaves, hundred children's cabinet, gray alley red tiles, cup steamer, the clerk is also dressed in Chinese clothing
.
Many Chinese elements are added to the products, such as "a mung bean popsicle", "black sesame paste for your face", "eat my tofu flower", "a cup of black sugar landscape painting", through coffee and classic mung beans, black sesame paste, tofu flower and other Chinese raw materials to create a Chinese familiar taste
.

The second is the broad Chinese style, that is, the "localization"
of simple coffee products.
The Chineseization of this product manifests itself on many levels
.
For example, the sinicization of materials, that is, the use of coffee beans from China's Yunnan coffee producing region, or the sinicization of techniques, such as Binle coffee, which uses traditional Chinese high-temperature water-proof stewing instead of coffee machines for coffee extraction
.
However, most of the current generalized Chinese coffee does the same thing, that is, coffee "milk tea", using the idea of milk tea to make coffee, to create a variety of fancy drinking methods
.
For example, Starbucks once launched Longjing tea crispy latte and camellia latte; Monster Trap launches big pineapple ice extract American, olive talk plum American and so on
.

Of course, in addition, there are also creative attempts
such as tonic coffee, sake brewed coffee, butter coffee, slightly drunk coffee, flower tea coffee, and spicy coffee.
In the past, consumers drank coffee professionally, but today consumers drink coffee and drink "good"
.
As the competition for new tea drinks moves towards the second half, the growth rate of the track slows down, and more and more tea brands are turning their attention from new tea drinks to coffee, and creating new subdivision trends
in the coffee track with the idea of new tea drinks.

Is it a gimmick or a vent?

Combined with various factors, the current Chinese coffee trend is by no means a gimmick
.
According to the White Paper on China's Freshly Ground Coffee Industry, as of 2021, the penetration rate of coffee in China's first-tier cities has reached 67%, and the per capita coffee consumption has reached a staggering 326 cups, close to the level of
mature coffee markets such as the United States and South Korea.

With the rapid development of the coffee track, the coffee culture that used to be traditional professionalism, ritual sense and business style has long been unsuitable for the present, and the coffee track needs a younger and more acceptable way of
playing.
And Chinese coffee, whether it is store scene design or product creativity, is more suitable for the aesthetics
of young people today.
For today's Chinese consumers, drinking coffee is no longer the "elite behavior" of the past, but has become part of the daily life of
today's young people.
"I love coffee, but what I like is not the bitterness of the coffee, but its aroma
.
" A coffee lover said
.
As Chopsticks Thinking says, in the past, people mostly went to drink coffee because they "needed", but today's consumers drink coffee for a simple reason: because the coffee is there, it's not that I need coffee, but that coffee needs me
.

Using "Chinese" to localize coffee and truly integrate coffee into the daily life of young people is the path
that the coffee track must take to maintain rapid development in the future and truly achieve popularization.
It is said that tea and coffee do not divide families, perhaps through the development of Chinese tea drinks, indirectly see the future development trend
of Chinese coffee.

In the early days, although tea has long become a popular drink in China, in the catering track, except for a few cities such as Chengdu and Guangzhou, most of China's tea is still hidden in high-end tea houses and small tea houses in a niche culture, flaunting Chinese style and grade, meeting people's business meetings and other needs, and the former "elite" coffee is almost the same
.

The emergence of new tea drinks liberates tea from the sense of ritual, abandons the attention to drinking tea, and uses portable tea cups, while adding fruits, milk and other elements to change the original monotonous taste of tea, making tea more fun and interesting, tea has truly achieved youth popularization and become the current daily drink
.

If the emergence of new tea drinks is put into the coffee category, it corresponds to the "local Chineseization" stage
of the current coffee track.
At present, people's localization innovation of coffee, just as the new tea drink subversive innovation of Chinese tea, is an inevitable process
that coffee must go through if it wants to achieve the popularization of coffee in China.
However, although the "Chineseization" of coffee is a future development trend of the coffee track, how to do a good job of coffee "Chineseization" is still a difficult problem
at present.
At this stage, the exploration of coffee brands in the Chineseization of coffee is still in the preliminary stage, and most of the creative products are short-lived and difficult to last.

At present, if brands want to truly realize the "Chineseization" of coffee, they may need to make more efforts at the following levels:

The so-called Chinese coffee is not only a national tide scene + modulated coffee products, in order to truly create the characteristics of Chinese coffee, innovation at the technical level is indispensable
.
Industry insiders believe that it is necessary to innovate on the basis of inheritance; There must be innovation based on localization; It is necessary to have unique technology that belongs to China; It is necessary to achieve a combination of Chinese and Western and conducive to popularization
.

Taste level Taste innovation is what coffee brands have been doing
all the time.
But whether it is coffee with fritters, coffee with pancakes, coffee with buns that were popular some time ago, or yogurt coffee, herbal tea coffee, spicy coffee later, almost all traffic gimmicks are greater than products, with freshness, but lack of cultural connotation
.

In the future, if coffee wants to truly achieve popularization in China, it may need to combine more Chinese elements to do more subversive innovation at the taste level, which is by no means as simple as
adding some Chinese flavor raw materials to coffee.
There are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand people, and a thousand ways to drink coffee in the eyes of a thousand people
.

(Source: Food & Beverage O2O)

China Food News(2023.
01.
09.
07).

(Responsible editor: Luo Chen)