On September 23, after a night of gusty winds, Beijing was a bit chilly in the autumn. However, the Starbucks Select flagship store in Sanlitun, Chaoyang District, was still warm and inviting. The bright sunlight shines through the huge floor-to-ceiling glass windows and shines on the soft, comfortable leather sofas, where customers gather in twos and threes, whispering or working. In this first-tier city of China, which is known for its fast-paced life, the rich aroma of coffee seems to slow down the time in the whole hall.

A coffee shop staff who just finished checking out customers told reporters: "Don't look at the weekday afternoon is not a lot of customers, on weekends can be a different story. At that time, from morning to night, there are no seats, and you have to wait for half a day to find a seat. Sometimes the order volume is so large that we are too busy behind the operation desk."

In August 2020, the Starbucks Beijing Sanlitun Selection flagship store was reopened. Before the upgrade, it was the first Starbucks flagship store to open in mainland China. Now, as the first Starbucks flagship store in China to complete an upgrade during the epidemic, the store's reopening is also seen by the industry as a sign and indication of the brand's continued ramp-up and investment in the Chinese market.

"After the transformational renovation and product upgrade of the coffee shop, it carries more functions, especially social attributes, and many people treat it as a 'second meeting room' outside of their homes." In the opinion of the staff here, coffee is no longer just a common drink popular among young people in China, but has become a culture that is deeply integrated into the daily life of ordinary people.

At the Global Investor Exchange held on September 14, Starbucks Corporation officially unveiled its 2025 China strategic vision and launched a new value-oriented growth plan to heavily increase its presence in the China market. According to statistics released by Starbucks, the number of Starbucks stores in mainland China has grown nearly tenfold over the past decade and will soon reach 6,000 by the end of fiscal year 2022. In the next three years, Starbucks plans to open 3,000 new stores at an average rate of one new store every nine hours, covering 300 cities in China. By 2025, Starbucks China will reach 9,000 total stores, add 35,000 partners (employees) to reach more than 95,000, and achieve the goal of doubling net income and quadrupling operating profit to current growth.

At the conference, Starbucks China Chairman Wang Jing Ying made no secret of her confidence in the future growth of Starbucks China, "After struggling to overcome the challenges of the epidemic, Starbucks China is even more resilient. Our confidence in the China market is long-term and strong. This announcement of our 2025 China strategic vision will enable us to more deeply embrace new development opportunities and always lead the coffee industry forward."

It is no coincidence that McDonald's, a large global multinational chain, has also accelerated its layout in the ready-to-drink coffee market this year. Also in September, McDonald's specialty artisanal coffee brand McCafé announced that it expects to add about 1,000 stores in 2023, mostly in third-tier cities. At the same time, McCafé also began to make efforts in the product line, completely off the shelves latte, the launch of the "milk iron series". It is understood that the "milk iron" is a new milk coffee product developed by McCafe on the basis of understanding the coffee taste of Chinese consumers. It will be sold as the exclusive star product of McCafe in nearly 2,500 McCafe stores nationwide for a long time, and this will help McCafe to achieve higher growth.

Behind all this, the rapid growth of China's coffee consumption market in recent years has really caught the world's attention. According to the "2022 China Freshly Ground Coffee Industry Research Report" released by Ariadne Consulting, the size of China's freshly ground coffee market was about 87.6 billion yuan in 2021, an increase of 38.9% compared to the previous year. The report predicts that China's freshly ground coffee market size is expected to reach 190 billion yuan by 2024. "China's freshly ground coffee chain brands and stores are mostly concentrated in the southern market and high tier cities, and there is still more room for penetration in the northern and mid-western markets and the sinking market in low tier cities." The report said.

After checking the above report, the reporter found that by comparing the number of Weibo followers and product prices of different typical merchants of freshly ground coffee, the brand voice of foreign coffee brands is generally higher than that of local brands. Ariadne analyst Liu Chenyu said, "Brand voice can be expressed as the product of the number of Weibo followers of a brand and the average unit price of a product. With the same conversion rate of online traffic, the more followers there are, the larger the potential consumption volume. On this basis, if the product's customer unit price is higher, the larger the brand's revenue scale will be."

In Liu Chenyu's view, it is because of these foundations that more and more overseas brands are looking more towards China for future performance growth. According to Liu Chenyu, the main raw material of freshly ground coffee - coffee cooked beans mainly from foreign coffee bean growing areas, coffee culture itself also originated in Europe and the United States. Therefore, in terms of raw material procurement, product control and cultural understanding, overseas brands have more advantages and are more likely to form a deep resonance with coffee lovers, and this is one of the reasons why overseas brands are currently making a big noise in China's freshly ground coffee industry.

"However, the emerging domestic local freshly ground coffee brands, as latecomers, have brought a larger online traffic dividend to the whole industry, and also provide a value reference for overseas brands to accelerate their online layout." Liu Chenyu told reporters that China's freshly ground coffee market still has more room for growth, and with the gradual development of the national coffee consumption habit, the scale of this market is still expanding.

She said that both overseas and local brands should focus on the following aspects when laying out the Chinese freshly ground coffee market in the future: First, to build a dynamic closed loop of the whole industry chain from upstream quality raw material supply to online and offline full contact linkage to consumer ecological service system construction and maintenance. Second, to fully explore the potential space around the high tier cities, expand the radiation range of stores and accurately cover the potential consumers of freshly ground coffee. Third, it understands the consumption psychology of contemporary young people, and through the expansion and iteration of the category, it generates phenomenal products and redefines freshly ground coffee. Fourth, the combination of Western-style coffee culture and Chinese oriental traditional culture, derived from the new Chinese characteristics, from the perspective of the cultural concept to create the brand's competitive advantage of differentiation.