The author | Ear East Chen
Editor| Wu Shuyi
Bach once wrote a musical called "Coffee Cantata" about a girl in the 1730s who loved coffee, but for Germany of that era, coffee was an expensive import. Young people, especially girls, who love to drink coffee, will be regarded as good and bad by their elders.
The girl's father used "introduce you to a good Lang Jun" as bait to persuade her to give up drinking coffee, but she did not expect that the girl would not marry unless she could drink coffee after marriage.
Not getting married is not a big surprise today, but to be clear, it was 18th-century Europe, more than a century before Ibsen wrote The Doll's House calling for women to awaken. Being able to drink coffee without getting married is a shock.
This plot sounds strange at first, but people who love coffee should be able to understand the most famous sentence in it, "If you don't drink coffee in the morning, I'm like a piece of dry roast lamb".
Is coffee really that important?
Today, more and more people in China are positive about the issue.
According to the White Paper on China's Hand-Ground Coffee Industry 2021, in first- and second-tier cities, consumers who have developed the habit of drinking coffee have 300 cups of coffee per person per year. This data is on par with per capita coffee consumption in mature coffee consumption markets such as the United States, South Korea, and Japan.
This is inseparable from the market education of Luckin Coffee in recent years, of course, it has also paid the "tuition fee".
From the initial "catch-up" social scene needs to today's daily life needs, the public's perception of coffee has changed, from psychological to physiological, people's dependence on coffee has changed.
This requires that the quality of coffee also change.
01
From the superstar of the investment world, the connector of coffee culture and Chinese consumers, to the infighting and delisting, the plot of Luckin is too ups and downs, but to the surprise of many people, Luckin is still alive and well.
In April this year, Luckin first reached a new round of financing agreements with Dabo Capital and Joy Capital totaling US$250 million, and completed the purchase of 1,000 tons of Yunnan specialty coffee beans for the new production season of 2020/2021.
After the thunderstorm, after the rollercoaster development, Luckin ushered in its own "nirvana".
There are traces of things to follow.
An intriguing phenomenon is that last year's epidemic and the drastic changes in the company did not keep consumers away from Luckin.
By the end of 2020, luckin has a total of nearly 4,800 stores, with sales of more than 300 million cups of ready-made drinks and nearly 100 million registered users.
Compared with the sensitivity of the capital market and the media to Luckin, the coffee consumers cultivated by Luckin pay more attention to convenience and affordability, and under the epidemic, the safety of coffee shops is also a new indicator of consumption.
Luckin just happened to be able to match.
Luckin site selection are in the area of dense office buildings, self-pickup is often more convenient than takeaway, during the epidemic period, many office buildings are prohibited from takeaway into the building, rather than adding a delivery fee to go downstairs to take takeaway, it is better to order online with coupons and then pick up in the store.
Consumers who go to Luckin have more needs to stay than consumers who go to Starbucks, take coffee and leave, have a short time in the store, have less contact with people, and are relatively safe during the epidemic.
Therefore, Luckin's store business has been performing well.
Although as of the third quarter of last year, the total number of Luckin directly operated stores decreased from 4507 at the end of 2019 to about 4000, during the Spring Festival holiday in 2021, Luckin Coffee opened more than 1900 stores nationwide, with the number of ready-made beverage cups nearly 5 times that of the same period last year, and the revenue was nearly 7 times that of the same period last year.
What is visible to the naked eye is that Luckin is no longer obsessed with opening enough stores to open 10,000 stores, and the speed of rushing into stores has slowed down, and the sales of drinks have become higher.
It is precisely in this way that Luckin can bottom out and rebound and regain the favor of capital.
02
Last December, Luckin became "black".
Different from the small blue cup with blended beans in the past, Luckin launched a limited edition king fried product with gold characters on a black background, "Little Black Cup · SOE Yega Shefi", there are three new products of Yega Shefi American, Yega Shefi Latte, Andyaka Shefi Ori White.
The limit is not a gimmick, it is a real material.
Synonymous with Ethiopian specialty coffee, The collection is soft and bright in the mouth, with a distinctly local flavor and a more balanced and mellow taste.
After the first launch in the Beijing and Shanghai markets, the small black cup has won a lot of praise, some reviews say, whether it is the small black cup American, or the small black cup latte, both have a citrus flavor, caramel and nutty aroma to maintain a stable taste, the overall balance is mellow, the afterglow is long-lasting.
As a result, some say Luckin has upgraded, and some say Luckin has made SOE (Single Origin Espresso) more accessible.
After testing the water, the little black cup was promoted nationwide.
Luckin developed the small black cup, the original intention is to give consumers more choices, to meet the existing users, the single production area of coffee beans like consumers, but also to attract new consumers to enter the game.
Recently, Luckin SOE Yunnan Hongmi series coffee - Yunnan Hongmi American, Yunnan Hongmi Latte and Yunnan Hongmi And Yunnan RedMi and Aorui White have successively landed in Luckin Coffee's national stores, which is the successor to Luckin Coffee's launch of the high-end product line "Little Black Cup · SOE Yega Shefi", another important step in the promotion of Luckin's specialty coffee strategy.
This time Luckin chose yunnan specialty coffee beans.
In the planting areas of Baoshan and Pu'er in Yunnan Province, where the altitude is more than 1300 meters, the coffee green beans with an SCA score of more than 80 points were selected and were collected by Luckin.
In order to better highlight the fruity flavor of Yunnan coffee beans and make the coffee flavor more balanced, Luckin uses a niche and costly "double anaerobic red honey treatment".
On the one hand, Luckin wants to use the "Little Black Cup" series to become a connector from mass coffee to specialty coffee and enhance the professionalism of the brand; on the other hand, good quality coffee can increase consumer stickiness and enhance the irreplaceability of the brand.
Yunnan coffee beans are the best choice to help Luckin do national coffee.
03
There is such a scene in the movie "Arriving Home at One Point" about Yunnan Coffee.
On the podium of the second exchange meeting of the China Coffee Association, three young people with young faces received the trophy, and the coffee-related practitioners and enthusiasts from all over the world raised a glass to drink the Yunnan specialty coffee they produced.
Liu Haoran raised his hand and asked the people in the audience, "Is there any smell of distant mountains and woods?"
The coffee that has just been imported has a slightly sour grape, a cinnamon aroma and the sweetness of roasted nuts mixed with the sweetness of fruit preserves and chocolate, accompanied by a slight mint coolness, fragrant but not greasy, and a mellow aftertaste.
The people in the audience also raised their hands, "there is a smell of distant mountains and woods."
Does it really smell like a "distant mountain forest"? This is not false.
The places where coffee is grown in Yunnan Province are mainly located in the west and south between 15° north latitude and the Tropic of Cancer, at an altitude of 1000-2000 meters. The terrain is dominated by mountains and slopes, the terrain is undulating, the soil is fertile, coupled with the plateau sunshine is abundant, the rainfall is abundant, the temperature difference between day and night is large, and the unique natural conditions have formed the characteristics of Yunnan coffee taste is strong but not bitter, fragrant but not strong, slightly fruity.
As early as the 1950s, Yunnan coffee was very popular in the international market, but over the years, Yunnan coffee realization, and coffee color is not directly proportional to the color of coffee.
As reflected in "Arriving Home at One Point", for a long time, Yunnan coffee was purchased by foreign manufacturers, then uniformly packaged, labeled, and sold around the world.
People can only remember the brand of coffee, but they can't remember the origin of coffee, which is a kind of harm to Yunnan.
Nowadays, Luckin + Yunnan has become a new way to open Yunnan coffee.
The advantages of Yunnan coffee are reflected in the unique flavor.
In addition, favorable policy support is also an important reason for the cooperation between Luckin and Yunnan Coffee.
As early as June 2018, the Department of Agriculture of Yunnan Province organized experts to compile the "Three-Year Action Plan for the Coffee Industry (2018-2020)", which established the goal of taking "quality and market" as the core and developing specialty coffee as the direction, laying a solid foundation for the coffee industry, and building Yunnan into an important production area of specialty coffee in the world.
After there is policy support, it needs the blessing of a national brand, complementing each other, the sales channel of Yunnan specialty coffee can be good, and the strategy can be landed.
As the most well-known local brand, Luckin is undoubtedly the best partner.
Luckin Coffee uses the red honey treatment method to highlight the flavor and taste of Yunnan beans, while using market popularity and huge consumers to enhance the popularity of Yunnan coffee.
At the same time that Luckin purchases Yunnan beans, Yunnan beans in turn empower Luckin, a national brand. The combination of the advantages of the two is a 1+1>2 initiative.
04.
"China Hand-ground Coffee Industry White Paper 2021" mentioned that at present, Chinese coffee consumers are mainly white-collar workers in first-tier cities between the ages of 20-40, most of whom have bachelor's degrees or above and have a high income level.
In the future, with the improvement of education level and the improvement of disposable income, the potential coffee consumer population will continue to expand.
In the past, Chinese consumers consumed freshly ground coffee for the purpose of business scene needs, and now, with the pressure of work, some people have become dependent on coffee from physical or psychological.
The new generation of post-90s consumers, as the main group of freshly ground coffee intake, on the one hand, are in the rising period of their careers, and for the needs of work, the demand for coffee intake for the purpose of refreshing is greater; On the other hand, with the obvious improvement of the health awareness of the young generation, more and more people pursue "weight loss" and "health maintenance", and the effect of coffee in promoting metabolism and swelling in the new city has been widely concerned, and some young people consume coffee, but also in order to lose weight and burn fat.
For these true sticky users, they care more about good taste than coffee prices.
In the past two years, Luckin's technology genes and own data platform have been able to achieve strong supply chain management, and the marginal effect of store expansion has decreased, bringing low-price coffee to consumers and forming the coffee habits of Chinese consumers.
After 2017, with the entry of Luckin, consumers' cognition of coffee has gradually changed from milk coffee with a lighter coffee taste, and the taste has gradually diversified.
Last year, Luckin's thick milk and raw coconut lattes were well received. "Little Black Cup · The launch of the SOE Yega Shefi series not only raises the brand tone and expands the new consumer groups dominated by business people, but also increases the user stickiness with good products and good word of mouth.
The Yunnan Red Honey is another answer sheet handed over by Luckin to consolidate the high-end line and increase stickiness users.
Nowadays, for Luckin, the product route is clearer, purchasing Yunnan coffee beans, with a strong supply chain and store layout, so that more people can taste the SOE coffee that can only be drunk in boutique cafes in the past.
The strategic planning is also clearer, and what Luckin wants to do is not a single category, but a connector of coffee.
Flowing water does not compete, but it is endless.