Frontline | After the exclusive cooperation with Ele.me expired, Starbucks and Meituan launched a takeaway delivery cooperation

On January 18, starbucks, a well-known coffee chain, announced a partnership with Meituan to allow its users to order coffee takeaways through the Meituan platform.

In addition to the takeaway delivery partnership, the two sides will also launch a service that allows users to make private reservations to taste and learn to make coffee at Starbucks stores.

Previously, the three-year exclusive delivery cooperation agreement between Starbucks and Ele.me, a takeaway delivery platform under Alibaba, expired on December 31, 2021, and the two sides did not renew the exclusive agreement, but the delivery cooperation continued. Before reaching a cooperation with Meituan, the market also rumored that Starbucks had negotiated with potential partners including SF, Meituan, and Wal-Mart's Sam's Club. However, in the end, it was Meituan, China's largest food delivery platform, that won the latest cooperation with Starbucks.

As of now, Starbucks Special Star Delivery has been fully listed on the Meituan takeaway platform, and there are still Starbucks Special Star Delivery services on the Hungry Mo platform. Ele.me said that there has been no change in access to Starbucks stores, and services such as special star delivery and star collection are not affected in any way.

Starbucks is the crown jewel of brands in the entire O2O field, and reaching cooperation with Starbucks often has more meaning than pure commercial cooperation.

In August 2018, Alibaba reached a strategic cooperation with Starbucks, regarding Starbucks as a very important partner, which is the first cooperation of Alibaba's key customer program "A100". Alibaba launched systematic concepts such as "Alibaba Business Operating System" and "Alibaba Digital Economy", telling the story of all-round cooperation between the Various Businesses of the Group and brand owners.

Alibaba's A100 cooperation with Starbucks was personally agreed upon by the highest levels of the two sides, and Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang and Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson attended the strategic cooperation conference at the same time. Daniel Zhang use "wedding ceremony" to describe this cooperation conference, but in "before marriage", the "days have already passed", and the "post-marriage" days must also think about how to be "happy and happy".

Alibaba, as a platform party, rarely endorses such a high-level brand, which shows the importance of Starbucks. At that time, Alibaba had just acquired Ele.me, and there were still ambitions in China's food delivery market. Although Ele.me has lagged behind Meituan in terms of market share, Ali still took advantage of the synergy between the complex businesses of the entire group and won the exclusive cooperation with Starbucks.

However, with the continuous changes in the takeaway delivery market, the gap between Ele.me and Meituan is getting wider and wider. Ali, which continues to face the challenges of the e-commerce retail market, has also begun to emphasize "agile organization" and seems unwilling to pour more efforts into supporting Hungry. As a result, ali's exclusive cooperation with Starbucks for three years , "marriage" eventually ceased to exist in fact due to the "intervention" of the US group.

It is worth noting that under the high-pressure situation of technology company supervision in recent years, although the US group successfully won the favor of Starbucks, it did not make a high-profile publicity and hold a cooperation conference like Ali three years ago, nor did any executives of both sides endorse this cooperation.

Editor| Qiao Qian