On the first day of 2024, a touch of orange fragrance overflowed from Luckin's coffee cup, and Luckin Coffee and Chu's Agriculture, a well-known fruit brand, announced the joint launch of a new product, Chu Orange Latte, and sent a blessing message of "New Year, All Wishes Come True", attracting everyone to buy and find a good omen for the New Year.
At present, the competition in the coffee market is becoming increasingly fierce, and while major coffee brands continue to "cross borders", they also launch various preferential activities, so that consumers can hold a cup of "refreshing water" with only 9.9 yuan.
Co-branded fruit brands have become a new trend
As a fast-rising local coffee chain brand in China, Luckin Coffee has become one of the largest coffee chain brands in China with the largest number of stores. Chu orange is a classic case in the fruit industry, its unique taste and quality have won the love of the majority of consumers, and has a good reputation and wide recognition in the market.
The reporter learned from the Luckin store on Chunxi Road that the "Chu Orange Latte" uses Chu orange as the raw material, combining fresh Chu orange juice with Luckin Coffee's Luckin Coffee Reschito extract concentration to create a unique taste and texture, "making people feel full of 'orange'." Some netizens commented.
In addition to coffee brands, more and more brands are launching co-branded models with various fruits. Last summer, Subway partnered with avocado producers to launch the Avocado Sandwich, a healthy choice that offers consumers a rich, palatable option. McDonald's has partnered with pineapple producers in Hawaii to launch the Pineapple Hawaiian Burger. Haidilao has also launched the grapefruit hot pot base "pomelo money pot" based on fresh grapefruit, and the grapefruit-flavored hot pot has made many curious consumers choose to try it.
Affordable coffee is more popular
In February 2023, the fledgling Cudi Coffee launched the "Coffee Carnival in 100 Cities and 1000 Stores", during which in addition to the 8.8 yuan event for newcomers, there are more than 70 hot-selling products all on sale at 9.9 yuan. Within two weeks, Cudi's total sales exceeded 1.53 million.
It was this carnival that set off a price war in the coffee market. In April of the same year, Luckin announced that more than 10,000 stores across the country would implement a long-term discount of 9.9 yuan for a single cup of coffee once a week. In the first week of the event, Luckin sold 39 million cups, and in the first month of the event, the number of paying users of Luckin exceeded 50 million. In October, Cudi Coffee launched a "8.8 yuan free purchase" campaign on Douyin......
In a short period of time, these round-up promotions have involved almost all coffee players of all sizes. Open the Starbucks App, and you can see the 39.9 yuan two cups of American or latte "special star delivery" opening screen advertisement, as well as 49.9 yuan double cups of new coffee, 69.9 yuan limited time three cups of designated drinks and other activities. This means that the average unit price of Starbucks' core products and new products launched in the current season falls in the range of about 20 yuan per cup.
Canadian coffee chain brand Tims also raised the price of coffee to 9.9 yuan for the first time in September last year, and to this day, it can still be purchased at 9.9 yuan on third-party platforms such as Meituan and Douyin.
Although the struggle is fierce, brands such as Luckin, Cudi, and Starbucks have achieved rapid expansion in the price war and the competition for the sinking market. The competition of low-price promotion of coffee has attracted the input of consumers, and coffee has also achieved mass popularization in the domestic market. According to the statistics of the "2023 China Urban Coffee Development Report", the scale of China's coffee industry will reach 200.7 billion yuan in 2022. It is estimated that by 2025, the industrial scale will reach 369.3 billion yuan.
In this back-and-forth price change, there are also some coffee brands that have to regret reducing the scale of their operations. Recently, Shanghai's specialty coffee brand Seesaw Coffee was revealed to be suspended in many stores across the country, and at present, iBrandi has observed that on Dianping, its store in Wuhan MixC has been suspended, and there is no store in Wuhan in the store community of the official public account of "Seesaw Coffee". It is reported that a number of Seesaw stores in other cities have also been closed.
In this regard, relevant people analyzed that when consumers are Xi drinking coffee at a preferential price, it is difficult to accept high-premium brands, and in this case, it seems a little out of place to take the high-quality and high-price route.
Chengdu Daily Jinguan News reporter Wang Liu Some pictures are taken from the Internet Responsible editor He Qitie Editor Wen Zhu