At 10 o'clock on October 22, Nanjing Xuanwu Lake Park was already full of people. Coffee and youth culture lovers from Nanjing and surrounding cities rushed to "Cherry Island" island early in the morning to participate in the fourth "And Coffee Festival".
Continuing the "special" trend that emerged in 2020, seasonal special coffee from more than 100 brands in more than 20 cities across the country is still the most anticipated "star product" on the scene. Coffee roasting, origin flavors, latte art... Popular buzzwords in the coffee industry have sunk to the consumer group, leading a new wave of punch card boom. Cross-border cooperation in lifestyle categories such as illustration graffiti, original design, urban camping, life aesthetics, etc. and coffee has also been mastered and favored by many consumers.
Coffee festivals, not just coffee.
"It's alcohol-free, but it has a strong bouquet of wine." Beijing Cafe 1/4 One Quarter Coffee Lab brought the creative specialty coffee "hops" that had won the second prize of domestic coffee competitions, and it attracted the attention of many people at the beginning of its sale. The "Tofu Brain Latte" from Tianjin Temper Coffee has also successfully gone out of the circle with the bold ideas of combining tradition and modernity, and colliding with the trend of the market, gathering a wave of consumers to punch in and taste the early. The person in charge of Jinjiu Coffee told reporters that creative coffee is not only the art of collocation, but also emphasizes whether the effect of 1+1>2 can be achieved on the basis of the existing flavor. The Haipai special "house box" brought by Jinjiu Coffee and the shanghai long-established Shao Wansheng can also feel the flavor of the old plum soup in addition to the coffee.
For a cup of "special" work is not only direct contact with consumer coffee brands, Vitasoy, ADC natural selection of plant milk, wild plants, Otaly... Also eye-catching is the storm of "plant milk" blowing on the spot. Replacing milk with plant-based dairy products and uniting multiple coffee brands to develop creative coffee is the same choice for merchants, which is a mutually beneficial and win-win operation, for merchants, this is an effective channel to reach consumers directly; for consumers, this provides more choices beyond milk; for cafes, this means more experimental challenges and deeper thinking about products.
It is worth mentioning that this year, Starbucks participated in the activities of the coffee festival for the first time as an exhibiting brand, and "drove" the mini cute mobile coffee car into Xuanwu Lake, which was the first appearance of starbucks mobile coffee truck in the Jiangsu market, attracting the attention of the audience and becoming a beautiful landscape. The coffee body is covered with Starbucks classic white and green, and the audience can choose classic drinks and foods through the open large window, and can also save time in the on-site queuing through "fast" ordering, which is another flexible innovation of Starbucks to connect young consumers with coffee. Han Ximei, a partner who is busy in the coffee cart, said: "I am very happy to be able to serve the customers on the spot at the coffee festival, and I hope that our cute coffee cart will bring you a different and novel experience." In addition, starbucks coffee master Tao Chuang will also be on the spot this weekend to show his latte art and interact with the audience, he just won the 2021 Starbucks China Northeast Latte Art Challenge and Latte Spike Double Champion, and previously won the 2020 Starbucks China Latte Art Championship National Championship, the 2020 Starbucks Asia Pacific Latte Art Championship Runner-up, and the 2022 World Lahua Art Competition China Southwest Division Third Place.
In addition to Starbucks' latte art sharing, colorful immersive coffee experiences such as "blind guessing of coffee beans", "coffee bean tasting", "on-site analysis of a cup of creative specials" and so on will also bring surprises to consumers. The free sharing brought by senior coffee practitioners allows consumers to participate in interaction without threshold, and understand the whole industry chain knowledge point of coffee as a drink from picking, roasting, extraction to collocation, so as to increase their recognition and judgment of "good products". For sharers, the interactive sharing of the scene is also an important window for them to collect user feedback, and the degree to which everyone's cognition of coffee has reached, how accepting emerging products, and how much feedback on creative collocations will be used as an important basis for their subsequent decision-making.
Coffee is an imported product, and along with it is centuries of café culture. People always think of a series of stories when they talk about cafes: Hemingway wrote in a café in Paris; the Café des Flora on the left bank of the Seine was once the birthplace of the "existentialist" genre; Picasso, Dali, Miró and Gaudí were all regulars at the Café des Cats in Barcelona. The glory of the old days is gone, but we have found another way of coffee colliding with local culture and integrating with life at the young "And Coffee Festival": younger, closer to the public, and showing extraordinary possibilities.
In 2021, there is also a coffee festival site, young illustrators from all over the country jointly exhibited, bringing the latest illustration works, zine, cultural and creative peripherals to form an "illustrator inspiration market", so that tourists who originally came to drink coffee can linger. A gray-haired grandfather at the scene told reporters that his son is also an illustrator, originally he thought that these were all useless things, but seeing that everyone liked these works so much, it seemed that he suddenly understood his son.
The improvisational performances brought by the Bashi Improv Troupe also achieved very good results. The organizer staff said that the linkage with the Nanjing Theater Festival was the idea that there was when the "And Coffee Festival" was organized two years ago, and it took two years to finally land, on the one hand, nanjing's coffee culture as a whole is better, and everyone can accept cross-border exchanges more easily and easily; on the other hand, the experience accumulated in previous coffee festivals gives them the confidence to show this matter in a more beautiful way.
It is worth mentioning that the coffee festival site is suitable for young tourists to develop a lot of sharing mini-games, such as the "coffee teasing a little" bean contest of the intersection news, the "call coffee" pop-up shop of Jingdong Electric Appliances has attracted many consumers to participate in the interaction, "In the end, what is won is actually not important, and strangers work silly for the same goal, and feel quite loving." ”
The coffee festival is not only a long knowledge of eating, drinking and having fun, but more importantly, it is also to attract people to go out of the house and discover more possibilities of life.
It is understood that the first "Yangtze River Delta Cities and Coffee Consumption Forum" will also be held at the same time as the "2021 Coffee Festival". In addition to creating urban life consumption cultural activities, the organizers and the life team are also committed to building an industry exchange platform to promote information sharing and collision of views, and to explore the pulling effect of "coffee consumption" in the development of urban new economy and soft elements such as urban cultural empowerment, prominent scene construction, market vitality, global tourism promotion, and improvement of supply quality, providing a new perspective for Nanjing to build an international consumption center city. Qian Dayong
Source: Purple Cow News