Pu’er Coffee

 I first entered the world of specialty coffee around 2010. At that time, the development of specialty coffee across China was still in its infancy. Most people still viewed coffee as a “bourgeois lifestyle,” a bit of a luxury, something bitter, something you couldn’t drink without sugar... and so on. But do you know how dramatically China’s specialty coffee landscape has changed in the past 10–15 years? What happened along the way? Today, based on market reports and data I’ve reviewed, let’s take a look back together. We can begin with some tangible, quantifiable data. In the past decade, China’s coffee consumption has grown by 150% . The trade of green coffee beans has surged, with demand for imports from Brazil and Ethiopia skyrocketing. In 2023–24, Brazil’s coffee exports to China increased by 186.1% year-over-year. Domestic coffee consumption in China has been growing at an annual rate of over 15% —more than five times the 2023/24 global average reported by the Internation...

 Outside a trendy café on Nanjing West Road in Shanghai, young people line up holding seasonal “Osmanthus Latte” cups for photos. In office buildings, coffee delivery lockers are restocked by riders every ten minutes, with a single locker serving over 300 cups daily. Thousands of miles away, at a county market in Yichang, Hubei, vendor Lao Wang’s drink cart prominently advertises “soy milk, black tea, iced cola,” while the word “coffee” appears in tiny print at the bottom of the menu. When middle school students ask about it, he laughs and waves them off: “That stuff tastes bitter like herbal medicine. I hear it keeps you awake all night. Better grab some black tea—three yuan, quenches thirst and calms you.” These starkly contrasting scenes paint a vivid picture of China’s coffee consumption market. According to professional estimates for 2025, between 1 billion and 1.27 billion people in China have never had coffee. Behind this number lies a complex landscape shaped by consumption...