New Hot Drinks and Rising Coffee: Lanzhou’s “Warm Economy” Keeps Releasing Vitality

Editor’s note (coffeeyo.com): As temperatures drop, Lanzhou’s new hot drinks and rising coffee buzz are heating up, with the “warm economy” continuously releasing consumer vitality.

Recently, as a new round of widespread cooling swept across the country, the “warmth” on the streets of Lanzhou has only grown stronger. Walking through its alleys and lanes, consumer scenes built around “warmth” can be seen everywhere. At dinner time, a visit to several commercial complexes in the city found that major new-tea-drink brands had placed their winter hot-beverage promotions in prominent positions, and sales of hot drinks at new-tea and coffee stores inside office towers and shopping malls had risen noticeably. The “warm economy” keeps heating up, igniting the vitality of the consumer market this winter.

“Rich” Takes the Lead: Cocoa and “Cake Milk Tea” Become Hits

This winter, major tea-drink brands have uniformly turned their attention to the word “rich.”

As temperatures drop, HEYTEA’s popular winter hot drink “Snow Land · Yak Butter Cha Anmo” has returned, with taro-boba milk and several other warm drinks launched in tandem; their dense, mellow, healing and warming texture has also become a common direction for many tea brands’ winter product development.

Recently, ChaPanda’s cocoa half-baked cheesecake balls and Oreo half-baked cheesecake balls have gone viral — one drink delivers three dessert flavors, scooping out a cake-like dense texture, earning it the label “liquid cake” from many consumers. The so-called “cake milk tea” adds crème brûlée, cookie crumbs, dried cheese and other baked ingredients to milk tea, making the drink approach a real cake in both mouthfeel and appearance. Office worker Xiao Lin took the cake milk tea handed over by the clerk and couldn’t help but hold it up for a look first: “Drinking it really feels like eating a cake that’s melted in the mouth,” she said with a smile.

This “drinkable dessert” precisely hits young people’s psychology of seeking instant comfort under pressure — packing a piece of cake into a straw cup makes healing accessible anytime, anywhere.

On the “rich” track, cocoa has won the favor of major tea-drink brands. Nayuki recently launched the “Raw Cocoa · Dark Tea” series, built around a base blending Yunnan ripe pu-erh with Sichuan Ya’an dark tea and fused with cocoa to create a light, healthful autumn-winter drink, letting traditional dark tea enter daily life in a younger way.

Jasmine Milk White, at the end of October, launched the gold-award dark-chocolate-upgraded “Lava Hazelnut” series, featuring a richer and smoother chocolate mouthfeel. Aunts in Shanghai (Shanghai Auntie), while launching its slow-cooked red-bean series, also blended cocoa into its hot-drink matrix.

Putting Northwest Flavor Front and Center: Bottling “Lanzhou Warmth”

While national brands compete for the market with cocoa and rich textures, the Northwest local tea-drink brand Fangha has taken a distinctly different path. Stepping into a Fangha store, the aroma of freshly brewed pear soup greets you. As the weather turns cold, hot drinks have become the sales mainstay. On October 8, Fangha launched the “One Fresh-Brewed Pear” hot-drink series, brewing a whole Huangguan pear fresh each day and adding tremella, goji berries, longan and other ingredients, with derivatives such as rose pear, rice-wine pear and hawthorn pear — all made with fresh, natural ingredients. On October 26, Fangha launched the “One Hot Rice Pudding” series, blending Lanzhou’s traditional specialty snack huidouzi into milk tea and combining it with the modern-popular rice pudding and cocoa, then topping it with Lanzhou Kushui roses to roll out products such as rose rice-pudding huidouzu milk.

“Locally, autumn and winter are dry, so people generally drink pear soup to moisten the lungs and clear dryness — a dietary habit that is also common across other parts of the Northwest,” explained Shi Yajuan, marketing director of Fangha. “We let locals taste a familiar old flavor while gaining a fresh experience; outsiders find the combination novel, layered and not strange.”

“Fangha has always strived to interpret the tea-drink culture of Northwest produce, presenting products in a manner suited to each ingredient and translating them in the most fitting way,” Shi said.

Judging by product sales, this persistence has also met with market response. The “One Pear” series comprises four products, three of which rank among this month’s Top 10 drinks, with a fairly stable repurchase rate; within the rice-pudding series, rose rice-pudding huidouzu milk has become the single most popular item among consumers. “Huidouzi and ruan’er pears — in autumn and winter, our original intention was to turn the ‘sweet soup’ and ‘Northwest goodies’ in Lanzhou people’s memory into a tea drink they can hold in their hands,” Shi revealed, adding that a ruan’er pear winter limited series will also launch in December.

Amid the hot-drink consumption boom, business at freshly ground coffee stores has also seen clear growth. A visit to an independent coffee shop near Gannan Road found the owner explaining that after the temperature drop, hot drinks have firmly become the store’s sales mainstay. Sales of classic hot items such as lattes and flat whites have risen steadily, and the shop has also launched winter specials such as cinnamon apple latte and hot orange americano, using warm, fragrant flavors to suit the season. Many customers favor a cup of hot coffee, palm against the warm cup wall, the rich aroma slowly sliding down the throat — dispelling the chill of the street while finding a moment of relaxation amid the busyness.

Chain coffee brands are likewise seizing the winter consumption window, rolling out new products in turns. MANNER Coffee launched warm-toned drinks such as apple cappuccino, autumn-rose latte and honeycomb caramel latte, weaving fruit, floral and caramel sweet aromas into a layered winter flavor. Luckin Coffee rolled out the “First Cup of Winter Solstice” series, suiting young consumers’ winter preference for warm, sweet flavors, and sparked a check-in frenzy on social platforms the moment it launched.

Lucky Cup, under the Mixue Group, meanwhile cultivates the winter market with a value-for-money strategy, meeting the daily consumption needs of office workers and student groups at approachable prices. A cup of warm drink is both a choice for warding off the cold and a low-cost, easily accessible comfort for winter.

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Original article: NetEase, “New Hot Drinks and Rising Coffee: Lanzhou’s ‘Warm Economy’ Keeps Releasing Vitality”
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