2026 Dialogue Salon on High-Quality Coffee Industry Development Held in Guangzhou

At a Glance (China Coffee Network): GUANGZHOU, Oct. 18 — The "Bay Area Coffee Gathering, Chain Linking the World" 2026 Dialogue Salon on High-Quality Coffee Industry Development was held at the Guangzhou Canton Fair…

GUANGZHOU, Oct. 18 — The “Bay Area Coffee Gathering, Chain Linking the World” 2026 Dialogue Salon on High-Quality Coffee Industry Development was held at the Guangzhou Canton Fair Complex. It was organised by the Guangzhou Daily Press Group, the China Coffee League organising committee and the Guangzhou Coffee Industry Association, with support from China Construction Bank’s Guangzhou branch. Leading brands including Luckin Coffee and Starbucks, representatives of coffee-growing origins from Yunnan, Hainan and Vietnam, and more than a hundred companies along the industry chain attended.

Wang Xiaohua, a member of the Guangzhou coffee task force and first-class researcher at the municipal bureau of commerce, said that by the end of 2025 Guangzhou had more than 8,000 coffee shops, ranking second nationally and first in South China, with an annual output value of RMB 67 billion across the full industry chain and more than 150,000 jobs supported. During the Guangzhou Coffee Culture Season from May to August this year, the city added over 500 new outlets. Guangzhou’s coffee industry rests on the trade advantages of a millennia-old commercial city, the hub advantages of sea, land and air connectivity, the consumption advantages of a population approaching 100 million, the industrial advantages of a fully coordinated chain, and enduring cultural strengths. The city’s newly issued “Several Measures for Promoting High-Quality Development of Guangzhou’s Coffee Industry” (the “Ten Coffee Measures”) streamlines customs clearance for green-bean imports and builds a digital trading platform on the trade side; offers grants of up to RMB 30 million for a single technical-upgrade project in manufacturing; encourages the creation of coffee districts on the consumption side; introduces “coffee loans” in finance; and establishes a multi-tiered talent-development system.

Li Hong, head of the Yunnan coffee expert panel and vice-president of Yunnan Agricultural University, noted that in 1836 a Danish merchant opened China’s first coffee house, “North Wind and Sea”, on Jingyuan Street in the Thirteen Factories of Guangzhou. He believes the next major space for global coffee-consumption growth lies in Asia, with China an important force. Chen Zhenjia, director of the China Coffee Engineering Research Centre and secretary-general of the Asian Coffee Association, judges that Chinese coffee has entered a new cycle of scale, standardisation and branding, with an industry size of RMB 354.9 billion and average annual growth above 23%.

Two signing ceremonies took place at the salon. The China Coffee League organising committee, the Shanghai Lujiazui International Coffee Culture Festival organising committee and the coffee industry associations of nine provinces and cities including Yunnan, Hainan, Sichuan and Guangzhou signed a memorandum of cooperation covering joint standard-setting, inter-city exchange, talent development and brand building. The South China International Coffee Trading Innovation Centre signed collective agreements with six companies — Yunnan Zuoyuan, Hainan Mushan, Huasheng Coffee and others — worth more than RMB 108 million in total.

During the roundtable, Dong Lei, deputy general manager of the logistics company of Guangzhou Port Group, said the Nansha port area has surpassed 22 million TEU in container throughput, with 25 of its 218 liner routes reaching African coffee origins directly. Xu Yang, general manager of Guangzhou Commodity Exchange, described how the exchange has innovated green-coffee “import-in-bulk, retail-out” bonded trading on the back of Nansha’s institutional innovation; the platform has so far traded 13,700 tonnes, helping enterprises cut capital-occupation costs by more than 20%. Li Tong, CEO of Guangdong Kuku Intelligent Robotics, shared how embodied intelligence is empowering coffee retail: with six-axis robotic arms, an in-house SaaS system and an AI store-manager system, one person can oversee ten machines, compressing the share of labour cost in a store’s expenses from 30–50% to below 8%.

Responding to companies’ requests for scenario access, the Guangzhou bureau of culture, radio, television and tourism said it will continue to support scenic areas, libraries, star-rated hotels, cinemas and cultural venues in introducing intelligent coffee equipment in line with market-based operating models. The municipal bureau of commerce said that brands opening Asian or Chinese first stores in Guangzhou can receive subsidies of up to RMB 5 million per project. The municipal bureau of industry and information technology pledged support through technical-upgrade grants and manufacturing innovation centres.

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