Author: Lei Jun
Editor: Meng Jiayi
Producer: Tea & Coffee Observer
01
Store-related news
Over the past week, tea-and-coffee brands continued filling regional gaps. Li Ruotao made its Shenzhen debut, with over 700 stores nationwide; Blue Bottle put up hoardings in Beijing, Nanjing, and Wuhan and plans to enter Zhengzhou and Xi’an; a tea-drink shop named “Gongyuan Xiangyin” opened at Nanjing Deji Plaza—Qichacha shows its major shareholder is Wu Tiejun, a director of the Deji Group.
Overseas, tea-and-coffee brands accelerated entry into Europe, America, and Southeast Asia. Cotti opened 1 new store in the Philippines; Luckin opened 2 new stores in Singapore; HeyTea opened its first Gelato Lab+ store in New York; Molie Yogurt opened its first New York store; Mixue opened 1 new store in South Korea.
Worth mentioning: Jasmine Milk White surpassed 3,000 stores and launched a “buy-one-get-one-free” anniversary campaign; on the first day stores in many cities saw peak foot traffic. Online warm-up via the mini-program’s “invite friends to unlock rewards” social-viral play saw, per brand data, over 10 million new users and over 100 million yuan in live-stream pre-sales.
02
Product-related news
Autumn-winter product launches are extending from single beverages to toppings, category crossovers, and daypart management—the logic is no longer just creating novelty.
Mid-October, the tea-coffee industry launched around pearl and dairy toppings. Luckin launched classic pearl milk tea and brown-sugar pearl milk tea; Oriental Molan launched brown-sugar fresh milk; Shu Yi Burned Grass Jelly launched taro puree brulee pearls; Starbucks China launched a new “soft cheese coffee” series; ChaPanda launched a semi-baked cheese-ball series.
Beyond drinks, some brands extended new products to tea foods and alcoholic beverages. HeyTea Tea House 2.0 added “fresh-made tea foods,” debuting freshly cut skin-on fries and salted boneless chicken legs, paired with 5 self-developed dipping sauces; Jasmine Milk White partnered with Budweiser Black Gold to launch two tipsy specials—Black Gold Beer with tree tomato, and Black Gold Beer with green apple.
These attempts expand stores’ product range and also offer more choices for consumption such as drink-with-snacks and friend gatherings, improving store daypart utilization and sales per square meter.
Additionally, Keurig Dr Pepper launched liquid concentrated coffee, targeting the iced-coffee and customized-drink market; the product will be offered under its four brands L’Or, Jacobs, Kenco, and Douwe Egberts across 20 countries, in three flavors—pure black, sweet caramel, and intense mocha.
On marketing, a tea brand leveraged a spokesperson for deep campaigns, but the instantaneous traffic also tested systems and stores’ carrying capacity. On October 11, Zheng Qinwen won the 2026 China Open women’s singles title, becoming the tournament’s first home-grown women’s singles champion. CHAGEE launched a full-day all-category and gelato buy-one-get-one-free campaign the next day, limited to official mini-program channels.
After launch, early-morning traffic flooded in; the mini-program showed loading anomalies around 8:40. Stores in core business districts such as Hangzhou and Wuhan saw order backlogs, and some temporarily closed online entry.
Regarding online rumors that “campaign drink costs are borne by franchisees,” CHAGEE responded that this was untrue. Meanwhile, the brand announced 13.5 million yuan in special rewards for store staff team-building and incentives.
Also, a coffee brand strengthened topic heat through creative merchandise and combo bundles, driving store sales. Luckin launched bean-bundling merchandise; buying a combo grants a full DIY material kit with two patterns to iron on. Within 3 hours of launch, multiple stores sold out, and related social-platform topic views reached 899,000.
On supply chain, upstream capacity keeps expanding. Finut’s “tea-coffee super factory” in Tongxiang officially opened in late September, with daily output of 600 tonnes of beverage base and nearly 200,000 tonnes annually. Nestlé simultaneously scaled regional capacity, announcing it will add US$1 billion in investment to its Mexican business between 2028 and 2030 to expand its Nescafé factory capacity and modernize facilities.
03
Money-related news
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- Original: NetEase, “HeyTea Sells Fried Chicken and Fries, Luckin Starts Bundling Beans | Tea & Coffee Weekly”
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