Recently the specialty coffee brand M Stand opened a run of concept stores built around handcrafted burgers in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and elsewhere — outlets designed to showcase brand philosophy and lifestyle rather than simply sell goods — with burgers priced from 28 to 78 yuan. At the same time the value coffee brand Cotti Coffee quietly ran a trial at one store in Ningde, Fujian, adding freshly poured draft beer and freshly fried snacks, with beer at a promotional 7.9 yuan a glass and snacks priced between 6.9 and 12.9 yuan. Two coffee brands with very different positioning have independently moved into light meals and snacks, a sign that coffee players are trying to broaden their product categories and find growth beyond the cup.
Within the coffee sector, the route into food is becoming more varied. Tims China entered brunch with a “coffee plus bagel” formula and launched lunch boxes in 2025, aiming to turn the bagel into a standalone meal line. Starbucks, on top of its coffee core, has been expanding its product mix around sugar-free drinks, high-protein items, fruit coffee, iced shaken tea and freshly baked food. M Stand and Cotti differ in going further: M Stand has launched specialty burgers at 28 to 78 yuan, while Cotti has priced draft beer at 7.9 yuan and fried chicken at 6.9 to 12.9 yuan, targeting late-night snacks in lower-tier markets. This collective crossover is not an attempt to become another Wallace; it is a search, against a backdrop of store densification and mounting cross-category competition from tea brands, for per-store growth that does not rely on new outlets.
Premiumising upward vs. penetrating downward
M Stand’s route is to test higher prices. As a directly operated specialty chain committed to “one store, one design”, its burger line continues the brand’s mid-to-high-end tone and aesthetic premium, made to order and using differentiated ingredients such as Wagyu beef, black tiger prawn and salmon, with the “handcrafted” concept used to support a 28 to 78 yuan price range. Plated with coffee, such food photographs well and travels on social platforms: as of October 26 the “M Stand burger store” topic on Xiaohongshu had 247,000 views and 1,236 discussions. M Stand’s product mix is unusual in other ways too. Its mini-program has long sold merchandise running from a 29 yuan stainless-steel coffee-bean scoop up to a 299 yuan home set, a 498 yuan leather-and-canvas tote, and cups in every material, shape and colour. M Stand is deliberately blurring its category boundary. It does not want consumers to read it as a coffee brand only, but to use coffee as a high-frequency entry point for purchases with higher ticket values, higher margins and stronger display value.
Unlike M Stand’s push upward, Cotti’s fried chicken and beer business is a penetration downward. Burgers and fried items are easier to standardise than other meals, and stores can cut the complexity of service with semi-finished products, reheating or shorter preparation flows, so food goes out faster. Public information shows Cotti has partnered with the sausage supplier Longda Foodstuff, which confirmed on an investor interaction platform that it mainly supplies sausage products to Cotti Coffee and that sales under the cooperation have exceeded 20 million yuan. The problem is that once cooking fumes, the smell of fried food and a late-night fast-food setting become fixed associations with Cotti’s coffee stores, pulling the brand back to a coffee narrative may cost more than rolling out a fried-chicken line.
The operational thresholds nobody sees
The most underestimated constraint on coffee stores moving into food is the hard limit of kitchen conversion. A coffee shop’s existing flow is designed around extraction, refrigeration and serving; freshly fried food requires dedicated frying equipment, an exhaust system and a heat-insulated work area, and older stores and small convenience formats have almost no room to add them. Many Cotti stores have expanded through joint-venture and store-within-a-store models, and some sites simply lack the hardware for hot food. If food is made by “central-kitchen pre-prep plus in-store reheating”, the gap in taste against food cooked to order will in turn affect repeat purchase.
Licensing and environmental oversight are a second hidden threshold. Permits for hot-food preparation, fume purification and wastewater acceptance are usually available in core commercial properties with catering facilities, but community stores and stores embedded in convenience outlets may not qualify. The sites M Stand chose, such as Changle Road in Shanghai, already meet commercial catering conditions, and Cotti’s Ningde pilot is a directly operated store; in the short term neither may roll out nationwide. Whether food can complement coffee, whether store operations can support the new categories, and whether consumers will pay for burgers and fried chicken in a coffee shop all remain to be seen.
New opportunities, new competition
This wave of food-led expansion is reshaping supply and demand up and down the chain. Upstream frozen prepared-food and meat-processing companies look set to gain orders. Beyond Longda Foodstuff, which already works with Cotti, leading prepared-ingredient manufacturers such as Sunner Development, Guolian Aquatic and Anjoy Foods all have the capacity to supply fried chicken and shrimp-burger semi-finished products to coffee stores and could share in the additional demand. As stores add hot food, demand rises for commercial kitchen equipment suited to small formats — smokeless fryers, smart ovens — and the equipment industry may see a refresh cycle. A higher share of food delivery also adds volume for cold-chain logistics and instant-retail platforms, making better use of store capacity in off-peak hours.
At the same time, coffee brands moving into full meals and late-night snacks will compete directly for customers with traditional Western fast food and value fast food, putting pressure on brands such as Yum China and Wallace. Yum China is itself working the same ground through its KPRO light-meal format aimed at urban health-conscious diners. Green-coffee trading and packaging suppliers are only marginally affected in the short term, but as coffee stores turn into heavier food operations the share of beverage revenue in the store mix will be diluted.
The coffee shop of the future may no longer be simply a place that sells coffee, but a composite space carrying coffee and the lifestyle around it. Menu categories will keep expanding, yet coffee remains the foundation of the business. Only players that strike the right balance between coffee and food — lifting the average ticket while holding their brand tone — can find a coherent position in this debate about where the coffee shop ends.
(The author is a researcher at the Economic Observer Research Institute.)
(By Yan Yuqiao)
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