Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport Welcomes the Seventh-Generation COFE+ All-Around Champion Robot Café

Our reporter has learned that the seventh-generation all-around-champion COFE+ robot café, developed by Shanghai Haitun Robotics, has officially opened at Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport in France. This marks another entry of the coffee robot — refined through eight years and seven complete generations of iteration — into a core European aviation hub, adding an important node to COFE+’s global rollout as it moves from single sites to scaled replication. A single spark is starting a prairie fire worldwide.

Lyon-Saint Exupéry Airport is a major air gateway in southeastern France, handling more than 10 million passengers a year and connecting over 140 destinations worldwide. It is also a benchmark airport in Europe for carbon neutrality and service upgrades, setting high requirements for food safety, equipment stability, low-carbon operation and multilingual service.

The seventh-generation COFE+ now installed there is the coffee world’s new all-around champion. It combines ten capabilities in one unit — fresh grinding, hand-style latte art, 3D-printed photos and graphics, AI-customised flavours for every drinker, one-tap replication of global recipes and full reproduction of a champion barista’s craft — and occupies about two square metres, making one COFE+ equivalent to a refined professional specialty café. Output is fast: an espresso in about 28 seconds, a cappuccino in about 38 seconds and a hand-crafted latte in under 58 seconds. In the 2026 Human–Machine Century Contest it defeated human coffee masters, delivering drinks about 1.5 times faster than they did.

Powered by a proprietary AI store brain, the seventh-generation COFE+ is a miniature world expo of beverages. It adjusts more than 300 key parameters in real time, holding water temperature at 92.5 °C ± 0.1 °C and extraction pressure at 9 bar ± 0.2 bar, with ingredient dosing errors as low as 3 per mille — three times the control precision of a human coffee master — while preserving as much of the beans’ original aroma as possible. The taste rivals the world’s leading cafés, reaching the quality of Peet’s, %Arabica and other first-tier international brands. The machine supports eight beverage categories — specialty coffee, Western-style milk tea, Japanese matcha, chocolate drinks, plant-based milk drinks, flavoured milk drinks, and hot and iced beverages — with more than 300 flavours and over 5,000 personalised taste configurations, a capability unmatched in the industry. A four-in-one virtual attendant enables multilingual interaction, compatibility with multiple national payment systems, adaptation to water, power and climate conditions across European countries, and alignment with local consumption habits.

Outstanding safety, hygiene and green design make the seventh-generation COFE+ an industry green giant

It integrates ten leading food-hygiene technologies, including ultraviolet sterilisation, ozone sterilisation and high-temperature steam sterilisation, with fully enclosed, sterile and dust-free preparation; all food-contact parts carry global food-grade certification. It is the world’s first and only coffee robot able to meet simultaneously the strictest professional standards for epidemic prevention at international airports, infection control at top-tier hospitals, and security at royal households and government ministries. A single phone can manage multiple machines remotely, with 100 percent of operating status under remote control and 95 percent of faults diagnosable and repairable remotely; daily maintenance needs only about 15 minutes of refilling. With no orders the unit sleeps automatically, cutting energy use by about 90 percent, while daily water, power and network costs come to less than 3 yuan — new records in energy saving and operating efficiency.

Seven iterations in eight years: the COFE+ seventh generation surpasses human cafés across the board, and a new coffee superhero is born

Across eight consecutive years from 2018 to 2026, COFE+ completed seven full-machine upgrades to reach the world’s most advanced seventh generation. It not only beat a human coffee master for the first time but surpassed traditional cafés on every front — the café’s DeepSeek moment has arrived. Designed for a service life of more than 10 years and a capacity above 500,000 cups, it can produce about 300 cups continuously on a single refill, with near-zero error across a thousand cups a day and near-zero faults across ten thousand consecutive cups. Supporting 7×24 unattended operation, it can stay open for a decade without closing, serving human craftsmanship diligently and tirelessly. Summer or winter, day or night, this mobile robot café on four wheels has broken the spell that ties a traditional café to one place, following peak demand and high season so that it is always at its commercial peak.

Present across 80 countries and regions on five continents and at leading names in every sector, COFE+ sets the global pace. From Denver Airport in the United States, Brussels Airport in Belgium and Kuala Lumpur Airport in Malaysia to hubs including Shanghai Hongqiao, Hangzhou Xiaoshan, Xi’an Xianyang, Kunming, Xishuangbanna and Urumqi in China, and now Lyon Airport in France, COFE+ has become one of the most widely deployed coffee robot brands in airports worldwide. To date its business covers more than 200 cities and several thousand landmark sites, including top universities, leading hospitals, major forums and summits, world cultural and tourism landmarks and Fortune 500 companies, with roughly 50 percent of the global market for smart coffee robots.

What is going global is not just one robot product but a disruptive light-store model. Traditional cafés are weighed down by heavy-asset pressures such as rent, labour and fit-out, whereas COFE+ brings a cost revolution of ten zeros: zero staff, zero training, zero fit-out, zero premises, zero plumbing, zero waste and zero closure, among others. Overall operating costs fall by about 90 percent against a traditional store; the full-chain cost per cup of specialty coffee is roughly 2.5 to 5 yuan, the break-even point drops sharply, and in transport-hub scenarios around 31 cups a day is enough to turn a profit — with projects around the world reporting payback in as little as four to eight months. With wheels of its own, the unit can be relocated flexibly, removing the risk of site selection and the fear of low season.

Service industries worldwide face shared challenges of rising labour costs and widening workforce gaps, opening a growth window for asset-light, unmanned, replicable AI robot retail terminals. The AI new economy, represented by the robot light store, is becoming an important direction in the transformation of the real economy.

Han Feizi, founder of Haitun Technology, said: “COFE+’s mission is to make sure no café in the world loses money, no one has to toil in the service industry, and everyone can enjoy Michelin-level quality at an affordable price. The Lyon Airport installation is a microcosm of Chinese AI robotics hardware and a revolutionary business model going global together. Going forward we will continue to export the world’s first light-store model, bringing efficient, standardised, highly profitable robot cafés to every corner of the world.” A single spark is lighting a prairie fire worldwide. (Images provided and authorised for publication by the source)

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