At a Glance (China Coffee Network): “Morning coffee for energy, afternoon milk tea for survival.” This young people’s catchphrase is now being written into Luckin’s financial report by Luckin. This ten-thousand-store giant that started by selling coffee has quietly sold 20 billion yuan of tea. When a cup of light milk tea’s sales can rival the classic latte, when non-coffee drink cup volume exceeds one-fifth, we can’t help but ask: do consumers walk into Luckin for caffeine, or for that sip of sweetness? The answer is hidden behind this report card.
“Morning coffee for energy, afternoon milk tea for survival.” This young people’s catchphrase is now being written into Luckin’s financial report by Luckin. This ten-thousand-store giant that started by selling coffee has quietly sold 20 billion yuan of tea. When a cup of light milk tea’s sales can rival the classic latte, when non-coffee drink cup volume exceeds one-fifth, we can’t help but ask: do consumers walk into Luckin for caffeine, or for that sip of sweetness? The answer is hidden behind this report card.
20 billion—a delayed report card.
In June 2026, Luckin first publicly disclosed its non-coffee beverage report card: as of May 31, cumulative total sales of freshly made tea drinks and non-coffee categories exceeded 20 billion yuan, cumulatively creating 22 single products with sales exceeding 100 million cups.
What does this number mean? In 2025 Luckin’s full-year total net revenue was 49.288 billion yuan; 20 billion is about 40% of its full-year revenue. For a brand built on coffee, selling tea at nearly half the volume of its main business—this can no longer be summarized as a side business.
From the product side, the hit matrix has begun to take shape. “Coconut Latte,” though with “latte” in the name, belongs to the non-coffee system’s classic product, with cumulative sales exceeding 2.1 billion cups; “Light Jasmine Milk Tea” sales over 400 million cups; “Apple Kale Tea” also approaching 100 million cups. Luckin official data shows that currently non-coffee drink cup volume exceeds 20%, equivalent to 1 in every 5 drinks sold being a fruit tea or light milk tea.
Luckin didn’t firmly walk the tea-selling path from the start; the turning point came in 2024.
In 2023, Luckin was still in a high-growth period, full-year total net revenue 24.903 billion yuan, up 87.3% year-on-year, self-operated store same-store sales growth rate over 21%. At that time, tea-drink products were more decoration of the product line than strategic focus.
By 2024, industry price wars kept escalating; Luckin self-operated store same-store sales growth rate turned to a decline of 16.7%. Meanwhile, total store count surpassed 30,000, and the marginal effect of acquiring new customers purely through coffee was diminishing. Against this backdrop, Luckin launched lemon tea, coconut water, and other products in June 2024, and a high-profile light milk tea series in August, issuing 9.9-yuan coupons for promotion, and inviting Liu Yifei as tea-drink product spokesperson, shouting the slogan “Morning coffee, afternoon tea.”
The logic behind this strategy is not hard to understand: although coffee consumption is increasingly popular in China, the audience base and drinking time slots still have limitations, especially in winter or lower-tier markets, where coffee’s functionality often gives way to hedonism. By expanding light milk tea, fruit tea, and other non-coffee categories, Luckin tapped into the broader pan-drink market, covering a wider consumer group and more diversified consumption scenarios.
As of May 31, 2026, Luckin’s global store total exceeded 35,000. Such a huge store network needs a rich enough product line to support per-store efficiency improvement. Selling tea is essentially doing incremental business on the basis of existing stores.
Industry mirror: the boundary between tea and coffee is accelerating disappearance.
Luckin’s 20-billion achievement is not an isolated case; the entire freshly made drink industry is undergoing a de-bordering transformation.
Starbucks China began strengthening the non-coffee market last June, implementing across-the-board price cuts on dozens of products such as Frappuccino, iced shaken tea, and tea lattes, and linking with Disney’s Zootopia IP to launch co-branded iced shaken tea, continuously enriching the non-coffee product line.
Cotti Coffee perennially sells fruit tea, milk tea, and smoothies; its hit products almost fully replicate the product structure and naming logic of new tea drinks.
Ken Coffee recently launched multiple non-coffee new products such as brown-sugar pearl milk tea, lemon tea, and apple iced tea.
Conversely, new tea-drink brands are also attacking the coffee market. Guming has scaled up its coffee category since the second half of 2024; as of end-2025, over 12,000 stores have completed coffee category deployment. Consumers’ choice logic is undergoing a fundamental shift, with the decision focus moving from “is this a coffee shop or a tea shop” to “is this drink good.” Category labels are giving way to the product experience itself.
Under the halo: the stock competition of the tea-coffee industry.
The 20-billion achievement is indeed dazzling, but examined against the whole industry, tea-coffee consumption is entering a new cycle of stock gaming and refined operation.
According to the “2026 China Tea Drink and Coffee Data Insight Report,” although the total scale of tea-drink stores exceeds 300,000, the expansion speed has clearly slowed; in the past 11 months, 174,000 new stores opened and 137,000 closed, the industry entering a stock-competition stage of high liquidity and high shuffle rate. Although the coffee track is still expanding, stores grew from 173,000 to 226,000, but the growth rate is also slowing.
More noteworthy is the dilemma of rising revenue without rising profit: the report shows 71.8% of enterprises saw revenue growth, but only 43.6% saw net-profit growth. Price bands highly overlap; 72% of tea-drink stores are concentrated in the 10–20 yuan range, and 45% of coffee stores also cluster there; fierce fighting squeezes everyone’s profit space.
This is precisely the deep background of Luckin’s 20-billion report card: under overall industry pressure, leading brands improve per-store efficiency through category expansion, competing for consumers’ limited drink budgets—an inevitable strategic choice.
The core trend revealed by Luckin’s 20 billion in non-coffee sales is: tea-coffee consumption is moving from “category-driven” to “scenario-driven.” Consumers no longer care whether a drink comes from a coffee brand or a tea-drink brand, but pay more attention to whether it can satisfy a specific scenario—morning refreshment function, afternoon emotional consumption, summer heat-relief need, winter warmth need.
From the market perspective, in 2025 China’s freshly made drink market scale exceeded 500 billion yuan, of which freshly made tea drinks about 302 billion yuan and freshly made coffee about 198.7 billion yuan; the coffee track’s CAGR (10.7%) is slightly higher than tea drinks (8.6%). Both tracks are still growing, but growth rates have shifted from galloping to jogging.
However, this cross-border integration is not without risk. Category expansion means more complex product-line management and supply-chain reuse capability; increased store operation procedures also place higher demands on standardized operation. In addition, when everyone starts selling everything, differentiation becomes even more difficult.
The 20-billion report card Luckin took the lead in submitting is both a powerful verification of the tea-coffee fusion trend and the starting line of a new round of competition. When category boundaries disappear, whoever can occupy users’ minds through full-time, full-scenario, full-category operational capability will win the next game in the stock-competition era.
20 billion is not just a sales number; it’s more like a declaration: in the freshly made drink industry, the category boundary between “coffee” and “tea drinks” has quietly disintegrated, and consumers’ choice is returning to the product itself. Relying on its huge store network and supply-chain capability, Luckin has taken the lead in completing the transformation from “coffee brand” to “drink platform.” However, the dividend of cross-border integration will eventually fade; when all brands start doing full categories, the ultimate barrier of competition will return to product innovation and operational efficiency. This tea-coffee fusion feast has just begun; whoever can continuously launch good products that consumers are willing to reorder will have the last laugh.
Author: Food and Beverage Experience.
Reprint Notice & Disclaimer: This article is reprinted from industry media. Original by Food and Beverage Experience. All rights belong to the original publisher.
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