How Shanghai Is Building a Full Coffee-Equipment Supply Chain

At a Glance (China Coffee Network): At the North Bund main venue of this year’s Shanghai International Coffee Festival, among 200-plus brands one zone stood apart from past years—it sold no beans and brewed no coffee, but showcased the equipment that makes it. A domestic grinder brand, LHOPAN, parked its booth beneath Lujiazui’s skyline with a RMB 168 home grinder. That scene captures how Shanghai’s coffee industry is shifting: equipment is moving from behind the bar into daily life, and in doing so is driving the nationwide rise of the whole coffee supply chain.

Source: Jiemian News (reporter Li Ye, editor Ya Hanxiang).

This year at the North Bund main venue of the Shanghai International Coffee Festival, among the 200-plus brands present there was a zone unlike previous years: it sold neither beans nor coffee, but gathered the equipment used to make coffee. One domestic grinder brand, LHOPAN, set its booth against Lujiazui’s skyline; its grinder, priced at just RMB 168 and aimed at daily home use, drew staff explaining the product to passersby.

A coffee enthusiast at the scene said he “drinks pretty casually, a bit of every flavor,” then listened with interest to LHOPAN’s pitch. This scene may illustrate the change underway in Shanghai’s coffee industry. The festival is no longer just a market for drinking coffee, and coffee equipment is no longer merely a professional tool for cafes. As coffee consumption keeps spreading across Shanghai, machines, grinders and roasting equipment are being pushed into more everyday positions, driving the development of related industries nationwide.

The 2026 China Urban Coffee Development Report, released on April 30, shows that China’s coffee industry reached RMB 354.9 billion in 2025, up 13.3% year on year; Shanghai’s coffee shops reached 10,336, officially crossing the 10,000-store threshold. For a city with 10,000 cafes, the spillover of coffee consumption shows not only in store counts but also in the clustering of equipment, supply chains and service companies.

A coffee-industry insider told Jiemian News that Shanghai has long been one of China’s most important distribution hubs for coffee-equipment trade and service systems. “Many well-known equipment traders, agents and system-service providers are registered or based in Shanghai, and serve the national market as a window from here,” he said, attributing it to the fact that Shanghai had the earliest batch of high-end hotels, Western restaurants and international chain brands, later joined by fast-growing boutique cafes, roasteries and corporate coffee scenes.

This was, however, a relatively long process. Wang Jun, a veteran of imported equipment with years of experience, told Jiemian News that in the 1990s a fully automatic commercial machine cost about RMB 100,000 and only high-end hotels could afford one. Back then most such machines were placed in hotel restaurants mainly for show and ambience, rarely used to actually make coffee—“guests wouldn’t drink it, and couldn’t appreciate it.”

With Starbucks’ entry into China, espresso machines gained popularity. “Take cappuccino,” recalled an older coffee lover; “in 1990s Shanghai, Starbucks could use its steam wand to produce dense milk foam, while other machines couldn’t and could only top drinks with cream—tasting off. That mechanized, automated approach was ahead of its time.” Yet the real force driving machine adoption was not just a few international chains, but the local chains and independent boutique cafes constantly emerging in Shanghai.

As Shanghai-based independent cafes and boutique roasteries rose, commercial espresso machines began offering both fully automatic and semi-automatic options—the former one-touch, the latter hand-operated by the barista. Wangli Coffee, long in beverage-system service, observed that demand shifted from earlier “large-scale standardized needs” toward “de-elitist, personalized flavor needs.”

That trend continues today. Over the years the number of imported equipment in the market has risen markedly; although no macro statistics exist, the customer base has clearly widened. Taking Shanghai as an example, per Wangli: in the 1990s clients were mostly international fast food, Western dining and high-end business hotels; from 2010 to 2018 independent and cross-over stores surged; since 2019 new clients include community stores, campus stores, convenience shops, supermarkets, tea-drink and bakery brands—almost every format. “Take the Swiss fully automatic Thermoplan,” Wangli said; “such machines were pricey and early on only used by top global chains and a few multinational F&B players for large-scale standardized output. Now every brand pursuing top stability and standardization adopts them—domestic top and mid-tier chains, high-end tea and bakery brands, business complexes, major airports and high-speed-rail stations.”

Driven by the expanding coffee market, machines are also moving from commercial spaces into the home. In the past, home coffee leaned on instant, drip or capsule products, with professional machines and grinders carrying a high barrier. But as Shanghai’s cafe density rose, boutique-coffee education spread, and consumers grew accustomed to lattes, americanos and pour-overs, more people began bringing cafe habits home.

Beyond cafes, Shanghai’s various festivals, expos and offline experiences also bring machines, grinders and pour-over gear—once hidden behind the bar—directly before ordinary consumers. Equipment thus ceases to be merely a barista’s tool and gradually becomes a consumer good for homes and offices. That also explains why this year’s Shanghai International Coffee Festival pushed equipment into a more prominent position.

The Shanghai Cultural and Creative Industry Promotion Association told Jiemian News that early festivals resembled a “cafe collection,” but upstream enterprises grew far more enthusiastic; this year the festival specially set up zones for roasting and processing equipment, tools and accessories, and raw materials and additives, with coffee and industry-related sections reaching 60% of the show—its function shifting from “drink a cup” to “build a whole chain.”

The market’s and consumers’ attention to equipment is itself a signal that Shanghai’s coffee industry chain is maturing further. On one hand, Shanghai’s huge coffee-consumption market provides dense application scenarios for equipment firms—whether chain brands testing new machines, boutique stores trying new extraction schemes, or home users buying grinders and semi-automatic machines, Shanghai offers abundantly varied demand samples. On the other hand, Shanghai is also a hub for numerous equipment traders and service providers. Many imported machine brands enter China via Shanghai, where agents, training institutions and accessory suppliers form a network that radiates nationwide; as China’s coffee stores expand rapidly, Shanghai has become a key window for equipment firms to observe the Chinese market and adjust strategy.

A new change after market expansion is the rise of domestic equipment. Jiemian News saw many domestic-equipment exhibitors at the festival. Facing strong manufacturing capacity and growing demand, many domestic machines are now pressing into the value price band. Wangli revealed that in the past, import mid-range models priced from tens of thousands to over a hundred thousand yuan held a large share, whereas domestic machines are now catching up quickly on stability, function, intelligence, localization, price and service. The high end remains import-dominated but is also iterating fast, launching models better adapted to China.

That coffee lover who paused at the LHOPAN booth ultimately scanned the brand’s QR code and bought the grinder. Such a scene would have been rare in the past: a RMB 168 domestic grinder, displayed beneath Lujiazui’s skyline at an international coffee festival, taken home by an ordinary consumer. Behind these details and changes lies, in fact, the popularization of Shanghai’s coffee consumption and the continuous upgrading of its equipment industry chain.

Shanghai’s coffee story is no longer only about the number of cafes, but also about the equipment trade and industry system growing up behind those coffees.

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This article is compiled and edited by China Coffee Network (coffeeyo.com) from publicly available materials (source: Jiemian News; reporter Li Ye, editor Ya Hanxiang; topic: Shanghai’s coffee-equipment industry chain). The copyright of the original text and images belongs to the original authors. This site reprints it solely for coffee-industry information sharing and does not represent our position; all data and views are subject to the original. We thank the original authors for their creation and sharing.
Original article: “How Shanghai Is Building a Full Coffee-Equipment Supply Chain” (Jiemian News).
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