Currently, the Chinese consumer market is undergoing structural reshaping. Convenience stores, as the core carrier of the 15 minute convenient living circle in cities and the "capillaries" of people's livelihood retail, not only carry the daily convenience of billions of residents, but also serve as an important window to test the resilience of the real economy. Faced with multiple challenges such as rising costs, customer flow differentiation, and profit pressure, the industry urgently needs to find a breakthrough direction.
From May 20th to 22nd, the "CCFA New Consumer Forum -2026 China Convenience Store Conference" was held in Changsha, Hunan Province, with the theme of "Deep Evolution Through the Cycle", focusing on the pain points and innovative solutions of retail transformation. The global coffee chain brand Novacoffee showcased its "store in store" revenue increasing cooperation model validated by thousands of stores, as well as the achievements of the entire industry chain at the conference, providing a market tested breakthrough path for the convenience store industry and becoming a vivid practice of empowering the real economy with light assets.
Scale expansion and profit pressure, convenience stores call for a "efficiency oriented" second curve
Convenience stores are the closest part of the urban convenience living circle to consumers and play an irreplaceable role in providing convenient services. According to the "2026 China Convenience Store TOP100" data released by the China Chain Store Association (CCFA), the total number of stores of the top 100 convenience store enterprises in China will reach 208000 by 2025, a net increase of 11000 year-on-year, with a growth rate of 5.6%. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in the first quarter of 2026, among retail units above designated size nationwide, the retail sales of convenience stores increased by 8.3% year-on-year, leading the growth rate of various retail formats.
However, behind the impressive data, the contradiction of "increasing income without increasing profits" in the industry is becoming increasingly prominent. The rigid increase in costs such as rent, labor, and cold chain fulfillment continues to squeeze profit margins; New business models such as mass market snack shops, discount stores, and instant retail flash warehouses are strongly diverting customer flow, leading to intensified homogeneous competition and a narrowing of gross profit and a decrease in average customer value.
When the marginal benefits of scale expansion decrease, convenience stores urgently need a "second growth curve" that does not rely on heavy asset investment, which can not only activate existing space but also bring high-frequency, high gross profit, and high repurchase incremental categories. Freshly ground coffee is a great candidate.
Innovative model breaks the deadlock, Nuowa Coffee "shop in shop" reconstructs a new retail collaborative ecosystem
The introduction of freshly ground coffee in convenience stores is not a new phenomenon, but most attempts are difficult to form sustainable profit units. The fundamental reason is that convenience stores lack professional coffee operation capabilities, stable supply chains, and brand momentum. The "store in store" cooperation model proposed by Novacoffee is not simply about "coffee machines entering the store", but a set of retail production factor restructuring plans that have been verified by over ten thousand stores. It is an innovative retail cooperation model that integrates multiple formats and achieves efficient resource integration and maximum value release.
From a business logic perspective, the core value of Novacoffee's collaboration lies in its structured approach to reducing transaction costs. Through resource integration, partners have avoided the risks and uncertainties of building stores with heavy assets, while Novartis has obtained a low-cost and high-efficiency terminal network, injecting new momentum into the transformation and upgrading of physical retail.
Building a solid foundation for thousands of stores with a closed-loop system across the entire chain, accelerating the sinking of the light asset approach
The cooperation between Novacoffee and convenience stores can be replicated on a large scale and sustainably, based on the fundamental premise that Novacoffee has built a complete industrial chain loop from planting, roasting to warehousing and distribution. This is not only a competitive barrier for the enterprise itself, but also a commitment to its partners to "not run out of stock, not degrade quality, and not lose control".
At the source, Novartis has established a dedicated coffee planting base in Yunnan to control the quality of green beans and stabilize raw material costs from the source; On the production side, the intelligent baking factory with an annual production capacity of 20000 tons will start construction in March 2026, effectively breaking through the bottleneck of production capacity, ensuring unified product quality and sufficient supply; On the fulfillment end, 15 warehouse distribution centers are deployed nationwide to achieve efficient fulfillment of orders placed on the same day and delivery the next day, ensuring fresh and stable products and continuous supply.
This complete industry chain system is not simply pursuing scale, but focusing on ensuring the operational certainty of partners, so that partners do not have to worry about stockouts, quality fluctuations, or cost increases, and focus on serving in store consumers. Relying on this solid supply chain foundation, Novacoffee has opened over 10000 stores, covering more than 300 cities and ranking among the top 5 global coffee chains.
In addition, the brand continues to promote comprehensive sinking layout, which has become an important practice to activate the consumption potential of county-level economy. Li Lixu, a partner of Novacoffee, previously revealed that currently 60% of the company's stores are located in third tier and above cities, and 40% cover fourth and fifth tier and county-level markets. In the future, the company will continue to promote the expansion of stores in China.
Real income and collaborative empowerment, activating new consumption drivers
The value of cooperation ultimately lies in the actual business results. It is reported that Novacoffee has cooperated with over 100 convenience store brands, covering more than 30 top brands in the industry, and has become the first choice for convenience stores to increase revenue through coffee cooperation. For example, after the cooperation between Meiyijia and Novartis, coffee revenue exceeded hundreds of millions of yuan; Shandong Youke and Hubei Today have single city revenues of tens of millions of yuan.
In addition to its product strength, Nova Coffee has built a digital operation system covering the whole online and offline scene relying on the Internet gene of the founding team. Help cooperative stores to efficiently obtain traffic on mainstream platforms such as Meituan, Tiktok, Taobao flash purchase, and expand the service radius. For convenience stores, this means that they do not need to build their own digital capabilities and can share Novartis' mature operational system.
The convenience store industry needs to truly go through the cycle and cannot rely solely on scale expansion. It needs to find increments in the stock and improve efficiency through integration. Novacoffee has demonstrated a replicable, sustainable, and mutually beneficial growth model to the industry through its "store in store" cooperation model validated by thousands of stores, full industry chain capabilities, and systematic operation system, injecting innovative momentum into promoting high-quality development of the real economy. (Huabai)