Article | Zebra Consumption Chen Biting
The domestic convenience store industry has bid farewell to wild growth and entered the deep-water zone of stock competition. The decline in passenger flow, high costs, and narrowing profits of the main product categories have become industry wide challenges.
How to break the deadlock? Leading chain convenience store brands have almost coincidentally introduced freshly made coffee as an important lever to cross the cycle.
However, with the rapid popularization of the in store model in coffee shops, new challenges such as homogenization, low price competition, and fragile single store models have emerged.
At the recently held 2026 China Convenience Store Conference, Xiaoka Coffee, which has been deeply involved in the coffee industry for nine years, fully demonstrated its full chain layout of equipment research and development, store operation, product innovation, and digital operation.
Unlike other peers who are expanding their scale in a race to conquer the market, Xiaoka Coffee, backed by a team from Tsinghua University, uses self-developed hardware as its foundation and tea and coffee categories as its cutting edge to deeply adapt to the consumption scenarios of convenience stores. It has embarked on a new supply path of co creating "coffee+fresh food" and "coffee+snacks" with convenience stores, providing a new model for the reconstruction and growth of the convenience store industry.
Convenience store new cycle, coffee becomes a deterministic incremental entrance
After experiencing rapid growth in the past decade, the Chinese convenience store industry has entered a new cycle of stock competition.
According to data from the China Chain Store Association (CCFA), in 2025, there will be a net increase of 7572 convenience stores in China, with a decrease of nearly 2000 new stores compared to the same period last year. The speed of store expansion has significantly slowed down; The daily average revenue of a single store was 4453 yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 3.9%; The daily average number of visitors per store decreased by 8.7% year-on-year, with both foot traffic and revenue weakening.
At the same time, the rigid costs of rent and labor have been increasing year by year, and snack discount stores and community e-commerce continue to divert offline traffic. The profit margins of traditional daily necessities and food standards continue to be compressed.
It has become a consensus among convenience store operators to search for new product categories with high repeat purchases, high gross margins, and suitable manpower for existing venues. The gross profit margin of freshly made coffee is significantly higher than that of traditional convenience store categories. The in store model does not require large-scale renovation and can be implemented based on existing staff and locations. It has low investment and fast turnover, naturally meeting the business demands of convenience stores.
Xiaoka Coffee entered the store in store market, unlocking a new paradigm of stock growth. The brand was founded by a team from Tsinghua University, and completed the full industry chain layout from backend self-service coffee equipment research and development to frontend independent store and convenience store in store operation in nine years.
As of now, the number of small coffee self-service coffee machines has exceeded 60000, ranking first in China; The number of operating stores has exceeded 2000, including independent direct operated stores and convenience store channel stores, among which 200 are directly operated independent stores.
The attitude of capital confirms the market's recognition of its business model. Since its establishment, Xiaoka Coffee has completed 7 rounds of cumulative financing exceeding 1.14 billion yuan, with a single financing of 448 million yuan in the previous round, creating the largest single financing in the consumer industry in nearly three years.
Deeply cultivate tea cafes and reconstruct the consumption scene of convenience stores
Breaking away from homogenized and low-priced competition in the industry is the most intuitive difference between Xiaoka Coffee and most convenience store coffee players.
At present, convenience store coffee generally uses mature standardized beverage formulas for the sake of lightness and speed, with basic coffee and fruit coffee as the main products. The product iteration pace is slow and the innovation space is limited, so only price can be exchanged for sales volume.
Xiaoka Coffee takes tea coffee as a breakthrough direction, builds a specialized new product research and development system, and highlights product differentiation from the source.
Four R&D teams with industry competition evaluation qualifications have been established for the brand, with a total of 25 full-time R&D personnel participating in new product project approval and flavor debugging. Internally maintain a fixed pace of new product launches, conduct 4 new product submissions per month, reserve more than 20 new products at a time, and select the top ten through comprehensive scoring to enter the public beta.
The new product launch of Xiaoka Coffee has a clear testing process. Relying on an efficient supply chain and direct sales control system, Xiaoka's new products can achieve short and fast regional customization and new testing. More than 10 products enter the direct sales stores every month for a 15-25 day product public testing period. After passing the testing standards, the series will be launched three times a month. And connect consumer demand pre-test, with tens of thousands of users participating in product testing, collecting over ten thousand product questionnaires, and ultimately determining the products to be promoted nationwide based on comprehensive scores.
This rigorous research and testing mechanism avoids the common industry problem of following the trend and introducing new products. Its original product, Morui Bai, launched in 2025, successfully broke through the market with cumulative sales exceeding 10 million cups, fully verifying its product innovation capability.
In terms of adapting to consumer scenarios, Xiaoka is not simply adding coffee drinks to convenience stores, but using high-frequency freshly made coffee as a natural flow entry point, linking convenience stores with fresh food, snacks, and drinks, catering to customers' immediate and complementary consumption needs, cultivating coffee+fresh food, coffee+snacks consumption behavior, creating a "one-stop consumption scenario", directly driving store customer unit price and associated consumption conversion.
Multi line technology brand foundation, targeting 100000 stores in 3 years
Channel cooperation and digital operation capabilities form the underlying support for the stable expansion of Xiaoka Coffee.
At present, Xiaoka has established formal cooperation with more than 30 of the top 100 domestic convenience store chains, and has collaborated with over 100 baking and lifestyle service brands. The single store operation model has been repeatedly validated by the market and has the conditions for large-scale replication.
In the daily operation of convenience stores, the difficulty of standardizing products, maintaining the reputation of takeaway food, and the pressure of labor costs are common pain points. Having multiple positions and responsibilities as a store clerk makes it difficult to unify the taste and efficiency of coffee production, which can easily lead to negative reviews and cancellations, directly affecting the online rating and foot traffic of the store.
Most similar brands in the industry focus on brand authorization, supply chain output, and franchise store expansion, lacking hardware self-developed and digital system development capabilities. Operation and control rely more on manual labor, making it difficult to solve standardization and efficiency problems from a mechanism perspective.
A tech savvy individual has developed their own AI management system for food delivery, which can monitor abnormal store operations in real-time, maintain a stable store rating of 4.8 or above, and control the return rate within 3%. Focusing on the long-term shortage of manpower in the industry, the company invested in the research and development of AI robots six months ago, and in the future, its offline stores will no longer rely on manual labor.
At the same time, the brand continues to deepen its cultivation, constantly accumulating strength for channel expansion. In recent years, Xiaoka has focused on top IP addresses, mainstream media, and entertainment content resources, and its market awareness has gradually strengthened.
In 2024, the brand has successively partnered with King of Glory and Temple of Heaven's cultural and tourism IP, and established stores in top commercial districts of the top ten core cities in China. In 2025, we will enter the CCTV Spring Festival Gala dissemination matrix and establish a deep cooperation with JD Seven Fresh Coffee. Collaborating with iQiyi to create the first coffee themed celebrity reality show in China, "Smile No.1 Store," with an overall online exposure exceeding one billion.
Cross border design collaborations, cultural and creative competition collaborations, as well as dozens of artists such as Gulnazha, Meng Ziyi, Fan Weiqi, and Chen Yanxi's strong product recommendations, have further expanded the brand's audience.
In 2026, as the sports year approaches, Xiaoka has placed its bets on World Cup marketing, signed top players, and leveraged its core product line "Tea Coffee Series" to double its energy boosting selling point. It is strongly tied to the demand for "staying up late to watch the game" during the World Cup, breaking through the main audience of World Cup and coffee consumption, and helping to boost store growth.
In addition to branding, tangible channel support can better reflect the long-term business layout and channel symbiosis ideas of enterprises. Xiaoka Coffee founder Zhu Baoju revealed at the convenience store conference that the company will invest nearly 600 million yuan in brand marketing and store building subsidies by 2026. Against the backdrop of industry profit pressure and rising operational pressure on franchisees, this significant investment can lower the threshold for cooperation, share the initial investment costs of stores, and strengthen the cooperation stickiness between convenience stores and franchisees.
Entering the era of thousands of stores, the competition in the convenience store coffee track has gone through the initial stage of simply competing for speed and location. In the future, it will be a long-term competition of comprehensive capabilities such as product polishing, scene adaptation, and technical operation.
Xiaoka Coffee is based on hardware research and development, breaks through price competition through tea and coffee innovation, integrates convenience store management logic with scene adaptation, and expands its channels through digitalization and brand investment. This is its confidence in building 100000 high-quality coffee shops in the next 3-5 years.
Upgrading the convenience store industry is not something that can be achieved overnight by adding coffee categories. Only brands that can understand channel pain points, match real consumer needs, and maintain the bottom line of single store profitability can stand firm in the industry cycle.
From this perspective, the full industry chain layout of Xiaoka Coffee has transcended the single dimension of beverage brands and become a valuable reference for the changes in China's convenience store industry.