热点关注｜从“隐形冠军”到“茶咖黑马”国产咖啡品牌走出破局之路Hotspot Focus - From "Hidden Champion" to "Tea and Coffee Dark Horse", Domestic Coffee Brands Embark on a Breakthrough Path

After experiencing rounds of "9.9 yuan price wars", the competitive logic of the Chinese coffee market is undergoing profound changes. When the price "involution" is difficult to sustain, how to find differentiated increments in the stock game has become a must answer for all players. In this context, a brand that started with smart devices and has a strong "Tsinghua style" technology gene, Xiaoka Coffee, is trying to find a unique breakthrough path through innovation in the "tea coffee" category and the "store in store" model.

From Price War to Value War

The Chinese coffee market continues to maintain an astonishing expansion rate. Industry data shows that coffee shops have grown from 173000 to 226000 in the past year, with a net increase of 53000 and a growth rate of over 30%. Meanwhile, according to data from iMedia Consulting, the market size of China's coffee industry has surpassed the trillion yuan mark by 2025, reaching 1002.7 billion yuan.

However, the expansion of scale did not bring widespread joy of profitability. With top brands such as Kudi and Luckin lowering their price bottom line to 9.9 yuan, the industry is in a dilemma of "increasing revenue without increasing profits". In the first quarter of 2024, Luckin Coffee went from profit to loss, with same store sales in its direct stores declining by 20% year-on-year. The industry generally believes that the model of relying solely on subsidies for traffic is no longer sustainable, and the market is transitioning from "low price expansion" to "quality and refined competition". For new entrants, if they cannot establish barriers in terms of products and models, it is easy to be eliminated under the price squeeze of giants.

From B-end 'hidden champion' to C-end breakthrough

Unlike Luckin Coffee and Kudi Coffee, which have been striving to establish C-end (products or services for individual consumers) stores since their inception, Xiaoka Coffee has taken a circuitous path of "To B first, then To C".

It is reported that Xiaoka Coffee was founded in 2017, and the founding team has a background in Tsinghua University and joint entrepreneurial experience with Meituan. The brand initially focused on the research and operation of coffee smart terminal devices. Up to now, the number of self-service coffee machines has exceeded 60000, ranking first in China, and it is a veritable "invisible champion" of B-end (Internet management platform for enterprises or organizations). This vast network of devices not only brings stable cash flow to the brand, but also accumulates profound hardware research and development and supply chain management capabilities.

Starting from 2022, Xiaoka Coffee will enter the C-end store business. As of May 2026, the number of operating stores has exceeded 2000, including directly operated independent stores and convenience store channel stores. In the expansion trend of the first half of 2025, Xiaoka Coffee's store growth rate reached 63.41%, becoming one of the fastest expanding brands in the industry.

Bet on "tea cafes" and "shop in shop"

How can small coffee shops establish themselves in the coffee industry dominated by giants? The core strategy of its breakthrough focuses on product differentiation and scenario adaptation.

Firstly, avoid homogeneous competition with "tea coffee". When the industry is generally competing in the red ocean of American style, latte, and fruit coffee, small coffee shops choose to deeply cultivate the tea coffee track of "Oriental Original Leaf Tea+Coffee". In 2025, the cumulative sales of its original product "Morui Bai" exceeded 10 million cups, verifying the market acceptance of this strategy. The brand has established four R&D teams with industry competition evaluation qualifications, maintaining a high frequency of new releases every month, attempting to establish brand awareness through category innovation.

Secondly, use the "store in store" lightweight model to run through existing scenarios. Xiaoka did not blindly pursue the high investment model of independent large stores, but instead focused on the existing space in scenarios such as convenience stores and bakeries. By collaborating with over 30 top 100 convenience store brands such as Meiyijia and Lawson, Xiaoka quickly integrates into the scene of freshly made beverages in a "store in store" format. This mode has low investment and fast turnover, and can form a "coffee+" joint consumption with the fresh food and snacks in the convenience store, directly increasing the customer price of the store.

Technology driven and capital assisted

Xiaoka's confidence in breaking through lies in its technical genes. In order to solve the pain points of standardized production and high labor costs in stores, its self-developed fully automatic tea coffee machine is said to improve meal efficiency by 50% and reduce training costs by 80%. In addition, the brand has invested in the research and development of AI robots, attempting to break free from a high dependence on human labor in the future.

The continuous injection of capital provides a foundation for expansion. Since its establishment, Xiaoka Coffee has completed 7 rounds of financing totaling over 1.14 billion yuan. The brand announced that it will invest nearly 600 million yuan in brand promotion and store building subsidies in 2026, and set a grand goal of "targeting 100000 stores within 3 years".

Faced with a more rational consumer environment and still fierce industry competition, Xiaoka Coffee avoids direct price wars and seeks gaps through the technological moat and unique category positioning accumulated on the B-end. However, the tea and coffee category still needs further education from the market, and the "shop in shop" model requires extremely high control capabilities for cooperative channels. Whether Xiaoka Coffee can truly stand out from the crowd with this combination of "technology+product+scenario" still needs further market testing.

Text | Li Lian

【 Source: Consumer Daily 】