Shanghai Hongqiao International Coffee Harbor was certified on August 4 as a coffee trading and exhibition platform, and is expected to realize an annual trading volume of CNY10 billion beginning in 2025, backed by a Chinese coffee market whose size may exceed CNY1 trillion by that year, industry experts said. Coffee is the first and one of 10 sectors expected to reach a business scale of CNY10 billion by the end of the 14th Five Year Plan period (2021-25) at the Hongqiao Import Commodity Exhibition and Trading Center, a year-round trading platform in Shanghai affiliated with the China International Import Expo. Shanghai Hongqiao International Coffee Harbor is expected to serve as a center for imports and exports of coffee-related products.
The Shanghai Coffee Industry Association was also officially launched on the same day. The establishment of the Association allows the harbor to hold talent training events and barista qualifying contests in the future in a bid to enhance Shanghai’s standards for the coffee sector. Despite the impact of Covid-19, the number of cafés in Shanghai reached 7,857 as of June 30, much more than the number in New York, London or Tokyo, said Mao Fang, Vice President of Meituan, citing a coffee consumption research report conducted by the online food ordering and delivery service provider.
“Considering the large number of cafés in Shanghai, there will be a need for more than 23,000 baristas in the city. If we can judge a barista’s skills using unified standards, we can help enterprises quickly distinguish talent and further promote the quality enhancement of the overall coffee industry,” said Xia Yuan, General Manager of the Innovation Business Division of Tim Hortons China, who is also head of the expert team for the latest national vocational technical standards for baristas published in June. The market size of China’s freshly brewed coffee sector rose 41.71% year-on-year to CNY8.97 billion in 2021. It is projected to soar to CNY15.79 billion by 2023, according to the Meituan report.
But compared with the United States and Japan, freshly brewed coffee consumption in China still lags far behind. Mao said it currently stands at 1.6 cups per person. The figure is 3.8 cups per person for Chinese people living in first and second-tier cities, whereas the figures in Japan and the U.S. are 176 and 313, respectively. China’s coffee market has entered a high growth phase. “The nation’s coffee industry reached a market value of CNY381.7 billion in 2021, up 27.2% year-on-year, and the overall Chinese coffee market is expected to surpass CNY1 trillion in 2025,” said Zhang Ruidong, Director of the Alibaba New Service Research Center, as reported by the China Daily.
