Cappuccino meets cha
As beverages go in China, it’s expensive and trendy, but coffee and café culture is attracting a growing band of fans in this populous and rapidly developing nation.
As you open the door, the familiar smell of brewed and espresso coffee is striking. The air is thick with it, along with hints of chocolate, caramel and a host of other base notes ubiquitous to cafés.
The décor is typical of a slightly upmarket café. Sofas, lounge chairs and low tables, all in earthy colours, are scattered around the room. On the walls hang works of art all with a distinctly continental European flavour that suggests: “hang me in a café”. Laptops and notebooks are set up on tables and young professionals are hunched over them. Groups of young women with Prada and Louis Vuitton bags by their sides are plunging forks into slices of cake or teaspoons into lattes. This could be in Toorak, Bondi or Southbank. But, the menu board on the wall behind the counter has all the prices in RMB (the Chinese currency unit, Renminbi) and the menu items are in English and Chinese.
We are among China’s middle and affluent classes and they have started drinking coffee. The battle for their disposable income has been underway for well over a decade and coffee is now on the list.
Coffee is fast becoming the drink of choice for young Chinese. Hanging out at a café like Starbucks has become as big a symbol of wealth and cosmopolitanism as owning and driving a late model European car or being seen making calls on an iPhone. While Starbucks was forced to close some of its less successful US and international stores some years back, the opposite is true here in China. They now operate over 690 outlets in greater mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.
Other café chains have yet to match the Starbuck’s success here. The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf boasts only 26 stores and Canadian-based Blenz has a few stores scattered around China’s east coast. But, small locally owned cafés have sprung up and are doing a roaring trade. Even James Rein, the ex- Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd’s brother-in-law, owns a café in Xiamen in China’s south while the China Coffee Association has reported there are now over 8000 cafés in Beijing alone.
So what has turned China’s young, upwardly mobile set on to coffee and away from thousands of years of drinking tea? The answer to that is, of course, excellent marketing.
With the influx of western ideas and products, Chinese youth are keen to show each other just how cosmopolitan they are. The novelty of the café as a western concept will attract first-timers, but it is the space itself that maintains patronage and brings the Chinese back. Being seen by others to hang out at a western style café is even more important than the beverages themselves.
Coffee is fast becoming the drink of choice for young Chinese. Hanging out at a café like Starbucks has become as big a symbol of wealth and cosmopolitanism as owning and driving a late model European car or being seen making calls on an iPhone.
Price is also a determinant. Coffee in China is often more expensive than in western countries, making it a symbol of wealth and exclusivity. And, when sharing the same space with 1.3 billion other people, standing out from the crowd is almost a national obsession. Tea is for everyone, but coffee is for the upper echelon of this new China. For this reason, most multinational coffee chains have not lowered their prices in China in spite of low overheads and labour costs.
Starbucks has also gone to great lengths to educate young Chinese on the virtues and benefits of coffee and accompanying dairy products. Given that the majority of Chinese are lactose intolerant and averse to dairy, this has been no easy feat. Starbucks promotes its products through shrewd advertising and even offers free evening and weekend coffee culture classes where there is no mention of lactose or anyone’s intolerance of it.
For those who wish to be seen at the café, but prefer a more traditional beverage, Starbucks have recently introduced more varieties of tea to their menu. The Chinese are not likely to abandon their tea drinking culture and embrace only coffee any time soon. In spite of the success of western companies off the back of sheer population volume, the Chinese are fiercely loyal to their nation and culture and would not betray that for all the tea in China.
Troy Waller lives with his wife and two children in Shenzhen, China where he teaches at an American International School. He has been living in Asia for over ten years and in China for six. He holds a Master of Journalism from UQ, is a regular blogger and has written for The Australian, That’s Shanghai, and On Being.
