A cup of coffee "links" the whole world: Why has Xiamen, which does not produce coffee, become a global coffee center?
A coffee bean from Ethiopia first travels by ship from the Port of Djibouti, takes over 20 days to reach Xiamen, and then goes through warehousing, roasting, packaging and distribution, before it can finally end up in a latte served in a shop downstairs of an office building.
More notably, around a quarter of China's total imported green coffee beans in 2025 were circulated and distributed through the supply chains of Xiamen-based enterprises before reaching consumers across the country. What Xiamen is seemingly selling is just a cup of coffee, but what it is actually building is a full-fledged business ecosystem that covers global procurement, logistics and trade, processing and manufacturing, brand headquarters operations and end-consumer markets.
The coffee cup is no bigger than the palm of a hand, yet the industrial map behind it stretches all the way from Yunnan to Brazil, and connects Africa to Southeast Asia.
Xiamen, Fujian Province, has drawn new business insights for urban development from a single cup of coffee: The truly valuable consumer industry for a city does not lie merely in the number of stores it opens, but in whether it can make goods flow through, get processed, be priced right here, and finally be sold to larger markets from this very place.
Xiamen does not produce coffee, so why is it able to thrive in the coffee business?
When talking about coffee in China, the first place that comes to most people's mind is usually Yunnan. Over 90% of China's coffee planting area and output are concentrated there, and production regions including Pu'er and Baoshan have become important sources of domestic coffee beans.
Xiamen is neither a major coffee producing region nor the most populous city, yet it has set the goal of building a national coffee headquarters cluster center, an international coffee trade center, a coffee production and processing center for the southeast coastal area, and a national coffee circulation and consumption center.
This sounds somewhat "cross-border": what advantages does a city that does not grow coffee have to compete in the coffee industry?
The answer lies in Xiamen's core strengths: ports, trade and supply chains.
Where coffee beans are grown matters a lot, but after they leave the producing regions, who makes the procurement, organizes transportation, bears inventory costs, completes roasting, and delivers the products to tens of thousands of stores also determines the cost and quality of a cup of coffee.
In 2025, Xiamen C&D Life Materials Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of C&D Inc., imported 25,000 tons of green coffee beans, accounting for 11% of China's total coffee imports. Its team has expanded operations to core overseas producing regions including Brazil, Ethiopia and Vietnam, and also laid out business presence in Yunnan, connecting domestic and overseas resources through the model of "direct procurement from origins + regional distribution".
In plain terms, Xiamen may not own coffee plantations, but it is striving to hold the "traffic command right" of coffee beans.
This follows the same logic of some cities that do not produce iron ore but have steel trade centers, or do not produce oil but form energy trading hubs: resources belong to their producing regions, but the flow, processing and capital arrangement of these resources can belong to the hubs.
In modern business, being closest to raw materials does not necessarily mean the highest profitability. Being closest to transactions, processing and customers is also a core competitive edge.
A dedicated freight train connects Yunnan and the seaport into a single production line
In January 2026, a dedicated freight train loaded with 22 containers, carrying a total of 682 tons of Yunnan green coffee beans, departed from Pu'er for Xiamen, covering a total distance of about 2834 kilometers.
In the past, Yunnan coffee beans were mainly transported to Xiamen by road, which took about 7 days. After the dedicated train was launched, the transportation time was shortened by 4 days. It seems that the train is just a little faster than trucks, but in essence it has improved the stability of the whole supply chain.
For ordinary consumers, three or four extra days may just mean waiting a little longer for their delivery. But for coffee brands that need to supply tens of thousands of stores across the country every day, time is inventory.
The slower the transportation and the greater the fluctuation, the more coffee beans enterprises need to stock up; the more inventory they hold, the more capital is occupied, and the higher the warehousing loss and price risk will be. With more stable transportation, enterprises can arrange roasting, packaging and distribution more accurately, and the products delivered to stores can maintain more consistent quality.
Therefore, what the dedicated coffee freight train transports is not just coffee beans, but also improves the cash flow efficiency of enterprises.
This is also a business insight that many enterprises tend to ignore: reducing costs does not only rely on "pressing suppliers for lower prices". Shortening the transportation route, speeding up turnover, reducing loss, and improving the accuracy of inventory forecasting, when accumulated, may create more value than negotiating a few percentage points of procurement discount.
In the past, some Chinese enterprises were good at making low-cost products; the more important capability for them in the next stage is to make the entire industrial chain shorter, more stable and more controllable.
Coffee shops are the storefront, while the supply chain is the back kitchen
The most interesting part of Xiamen's coffee industry is that it has two distinct faces.
The side facing tourists is very artistic. The old buildings on Gulangyu Island, the sea breeze along the Island Ring Road, the alleys in the old town and the overseas Chinese courtyards provide natural scenarios for coffee consumption. According to rough statistics from Xiamen Baking and Coffee Association, there are more than 1700 personalized specialty coffee shops in the local area; the white paper released by relevant platforms shows that the proportion of coffee consumers in Xiamen ranks fourth across China.
At Jinsha Academy, the "most beautiful window" attracts visitors to take photos, and along the promenade people can enter cafes, tea spaces and handcraft shops. The architecture is designed to attract visitors, and the commercial formats are designed to make them stay. The local authorities even launched a 9.9-yuan customized latte with latte art, turning a casual visit into actual consumption.
The other side is far less romantic.
It is the containers at the port, the gunny sacks in the warehouse, the procurement teams across global producing regions, the production lines in roasting factories, and the orders in the scheduling system. What consumers see is the latte art, while what enterprises calculate is the price of green beans, the shipping cycle, the roasting capacity and the inventory turnover rate.
Luckin Coffee set up its headquarters in Xiamen in 2018, and later continued to build its production innovation center. According to public plans, the Luckin Coffee Xiamen Innovation Industrial Park is scheduled to reach an annual roasting capacity of 55,000 tons, with a maximum annual green bean processing capacity of more than 100,000 tons.
The gathering of headquarters, supply chain enterprises, roasting capacity and consumption scenarios does not bring about a simple superposition of values.
Brands bring orders, and orders support factories; factories expand procurement, and procurement attracts trade and logistics; industrial aggregation in turn reduces the cost of brand expansion. Eventually, a cup of coffee completes the transformation from a consumer product to a complete industrial chain in the city.
The most referable part of this model is: viral consumer trends are responsible for generating public attention, while large-scale supply chains are responsible for retaining profits. If a city only has the former, its prosperity will be short-lived; when the two are combined, the traffic can be precipitated into real industrial value.
Behind affordable coffee is "millimeter-level" cost reduction
China's coffee market is expanding rapidly. Relevant research shows that the scale of China's coffee industry reached 354.9 billion yuan in 2025, with a year-on-year growth of 13.3%; the annual per capita coffee consumption rose from 16.74 cups in 2023 to 28.57 cups in 2025.
However, the expansion of the market does not mean that every coffee shop can make profits more easily.
When 9.9-yuan coffee becomes the normal price, consumers get tangible benefits, but brands have to work out an extremely difficult arithmetic problem in the background: among coffee beans, milk, syrup, cups, rent, labor, distribution and marketing, which part can still be cut a little bit more in cost?
In the final stage of price war, what enterprises compete for is usually not who is more willing to issue coupons, but who has larger procurement volume, higher factory utilization rate, shorter logistics routes, and more accurate store order forecasting.
Xiamen connects global procurement, centralized processing and large-scale store networks, precisely to save a few cents in every link. Saving a few cents per cup seems trivial, but when multiplied by hundreds of millions of cups, it can become a critical line that determines whether a brand can continue to expand.
This also gives a practical reminder to small and medium-sized enterprises: the low price offered by large enterprises does not only come from their thick profit margins or large subsidies, but also from the efficiency advantage of the entire system. If a small shop only imitates the selling price of large brands without the same capabilities in procurement, turnover and digital management, it is very likely that customers get cheap coffee, while the shop owner bears the huge cost.
What is really worth imitating is not the 9.9-yuan price tag, but the organizational capability behind the 9.9-yuan coffee.
"Linking to the global industrial chain" also means facing risks from all over the world
Doing business across the globe does not only mean romantic ocean shipping routes, but also brings in all kinds of global risks.
Coffee production is highly concentrated. Data from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations shows that Brazil and Vietnam together contribute nearly half of the global coffee output, and five countries supply about 65% of the global coffee exports. Drought, frost, heavy rain, plant diseases and insect pests, as well as shipping delays, may quickly change the international coffee price.
In July 2026, the composite indicator price of the International Coffee Organization rose by 15.4% month on month, with a daily increase of more than 8% on some trading days. This shows that even if a cup of coffee keeps the same price on the menu for a long time, the raw material market behind it may experience drastic fluctuations like a roller coaster ride.
The longer the supply chain, the more variables enterprises need to manage: exchange rate, weather, freight, inventory, food safety and quality differences among different producing regions. A problem in any link may be transmitted to the cost end and then to the stores.
Therefore, the real value of global procurement is not just to buy products at lower prices overseas, but to build capabilities including multi-origin procurement, long-term contracts, inventory management, quality traceability and risk hedging. Without these capabilities, "global procurement" may not be a competitive advantage, but a risk exposure instead.
When Xiamen proposed to build a 100-billion-yuan coffee industrial chain, it also needs to be alert to another problem: The planning target is not equal to the realized revenue. If the increase in the number of coffee shops and the expansion of roasting capacity outpace the real consumer demand, it may lead to homogeneous competition, cutthroat price competition and insufficient capacity utilization.
The hotter the industrial chain is, the more we need to ask: how much more coffee have consumers actually drunk, and how much profit have enterprises actually made, rather than only focusing on how many new stores have opened and how large the new factories are.
A cup of coffee brings three plain insights for enterprises
Xiamen's coffee story can not be copied by every city. Its port location, foundation of supply chain enterprises, leading brand headquarters and tourism consumption scenarios are all unique local conditions.
But there are three business experiences that ordinary enterprises can also learn from.
First, you do not need to own all the resources, but you must occupy a key node. If you do not have coffee producing regions, you can develop your business in procurement, processing, logistics, design or distribution channels. Small enterprises do not need to control the entire industrial chain. The key is to find a link that others cannot bypass and are willing to pay for continuously.
Second, do not only focus on the parts that customers can see. Store decoration and marketing determine whether customers will come for the first time, while procurement, inventory and delivery determine whether the enterprise can survive until customers come for the second time. The front stage is responsible for bringing surprises to customers, and the back stage is responsible for avoiding unexpected problems.
Third, connect local advantages to larger markets. The value of local specialties, the technology of a factory, and the flow of a block can only be magnified when they are connected to the national and even global procurement and sales networks.
The most charming part of a cup of coffee is not just that it comes from Ethiopia, Brazil or Yunnan, but that countless enterprises participate in the whole process: some are engaged in planting, some in procurement, some in transportation, some in roasting, some in opening stores, and others turn coffee shops into a lifestyle of the whole city.
What Xiamen is doing is to let more links of the industrial chain meet right here.
What consumers drink is a cup of coffee that costs a dozen or dozens of yuan, while what the city wants to retain is the long-term value generated by the integration of trade, processing, headquarters economy, logistics and consumption.
The so-called "linking to the global industrial chain" does not mean drawing a few more lines on the map. What it really tests is: After a coffee bean crosses mountains and oceans, whether you can make it generate more efficiency, create more value in your hands, and finally turn it into a sustainable business.
References:
1. China Media Group: "Vibrant China Research Tour · Xiamen, Fujian: A Cup of Coffee Links to the World", September 3, 2026
2. Xinhua News Agency: "Vibrant China Research Tour | Standing Out with 'Firsts', Xiamen Builds New Gravitational Field for Consumption", August 24, 2026
3. Haixi Morning Post: "Xiamen Observation | How a Single Window Attracts Visitors and Retains Customers", August 25, 2026
4. China Institute for Urban Governance, Shanghai Jiao Tong University: 2026 China Urban Coffee Development Report
5. International Coffee Organization: Coffee Market Report, July 2026
6. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Global Coffee, Cocoa and Tea Market Price Dynamics Report, July 14, 2026
This article is from the WeChat official account "BT Finance" (ID: btcjv1), written by BT Finance, and authorized for release by 36Kr.