Starbucks and McDonald's fight against the season for iced coffee, but China still likes to soak Chinese wolfberry.

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Foreigners have a good physique and can eat ice all the year round.

Coffee giants have found an interesting phenomenon. Even in winter, you can see many men and women wearing gloves and holding iced coffee.

Because of consumers' fondness for cold drinks in recent years, McDonald's, Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts have started a war of iced coffee, launching innovative products one after another to grab consumers.

Starbucks and McDonald's are fighting for iced coffee, but it may not be suitable for China on the thermos cup.

McDonald's enters the game, the competition is fierce.

Last year and this summer, cold coffee from stores such as Starbucks and Donndole became popular at an incredible rate. Krypton 36 has introduced that cold-extracted coffee takes at least 12 hours to brew and tastes better with lower acidity.

McDonald's is not involved in the battle for cold coffee, but has repeatedly stressed the importance of its own cafe McCafe. McCafe is a small "cafe" embedded in McDonald's, featuring cold / hot coffee, cakes, macarons and other drinks and snacks. McCafe is found in many McDonald's restaurants in China.

Recently, McDonald's and Coca-Cola have reached a partnership to launch McCafe Frappe ready-to-drink drinks, opening a new way for them to sell only hot coffee in the past. Although McDonald's may not be the first choice for coffee lovers, the price advantage is hard to shake. After all, McDonald's small cups of coffee usually sell for only $2 (9.5 yuan in China), much lower than Starbucks.

Starbucks and McDonald's are fighting for iced coffee, but it may not be suitable for China on the thermos cup.

Both Starbucks and Dawn are busy. Dawn is happy to launch a new ready-to-drink production line and open up e-commerce channels for sales. Starbucks is rapidly expanding its bottled product line, not satisfied with iced coffee and cappuccino. We also need to come up with energy drinks and newly extracted coffee.

Fancy Innovation of Ice Coffee

If you want to catch the hearts of consumers, you must first grab their stomachs. For FMCG, it means constantly pushing new products and making trial and error, and the same is true in the field of iced coffee.

McDonald's is the most conservative of the three companies, and coffee drinks have not made much progress. Starbucks and Donndole have dedicated R & D teams to look for new "iced coffee" products that have no seasonal fluctuations and make people want to drink all year round.

Donndole gave up on Cool Coolatta and made every effort to develop a new Frozen Dunkin coffee to compete with Starbucks' popular Frappuccino all year round. Frozen Dunkin uses a special extract of 100% Arabica coffee to improve the original Coolatta formula.

Although Starbucks already has Frappuccino, it has been trying to promote a variety of limited-edition flavors of Frappuccino and other iced drinks. This fall, Starbucks will launch a cold-pressed coffee Cold-Pressed Espresso, similar to cold-extracted coffee, but distilled in a slightly different way, which takes less than 12 hours to make, and Starbucks is applying for a patent.

The cold-pressed coffee will be the first to be launched at Roastery, a high-end Starbucks bakery in Seattle, and may be promoted globally in a richer form after a successful attempt.

The market for cold drinks is huge.

Although none of the three companies specifically disclosed the sales of their cold drinks, according to some data provided by Starbucks at the 2016 investor conference, the size of the cold drinks market is imaginative. Starbucks believes that revenue from its cold coffee business is expected to double by 2021, with sales of the overall cold drink portfolio rising from 35 per cent in 2013 to nearly 50 per cent in 2021.

In addition, Starbucks cited a report that iced coffee consumption has increased by 75% over the past decade, and sales of cold coffee have increased by 338.9% between 2010 and 2015. The trend of iced coffee is creating a lot of opportunities and there is a lot of room for development.

In the case of Starbucks, cold-extracted coffee has helped them attract millennials with unique tastes and save some "middle-and high-end" consumers, while Frappuccino has attracted coffee fans who are looking for different tastes.

Although McDonald's is not innovative, it is just "copying" the other two iced coffee products, which may not cultivate loyal consumers, but it is likely to win with low cost and scale, after all, as long as existing fast food fans, each person has an extra cup of iced coffee, it will bring a lot of extra benefits.

However, the future of Starbucks, McDonald's and Donndole in China is uncertain when it comes to developing iced coffee, as they face very strong competitors such as hot water and thermos cups.

From January to June 2017, China's cold drink market was in a period of high growth, with a compound growth rate of more than 33%, according to data from Nielsen and other institutions. However, China's per capita cold drink consumption is still at a low level of 4 litres, while the US has reached 18.4 litres.

In China, cold drinks also have strong seasonality, and summer is often the peak of consumption. According to the Chinese custom, they are not able to eat popsicles and drink cold drinks freely in the cold winter, and most of them will soak Chinese wolfberry in a thermos cup. When traveling abroad, we often encounter the embarrassment of "how do Chinese people drink hot water".

In addition, from the perspective of the coffee market, we are far from reaching the scale of Europe and the United States, and consumers have not yet been fully cultivated, especially in low-line cities. In addition to foreign brands, there are few local coffee brands with brand tone, clear target consumer groups and differentiation in the Chinese market. The coffee market has great potential, but it is not yet explosive.

So the question is, will you have a cup of iced coffee in autumn and winter?