Development of Chinese Coffee Market Chinese Coffee starts from Pu'er

What binds Jin Jihui, Alex and Hute to Yunnan is the thousand-year-old tea village Pu'er. This small border town, which has changed its name from Simao to Pu'er because of its famous Pu'er tea, now wants to add another label to its city card-the coffee capital of China.

In 2007, Jin Jihui, a middle-aged literary and artistic classmate with Jia Jingwen and Xu Jinglei at the Beijing Film Academy, came to Pu'er, a small border city in Yunnan. When he wanted to come here to spend his days doing Pu'er tea business, he was surprised to find that there were a large number of coffee trees here, which could satisfy his three major hobbies of coffee, red wine and movies at the same time, so he stayed in Pu'er and opened a COE cafe to start a new life and business.

Now Jin Jihui is busy doing two major things: one is to open a coffee movie theme hall, and the other is to "use the manor method to make coffee of the same quality as Blue Mountain" in the contracted coffee farm covering an area of 3000 mu.

In 2010, Hong Kong resident Alex also came to Yunnan. He is the most respected barista by the owner of the "breathing Cafe". Because there are excellent coffee trees in Pu'er, Yunnan Province, the boss opened the branch to Kunming. Alex flew to Kunming with the brand mission of the branch.

Alex now wears a blue apron and white gloves until the middle of the night. The "Respiratory Cafe", located on the third floor of Kunming Wangfujing Department Store, is so good that customers occupy almost every table. At 10:30 in the evening, guests began to check out one after another, and Alex was busy with another job-baking. "I like baking at night, it won't affect the guests, and the environment is quiet." In the minds of many young people in Kunming, the coffee shop managed by Alex has become a symbol of petty bourgeoisie life.

Belgian Hute came to Yunnan earlier than Jin Jihui and Alex. He has been traveling in numerous mountain villages of Pu'er for seven years. Just looking at clothes, this one is 1.93 meters tall with a slight hunchback, wearing jeans, hiking shoes, wearing a Little Red Riding Hood, carrying a "map" with intricate circles, and driving a green Cherokee. It is more likely to be regarded as a foreign tourist, but his identity is the manager of the agronomy department of Nestle Pu'er, and the complex "map" is full of information about coffee-growing villages to be developed and familiar farmers.

He chose to come to Pu'er also because of the coffee here.

Before Huth, the manager of Nestle's Pu'er agronomy department was his father, Yang Dimai, who took him to the coffee road. Huth went to Burundi in Africa with his father at the age of 3 and watched his father study how to grow coffee there for the next 15 years. Then he returned to Belgium to study at university and majored in agriculture. In 2005, he joined Nestl é and was sent to Pu'er to take over his father's job.

Hute, who often goes to the countryside, has become friends with many Pu'er farmers, easily eating at the farmhouse, chatting with the villagers, drinking Pu'er tea, and even falling in love with the hookah here.

What binds Jin Jihui, Alex and Hute to Yunnan is the thousand-year-old tea village Pu'er. This small border town, which has changed its name from Simao to Pu'er because of its famous Pu'er tea, now wants to add another label to its city card-the coffee capital of China.

New business card

During the purchasing season from December to March, Hute will see for himself whether the coffee beans sent by farmers meet Nestl é standards at the company's office, in the small red building of the national grain reserve warehouse on the outskirts of Pu'er. Coffee industry terminology is "cup product".

On the afternoon of February 23, the fragrance of coffee wafted out from Xiaohonglou. Hute is tasting coffee with three other "cup test" masters, and they want to record and score all the instant aroma, acidity, glycol, earthy taste, fermentation taste, and so on.

During the annual purchasing season, Pu'er Canon will drive tricycles, motorcycles, tractors and trucks to deliver its coffee beans to Nestl é. In the busiest times, there are long queues of vehicles, from the warehouse rented by Nestl é to the Sanjiacun tea factory 500 meters outside the grain depot, sometimes walking another kilometer. On both sides of the long queue are neat Pu'er tea trees, just showing emerald green leaves.

Such a tea shrine is now planted with a large area of coffee trees. According to official data provided by Pu'er, by October 2011, the coffee planting area in Pu'er city had reached 425000 mu, accounting for 65.8% of the coffee planting area in Yunnan Province and 65.6% of the 648000 mu in the country. At present, the planting area of Pu'er coffee is equivalent to 1/3 of the planting area of Pu'er tea: in 2011, the area of modern tea garden in Pu'er City reached 1.412 million mu. At the end of 2011, the Pu'er municipal government formally proposed to build "the coffee capital of China" and make coffee another business card of Pu'er.

Like other developing third-and fourth-tier cities in China, new buildings can be seen everywhere in Pu'er, with prices in the center of the city reaching 5000 yuan per square meter. However, young people in this small town have completely different consumption concepts and lifestyles from Kunming, the provincial capital more than 500km away. Coffee has not yet become popular and entered their daily lives.

In this small border town, there are few cafes. The busiest May Day pedestrian street in Pu'er has more than a dozen Internet cafes and a Dex, but not a single coffee shop. In a Shangdao coffee house on the outskirts of the city, young people often eat western food or even drink white wine, but from afternoon to evening, they often fail to sell a cup of coffee.

Huth has long been used to this contrast. For him, the magic of Pu'er coffee takes place outside the city, such as Dakaihe Village, Nanping Town, where he goes most frequently.

Because of coffee.

Along the highway from Pu'er to Mangshi, after passing the Nandao River toll station, there is a fork to the left. on both sides of the road, on the hillside facing the sun, there are half-meter-high tea trees, neat and uniform, like green satin. On the shady side, however, there are rows of taller, messy coffee trees. Accompanied by occasional pine, banana and camphor trees, thousands of years of Chinese tea and foreign coffee with only a few years of history stared at each other like two armies against each other.

At the mouth of the village of Dakaihe, two-story buildings built with marble tiles on both sides of the village road are usually new furniture-refrigerators, sofas, coffee tables and solar water heaters. There is often a pick-up truck or a farm tractor in the yard, some farmers' homes, and a third car-a car or SUV. According to a survey conducted by the Pu'er municipal government, 50 cars were added to Dakaihe Village last year.

This is an immigrant village, which was only established in 1983. The villagers came from the rural areas of the surrounding counties and cities. Because of the water conservancy project and the soil erosion of the original village, they were forced to move to Dakai River. When Hute came here seven years ago, as the poorest village in Pu'er, most of the villagers of Dakai River still lived in low thatched huts with an annual per capita income of less than 1,000 yuan and lived on government relief food.

Zi Shaofang, director of the Dakaihe Village Committee, said that it was coffee that made Dakaihe Village famous, and media from all over the world came to cover it. Of course, more coffee merchants came from Japan, South Korea, the United States, Switzerland, and other places.

Over the past year, Zi Shaofang has received more than 50 groups of visitors, and he has been able to endorse the coffee area, planting history and farmers' benefits of the village without hesitation, and even blurted out the previous day in the New York futures market. the purchase price of coffee beans is 216.8 cents per kilogram.

The myth of wealth brought by coffee has enabled remote villagers to experience the sweetness of the global coffee trade. More than 90% of the agricultural land here is planted with coffee, and 5130 mu of coffee fields have been designated by Nestl é as the raw material base. like farmers in coffee-producing areas such as Ethiopia, Indonesia, Costa Rica and Brazil, Dakaihe villagers are full-time farmers They have become part of the coffee trading system of more than 10 trillion yuan a year.

Luo Weijun, who is in his 40s, is no longer satisfied with being just a farmer. On the hillside behind the village, he has just rented 200 mu of land to build a coffee fruit processing plant.

"in the processing plant, there will be a computer-controlled rice remover from Colombia that can identify the size and shape of beans and screen out stones and moldy beans. The cost of all investments is 2 million yuan. I believe a lot of people will come to me to process beans. " Luo Weijun's idea is very simple, Pu'er coffee, mostly individual farmers, many only began to grow coffee in the last three years, they simply do not know how to process the fresh fruit of coffee. As long as people from his village and the surrounding villages come to his factory for processing, he will be able to get his money back in two years.

Economic impulse

These stories are what Huth would like to hear most. Many villagers in Dakaihe have received his technical guidance, including Luo Weijun, who is being promoted to be a boss.

After graduating from Hute University, he worked in Tanzania for three years, and the job was still to teach farmers to grow things.

After being sent to Pu'er by Nestl é in 2005, he found that it was just right to achieve his two goals of growing coffee and helping farmers.

Pu'er is located in southwest Yunnan, with mountain area accounting for 98.3%. The ecological environment in the mountain area is poor and natural resources are scarce. Local people have no choice but to compare: "spread a slope, harvest a basket, and cook a pot." However, coffee can adapt to this environment. Although the mountains of Pu'er are undulating, it is located near the Tropic of Cancer, with a large temperature difference between day and night, and abundant rainfall, which is similar to the conditions in Colombia, a coffee growing area at the same latitude. It is in line with the growing environment of Arabica beans, the most commercially valuable coffee varieties.

Arabica is suitable for planting between 800 and 1800 meters above sea level. For Pu'er, it ranges from 300 meters to 3000 meters above sea level, which happens to be a large amount of land available. Although a large amount of tea is grown here, Pu'er tea is usually picked from late February to November, and coffee is picked from December to March of the following year. Where tea likes the sun, coffee likes shady land, and there is no conflict between the two crops, so the government is naturally happy to promote a new cash crop to develop the local economy.

What's more, after the frenzied speculation of capital in 2007, the purchase price of Pu'er tea plummeted, and the economic benefits could not be compared with coffee. Tea produces 300kg of fresh tea per mu, according to last year's market price of 9 yuan / kg, the output value per mu is 2700 yuan; while coffee produces about 1 ton of fresh fruit per mu, that is, 200 kilograms of raw beans, and at the current purchase price of 25 yuan / kg, the output value per mu is 5000 yuan, more than twice that of Pu'er tea.

Ganba Village, Yunxian Township, 80 kilometers away from the city, only began to grow coffee on a large scale in 2008. Previously, the largest cash crop in the village was tobacco, with 1800 mu. Now the coffee field in this village has soared to as much as 3000 mu.

Although more than 2/3 coffee trees will not bear fruit until two years later (usually the fruit will not be harvested in the third year after the coffee trees are planted), Zhu Xuekun, a secretary of the village branch, felt the villagers' impatience last year: there were several conflicts in the village every month, all related to the land, and even people who moved out more than a decade ago are now asking to move back to redistribute the land.

"people fight for land just to grow coffee." On the way back to the village from the mountain, Zhu Xuekun introduced the troubles in the village without scruples.

Compared with Dakaihe Village, the current situation of Ganba Village is more in line with the reality of most villages in Pu'er: longing for coffee to bring wealth, but facing a variety of practical problems. For example, there is no water pipe, it is not convenient to wash fruit and shell, the narrow yard is also easy to let the sun-dried coffee beans ferment mildew, in a hurry to grow coffee, the plant distance of 1.5 meters should be changed into 1 meter. All these may lead to a decline in the quality of coffee, and the coffee field in Ganba Village is still the most and best in Yunxian Township.

Huth often rejects coffee shipped by some farmers because of improper cultivation.

On the afternoon of February 23, one of the four samples that were being tested in Xiaohonglou failed. "it's full of mildew. I can't feel the mellowness of coffee. We won't want this kind of beans anyway." Hute asked the staff of the purchasing station to inform the farmers that the 30 bags of beans he had brought had to be shipped back.

Musty coffee can not be seen from the surface of beans, because there are many reasons, which may be improperly planted or appear in the sun. On one occasion, he found that after drying the beans, there was no place to pile them up, so they could only put them in the yard. Worried that Rain Water would get wet, the farmers used plastic film to cover the beans. As a result, they all fermented in the sun and turned into "moldy beans" after drying.

Hute, who has lived in China for seven years, said that Chinese farmers are very good at learning and have a flexible brain, but they often make some "Chinese mistakes", such as imitating the method of growing tea, burning the land, cutting down miscellaneous trees and cleaning up the ground, but unlike tea trees, coffee is a tropical crop that needs shade from trees and vegetation during its growth. In order to save the land that has been burned, he also persuaded farmers to replant trees in the fields-one large tree every 10 meters and scattered.

Nowadays, with the expansion of coffee planting area, mistakes continue to break out. After all, many farmers in Yunnan do not have any coffee culture. They grow coffee entirely because of economic motivation, whether it is planting, fertilization, or drying processing. There can be problems in every link.

In order to solve these problems, Hute almost ran all over the coffee fields of Quan Pu'er and Xishuangbanna in seven years, and the "Mr. Coffee" was used to inviting him to smoke a hookah and then making a cup of tea to entertain him.

Oligarchs and checks and balances

Direct contact with farmers, imparting technology, solving problems, and purchasing products are actually the work of Nestle Pu'er purchasing station. In 2011, Nestl é bought 8000 tons of coffee beans in Yunnan, and 99 per cent of its suppliers were individual farmers, a special system even among Nestl é's 80 coffee sites around the world.

This practice was formulated by Wu's predecessor and his father, Yang Dimai. During Yang Dimai's tenure, instead of relying on large local coffee suppliers and state-owned companies to provide supplies, he decided to hand over the money directly to local farmers and move Nestl é's office from Kunming to Pu'er to buy coffee beans from local small farmers directly. The advantage of doing so is to avoid middleman price speculation, tax concessions, directly establish a strong trading relationship with farmers, but also effectively control the production and quality of products from the source.

Dakaihe Village cooperated with Yang Dimai at that time. The direct assistance and acquisition of large international companies have aroused the enthusiasm of the villagers. While Nestl é only receives processed green coffee beans, almost every peasant household in Dakaihe has bought a series of processing facilities such as peeling machines, fermentation ponds, and drying grounds, which has made Dakaihe Village the most experienced coffee village in Pu'er for more than a decade.

Hute, who has closer ties with small farmers, directly taught qualified farmers to check futures prices online and decided in 2011 to bundle the purchase price with the New York futures market, which became Nestl é's offer after deducting 10 cents per pound from freight.

The coffee purchase model of "cooperation based on small farmers" jointly created by the father and son is very different from the documentary "Black Gold" in which Ethiopian farmers are exploited by local plutocrats and multinational groups. Most farmers in Ethiopia have plantations, but only 0.5 yuan a day for hard work, while farmers who come to work in Dakaihe Village during the picking season can pick 80 kilograms of coffee fruit a day. The income is about 80 yuan.

However, the "cooperation of small farmers" coffee acquisition model does not mean that Nestl é is a public welfare organization. In 1988, it was because the coffee harvest in South America, Brazil and other countries directly affected the product prices of large coffee producers such as Nestl é, Kraft and Procter & Gamble, in order to reduce its dependence on South American coffee planting bases, Nestl é chose to come to Pu'er to open a new base.

As a multinational giant, Nestl é also has its own business considerations, and it will not keep the acquisition price high all the time. The offer posted by Nestl é outside the Little Red Building on February 23 is 25.91 yuan / kg, which is a far cry from the sky-high price of 41 yuan for Pu'er last year because of the frost disaster in Brazil and the decline in production. With the increase in global coffee production, many coffee traders in Yunnan expect prices to continue to fall.

Nestl é directly guides the behavior of farmers, and many people think that it will cause a bad phenomenon, that is, to make the local coffee varieties more simple. In order to stimulate the production of Pu'er coffee, Nestl é specially cultivated Katimo, which is suitable for the climate here, which is made of 75% iron pickup (a small-grain coffee mainly grown in Kenya) and a mixture of 25% Robasta (a medium-grain coffee. Jamaica Blue Mountain also belongs to this variety) and bred coffee varieties with high yield and strong pest resistance.

However, although Katimo also belongs to the better quality Arabica coffee, its taste is second to that of Itsuka and Robasta. Now more than 60% of the coffee grown in Yunnan belongs to Katimo introduced by Nestl é. Only less than 20% of the varieties are iron pickups first brought in by missionaries.

Liu Biao, deputy director of Pu 'er City Coffee Industry Development Office, who has been dealing with Wu Te for many years, feels that multinational enterprises have played a role in stabilizing the overall situation. For example, Nestle's acquisition volume accounts for one third of Pu' er coffee production. Liu Biao's other identity is the deputy director of the local tea bureau.

As an official, Liu Biao not only often followed Wu Te to the countryside below to check the growth of coffee, but also often discussed with Wu Te what to do next in coffee bean breeding. From the perspective of technology, capital to publicity, Liu Biao believes that these multinational giants have made contributions.

However, he also admitted that if only rely on Nestle, there are potential risks behind it, which is not conducive to the expansion of the coffee industry. Therefore, a few years ago, the government of Pu 'er City paid attention to Starbucks. Since 2007, the latter has been purchasing coffee beans in Baoshan, Yunnan Province. Two years later, Starbucks also used Yunnan coffee beans to make a product "Fengwu Xiangyun", which was placed on the store shelves.

However, Pu 'er's large-scale Katimo variety does not meet Starbucks' procurement requirements. They are required to change from a raw material buyer to an influential grower like Nestle. Later, the government of Pu 'er City found the government of Yunnan Province, and under the leadership of the provincial government, Starbucks signed an agreement with Yunnan Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The former introduced 4 foreign varieties and 4 Yunnan varieties, totaling 70,000 coffee seedlings to the latter for secret cultivation.

After a series of deliberations, Starbucks finally signed a memorandum of cooperation with the local government of Pu 'er, and in February this year, officially announced the establishment of a joint venture company with Aini Group headquartered in Pu' er. The new joint venture, which will be led by Starbucks, will purchase and export high-quality Arabica beans from Yunnan and will operate a coffee processing plant there.

"You can think of Starbucks 'introduction as a counterbalance so that the future doesn't just depend on Nestle." In Liu Biao's view, this works well, because Nestle also signed a planting cooperation memorandum with Pu 'er City and claimed that coffee would be developed into a major local backbone industry.

The secret war between Starbucks and Nestle, the two giants, has also made Yunnan coffee famous from another level. Since the second half of 2011, foreign coffee traders have been looking for Liu Biao, from Switzerland, Britain, Spain, France, Germany to South Korea. In one month, he received hundreds of business cards.

Coffee craze

For local governments, winning the favor of multinational groups can often increase their own achievements, and after coffee beans are acquired by multinational companies, it is also equivalent to exporting foreign exchange. At present, more than 70% of the coffee beans produced in Yunnan every year are divided by coffee giants such as Starbucks, Nestle and Maxwell, while 90% of the coffee beans in Pu 'er are exported.

Has Pu 'er City ever thought of opening up the domestic market?

"There's no domestic market. We have to ask the Chinese why they don't drink coffee." Liu Biao replied without hesitation.

The answer seems subjective. In January, a report by the China Bureau of Statistics showed that the proportion of urban population exceeded 50 percent for the first time. As part of the urbanization process, western lifestyles such as coffee drinking began to enter the daily life of more urbanites, and cafes gradually became the "third place" between home and work. As an example, the big brands originally rooted in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou also began to copy chain stores to Kunming and other second-tier cities in the mainland.

Starbucks, for example, announced that it would increase the number of stores in China to 1500 by 2015. Lavazza Espression, which opened its 15th coffee shop in Zhujiang New Town, Guangzhou late last year, is known as the "most popular coffee brand in Italy" and will open 200 new stores in China's first-and second-tier cities in the next three years. Costa Coffee in the UK followed suit with a decision to open 250 new stores in three years. Even China Resources Group, which is a supermarket, has acquired 80% ownership of Pacific Coffee in Hong Kong at a price of more than 300 million yuan, preparing to open 1000 Pacific Coffee in the Mainland.

China may be the only country in the world that can produce coffee and has a huge potential consumer market.

Along with this coffee craze, countless small private cafes have sprung up. For example, in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, Wangfujing had just landed in Kunming, and together with nearby Parkson Shopping Center and Baida Xintiandi, it constituted Kunming's most prosperous shopping center. The construction of a large shopping mall has brought with it many new things, such as the Broadway iMAX Studios, two Starbucks, a Charlie Brown Cafe and a Breath Cafe. For the city's 30-somethings, one result of the city's changes is a demand for coffee breaks and time to pass between shopping and movies.

Breath Cafe is a branch opened in Kunming from Hong Kong in 2010 under this background.

"If you want a cup of Perfect coffee, you have to consider how the beans are grown and what characteristics the beans have this year." Alex is very particular about the taste and color of coffee beans and believes that this is a key factor in determining roasting. As one of Hong Kong's famous cafes, they are popular because they insist on baking themselves.

So, after Alex came to Yunnan, he went to many places to check out coffee. Last November, under the introduction of Chen Zhonglin, sales manager of Kunming Jiesi Trading Co., Ltd., he found his favorite coffee beans in Naji Village of Pu 'er and ordered a ton of Naji Village coffee beans.

Now Alex has brewed a new coffee in Kunming called Yunnan Coffee Cup 3A, which, like cappuccino, latte and espresso here, is made only from Pu 'er coffee beans. And guests favorite mint latte, and other fancy coffee, half beans are Pu 'er, half are Brazilian beans. Alex said that in Hong Kong, breath cafes also mix Yunnan beans with other varieties.

In fact, Kunming Savardo, Guiyang Reading Time, Guangzhou Fangsuo Bookstore and other small cafes, also find people to Yunnan beans, and then bake themselves, make "Yunnan coffee" recommended to consumers.

"Actually, Pu 'er beans can be made into fine products." Jin Jihui once took Pu 'er beans to SCAA for cup testing and got a high score of 85-a score that means the beans tested have reached excellent level.

"With exports as the mainstay, Yunnan coffee will find it difficult to develop its own characteristics in the future and become a well-known bean like Sumatra Mantenin, Jamaica Blue Mountain and Indonesian Civet Coffee. Multinational companies always prioritize brand features so that people remember it as Nestle or Starbucks experience, rather than reminding people that I drink Yunnan coffee." Although Jin Jihui wants to make Yunnan fine coffee, he does not have the funds of multinational groups, so he can only find ways to make bean brands first.

In his mind, the best way to launch a brand, in addition to strict manor cultivation, but also with the help of foreign coffee merchant reputation. Austrian family-owned coffee merchant Kermann Schalf, who is planning to open a 1000-square-meter Viennese style cafe in Harbin, has talked to Schalf and agreed to supply the cafe with coffee beans from his estate.

Wu Te now has also received new requirements from the company. In the next few years, he needs to purchase more Yunnan coffee beans. During his tenure, Nestle has used the Pu 'er coffee beans he acquired to develop a high-end gift box called "Yunnan Noble", focusing on the Chinese market.