Flush the coffee out of the Internet.

Characters:

Liu Zuofei, founder of NeverCoffee

Areas:

Internet catering

Entrepreneurial Quotations:

"We want to break the cycle of high price and low quality in the domestic coffee market."

Our reporter Pan Fuda

When you get up and stay up late, take a sip of coffee to refresh yourself, and order a cup of coffee while drinking and chatting at the same time. Coffee has become a standard part of young people's life, but a cup of commercial coffee in chain stores costs as much as 30 to 40 yuan, and high-quality boutique coffee can be as high as 100 yuan. Foreign coffee of the same quality has been transformed into a luxury drink at home.

"9.9 yuan per cup pricing revolution", "only make boutique coffee with more than 80 points", "sell coffee online for three days to get financing" …... There is such an Internet coffee startup team, they are not convinced by the current quality and price of coffee in China. They hope that Chinese coffee will become a "beverage with no consideration of price" like Coke, sending high-quality boutique coffee to the hands of young people.

A cup of coffee costs only a few cents

Walking into a small NeverCoffee coffee station on the corner of an alley on the west seaside, there is a dazzling variety of hand-made coffee, lattes and mocha fancy coffee from six producing areas on the menu, but the prices of all categories are surprising-9.9 yuan for medium cups and 14.9 yuan for large cups.

"Zhongguancun, Chaowai SOHO and three other coffee stations at the National Exhibition will soon open to serve take-out coffee groups. At present, our business mainly comes from online bottled coffee." Liu Zuofei, CEO of NeverCoffee, pointed to a cup of Yejia snow coffee that had just been ordered on the table. "A cup of American coffee made from commercial coffee beans costs 22 yuan in a chain store, but their coffee beans cost about 40 cents, and our boutique coffee beans cost several times as much, only a few yuan." Liu Zuofei came straight to the point and continued bluntly: "our pricing of 9.9 yuan is described as' disrupting'by our peers. The rule of the Chinese coffee industry is 5 to 10 times profit, while we only earn 20% to 30%."

Walking into the NeverCoffee office across the street from the cafe, the barista was busy with a cup test, and several online operators flipped their fingers in front of the keyboard across the wall. According to reports, coffee with an average price of US $2 accounts for 1% of the average daily income of US residents, while coffee with an average price of 30 yuan can account for 10% of the average daily income of residents of China's first-tier cities. In fact, coffee beans are the second largest trading futures in the world after oil. They are clearly priced on the New York and London exchanges, but just because the term "coffee" is imported, a cup of coffee of average quality is sold at a high price in China.

He also revealed the processing secret behind a cup of coffee: some commercial coffee chains first masked the smell of defective beans with the bitterness of deep baking, and then masked the smell of deep baking with lots of cream and syrup. On the other hand, fine coffee emphasizes the flavor of its origin, and there are a series of requirements from seeds to cups, such as high-altitude slope planting, manual picking and selection, water washing or sun treatment, medium and shallow roasting, various extraction methods to test the technology, and so on. Boutique coffee has been popular in Europe and the United States since 2000, but it has not been popular in China.

9.9 yuan pricing secret "excluding operating costs such as store rent, through the direct mining of overseas boutique coffee farms and the standardized baking extraction of factories in Beijing, we have directly reduced the coffee pricing to 9.9 yuan." There is a set of six bottles of black coffee with different flavors on the table, which have made waves in the coffee circle recently. Mantenin, Sumatra, Yegashifi, Ethiopia, Honduras. The coffee grown in the holy place has been standardized and filled into heat-resistant plastic bottles, and the sweet and bitter taste level, treatment method, baking degree and flavor evaluation are clearly marked on the package.

For coffee lovers who are picky about their taste buds, it is too troublesome to make their own coffee, and the coffee shop is expensive and of mediocre quality, all of which have become pain points. "heated in the microwave or refrigerated in the refrigerator, you can drink hot or iced coffee at any time." Liu Zuofei, who has worked as a lawyer in the United States for 11 years, said that in the United States, coffee at $1.75 is only one coin more expensive than a $1.50 Coke. In China, a cup of coffee can buy a case of Coke. Such a coffee pricing system is unreasonable. "with a price of 10 yuan, consumers can buy any drink such as Coke and get fine coffee without thinking." He said.

Online Wechat sells bottled ready-to-drink coffee, there are small offline coffee stations, although the price is low, but rely on "volume" profit, coupled with the standardization of coffee production. Although they think they sell coffee, many people call it "Internet coffee". "the Internet is just a platform for issuing orders, we make money from coffee itself, and the quality of individual items in the catering industry is the core competitiveness." Liu Zuofei said.

A layman who "quarrels" every day starts his own business.

Among the four "unreliable" founders derided by Liu Zuofei, the other three are architect Zhao Yue, rock veteran Hou Zhantao and coffee roaster Kang Jin, of whom Kang Jin is the only one with coffee experience who supplied coffee beans to a number of boutique cafes in Beijing before joining NeverCoffee. Because of his love of coffee, Liu Zuofei met Kang Jin and soon made a decision to partner in Internet coffee and "make the boutique coffee bigger." However, as soon as they started working together in the early days of the business, the two had a big fight.

"he thinks that the quality of the boutique coffee we developed is of high quality, and the price should be set at least 40 or 50 yuan, but I insist on reducing the price to less than 10 yuan." Liu Zuofei said with a smile that one day, the two of them were discussing pricing in a coffee shop and quarreled from 10:00 to 09:30 in the evening. In the end, Liu Zuofei reluctantly convinced the coffee master: "if you want to achieve the real extreme, you have to consider not only quality but also price."

Difficulties come one after another. On the first day of the product launch in May, the team, which had prepared only 1950 sets of products in advance, was bewildered by the unexpected 100 daily orders. Temporarily increase production capacity, send everyone to the factory to supervise the production, soak in the factory until dawn, they finally made it through the difficult first few days. But then, many coffee lovers have become loyal fans, investors have also left messages in the background of Wechat asking about financing intentions. It was launched on Thursday and began to meet with different investors on Friday. on the third Sunday after its launch, they finalized the 3 million yuan angel round of Hongtai fund founded by Yu Minhong and Sheng Xitai.

"now the team is often blushing over a small detail." Liu Zuofei said that they always adhere to the "never spirit" and never give up in the face of difficulties. The team has been pursuing the extreme of a cup of coffee: top coffee beans such as Blue Mountain and Rosa are monopolized by foreign countries in the form of manors, and it is difficult for Chinese people to drink the real thing. "it is hoped that we will expand our sales until we are able to acquire the world's top estates that produce top coffee beans." Their ambitions are quietly sprouting: "We want to make the flavor of boutique coffee appreciated by more Chinese people."

Source: Beijing Daily