Starbucks collided with McCoffee.

Last year, consumers who prefer pumpkin-flavored coffee have already tasted the benefits of Starbucks pumpkin-flavored Frappuccino packaged drinks launched on Costco. This year, in an effort to catch up with these sweet lovers, Starbucks announced another limited edition of pumpkin-flavored latte K-cup drinks. It is accompanied by pumpkin-flavored Via instant coffee bags.

At the same time, if you don't mind the sweetness of a lot of sugar and caffeine exploding in your mouth, Starbucks bottles of pumpkin-flavored Frappuccinos are available on shelves across the United States. the biggest package is also bigger: 15 bottles of Frappuccino in one case instead of 12.

Starbucks is not alone in celebrating pumpkin season. McCoffee, owned by McDonald's, also announced that the pumpkin-flavored latte, which made its debut last year, will return on August 31 this year. Also on the market is a sweet drink with cinnamon flavor.

The pumpkin-flavored latte battle is just a common competition among chains in the fall, but the relationship between Starbucks and McCoffee, which has been established since the latter was founded in 1993, has seen some uncertainties in recent years.

The scale of the two is still not the same. As of 2015, McCoffee had 5044 stores worldwide and Starbucks had 22557, almost five times that of the former, according to Euromonitor. This apparent volume gap is more reflected in full-year store revenue, which exceeded $21 billion worldwide in 2015, compared with less than $1.5 billion for McCoffee.

But with the channel advantage of McDonald's existing stores, McCoffee is catching up, especially in the Chinese market.

From 2010 to 2013, the number of Starbucks stores in China grew from 470 to 1017, and its market share in China's coffee industry increased from 15.9% to 31.5%. McCoffee is clearly expanding faster: over the same period, McCoffee's market share in China has grown from 1.7% to 6.1%, with an annual growth rate of more than 86%. In 2013 alone, McDonald's announced the opening of 45% more McCoffee stores to 750 by the end of the year.

This is far from the ceiling. In 2014, the number of McDonald's Chinese restaurants reached 1988, while Starbucks had only 1140. In the world, the gap of future growth space is gradually widening. In 2015, McDonald's had 36525 stores worldwide, while Starbucks had only 23043.

In the United States, the stronghold of Starbucks and McDonald's, McCoffee currently accounts for 3.6% of the single-cup coffee market, while Starbucks' market share remains at 14.8%.

But in the face of McCoffee's accelerated expansion, Starbucks, which continues to signal a transformation, has shown greater ambition.

Starbucks, which once said "never sell food", removed the word Coffee from logo in 2011. In 2012, it bought La Boulange, an American bakery chain, and a large number of baked goods and sandwiches were officially sold in Starbucks stores. It has even tried to launch late-night drinks in 32 stores in Chicago, Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles-trends that suggest that Starbucks is moving from a coffee brand to more like a restaurant chain.

Constrained by the overall downturn in the US catering industry, both Starbucks and McDonald's are not doing very well. However, even though Starbucks has delivered lower-than-expected results for three consecutive quarters this year, it is still growing faster than McDonald's. And it still looks more popular than McDonald's because it bypassed unhealthy label foods such as hamburgers and French fries from the start.

But the competitiveness of McCoffee is another matter. In addition to the existing channel advantages of McDonald's stores, it is cheaper than Starbucks, but McCoffee needs to think more about how to get rid of its "greasy" image-- which is also a headache for McDonald's-- it launched its own coffee beans and capsule coffee products in January as a step to strengthen the coffee brand, but whether it works in the end depends on whether young people will pay for it.

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