From online to offline, Never Coffee turns boutique coffee into ready-to-drink fast consumer goods.

With so many categories of consumer upgrading brands, this time it's time to talk about ready-to-drink coffee.

Coffee as an imported product in China, the market scale is not very large, a total of 70 billion yuan, minus the chain stores represented by Starbucks and instant coffee represented by Nestle, the market for bottled coffee is only 3 billion yuan. However, the annual growth rate of instant coffee can reach 30%, which is a fast-growing category. You know, instant coffee has stopped growing, and the overall bottled beverage market is growing at less than 10%.

Never Coffee is a bottled coffee brand, priced at 9.9 yuan a bottle. The well-known bottled coffee from Starbucks and Master Kang is made from coffee extract, while Never Cofee coffee is directly extracted from boutique coffee beans. As far as I understand it, the difference is like regular fruit juice and NFC juice (non-concentrated reduced juice). Although can not achieve the taste of freshly brewed coffee, but the flavor is much better than ordinary bottled coffee.

Blue Bottle, an American boutique coffee brand familiar to Chinese consumers, already has boutique coffee bottled products, with sales exceeding those made in stores. According to Liu Zuofei, founder of Never Coffee, it is difficult to achieve industrial production of boutique coffee. Several US boutique coffee brands keep the production process secret, and there is no mature equipment in China at present. After about a year of experiment, Never Coffee can ensure a stable output.

In the past, Never Coffee was a pure Internet brand, and the advantage of online sales was that it was able to respond quickly to consumer feedback, so they developed and iterated more than a dozen unique SKU. But since the second half of 2015, the cost of getting customers online has soared, and the Never Coffee team has found that after 10 months, the monthly repurchase rate of users has dropped from 70% to less than 5%. They realize that the Internet has not made it easier to buy ready to drink products, but more troublesome. New opportunities for Never Coffee should be offline.

After the Spring Festival this year, Never Coffee began to roll out offline channels. At present, it has laid 3000 terminals in Beijing, East China and South China, and its overall sales have increased from tens of thousands of bottles per month to more than 100,000 bottles per month. For Never Coffee, the new offline opportunities are mainly reflected in three aspects:

Only choose convenience stores, boutique supermarkets, bakeries, many new channels are in great need of new brands to attract young consumers. And grow with the new brand.

Large enterprises such as Uni-President and Wa make room temperature coffee, which is put together with normal temperature drinks, while Never Coffee is a cold chain product, which is put together with yogurt and NFC juice to give consumers a healthier and high-end brand.

The difficulty and cost of online selling cold chain to the whole country is high, while offline sales can make use of the mature cold chain distribution system such as convenience store, Shangchao and so on.

We noticed that Never Coffee did not emphasize the word "boutique coffee" in bottle design and brand promotion. Liu Zuofei explained that boutique coffee is a minority category in people's minds. although they emphasize quality, they still want to make fast consumer products. Offline, Never Coffee sells only three classic SKU to satisfy different groups of people. One is black coffee with obvious acidity, one is latte, and the other is lime Yega, which is specially developed by them, which is a combination of non-concentrated reduced Lemon Juice and Yega Sheffield Coffee.

Founder Liu Zuofei, a Ph.D. from the State University of New York, once worked for multinational food companies in a New York law firm. Founded the brand of HPP juice. At present, Never Coffee has completed the Pre-A round of financing.