Tea vs coffee in China: new-style cafes’ frappuccino fightback suggests there’s room for them and Starbucks too
Despite a 2,000-year tradition of tea drinking, coffee culture has been quick to conquer China, pushing tea houses out of business. But new cafes serving quick-to-make tea drinks with added milk, cream or fruit suggest there’s room for both brews
The Chinese have been drinking tea for more than 2,000 years, but the 21st century is turning the old traditions on its head amid an onslaught of coffee shops sprouting up in cities across the country.
Starbucks has been leading the charge, having opened more than 3,000 outlets in China since 1999. It is planning to open another 2,000 by the end of 2021.
The Seattle-based company has boasted it is opening a store every 15 hours in China. In December it opened its largest store in the world – Shanghai’s Starbucks Reserve Roastery, on the main retail thoroughfare of Nanjing Road.
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In 2007, when Starbucks had already been on the march in China for eight years, Paris native Florence Samson set up Song Fang Maison de Thé in a 1930s Shanghai lane house. Her aim in opening the three-floor retail store and tea house, in the former French Concession area, was to bring the best of Chinese and French tea drinking cultures together under one roof. She offered different teas and blends from around China and Europe to help emphasise the traditional ways of preparing and enjoying tea.
After 11 years, Song Fang closed its doors at the beginning of this month, and Samson now plans to take the business in a new direction.
“We have seen some changes in customer habits. We had fewer customers coming into the tea house in the last two years. We didn’t change our products, and maybe it was because we weren’t offering anything new [that people stopped coming],” Samson says.
“I wanted to preserve the Chinese way of drinking tea, which is amazing. You have very good quality tea, you brew it for different lengths of times, and you have to discover it. But I think it’s less what the Chinese customers want now.”