Why Did the Luckin JOJO Cheese Latte Go Viral?

Luckin Coffee's co-branded Raw Cheese Latte with JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean sold 1.31 million cups on its first day and 6.59 million cups within seven days, a new high for a Luckin product debut. At roughly 20 yuan per cup, first-day sales passed 26 million yuan, and the drink trended across major social platforms.

Development went through 43 rounds of tasting to balance cheese, milk and coffee aroma, giving the drink a slightly salty smell and a dense, smooth body. For comparison, the Coconut Cloud Latte collaboration in April sold 660,000 cups on day one, about half. The gap shows how much weight anime IP tie-ins now carry in cafe latte marketing.

Luckin Coffee's co-branded Raw Cheese Latte with "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean" broke new product launch records as soon as it hit the market, selling 1.31 million cups in a single day and surpassing 6.59 million cups in total sales within 7 days, with the buzz sweeping across all major social platforms. This coffee, marketed for its cheese aroma, stands clearly apart from the Raw Coconut Latte and Thick Milk Latte, and has also sparked both celebration and controversy among JoJo fans. From product development to IP selection to the pacing of its marketing, Luckin's collaboration can be called a textbook example of creating a viral hit. This article will offer a comprehensive analysis of why this Raw Cheese Latte went viral, from the perspectives of sales data, flavor innovation, fan feedback, and ACG marketing trends.

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Luckin Coffee recently teamed up with the popular anime "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" to launch a co-branded Raw Cheese Latte, which triggered a buying frenzy as soon as it hit the market. Official data shows that the product sold 1.31 million cups on its first day. At an estimated price of 20 yuan per cup, single-day sales exceeded 26 million yuan, setting a new high for Luckin's new product debut.

According to Luckin's official WeChat public account, in the short week from October 10 to October 16, cumulative sales of the Raw Cheese Latte reached 6.59 million cups, with stores almost every day in a state of "raw cheese content" maxing out. The product went through 43 rounds of development and evaluation before finding the golden balance among cheese aroma, milk aroma, and coffee aroma. The finished drink has a slightly salty aroma and a dense, smooth mouthfeel, and many consumers predict it is very likely to become the next hit in short supply.

By comparison, the Coconut Cloud Latte that Luckin launched in April this year in collaboration with Coconut Palm brand coconut juice also drew much attention, but its first-day sales were only 660,000 cups, roughly half of the JoJo collaboration.

This co-branded product sparked widespread discussion across major social platforms. When searching for "Luckin" on Weibo and Xiaohongshu, nine out of ten results are related to the JoJo collaboration. Unlike the Raw Coconut Latte and Thick Milk Latte, the core selling point of the Raw Cheese Latte is its "cheese aroma," which can be understood as using another form of milk to create an entirely new coffee flavor.

In fact, before the nationwide launch, Luckin had already done its homework. The company released teasers on Weibo very early, revealing that it would collaborate with the highly popular anime "JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean." The news immediately set the internet abuzz, with ACG fans reacting especially enthusiastically. After the new product was officially released, a large number of JoJo fans placed orders in support right away, causing limited-edition cup sleeves and paper bags to quickly run short.

The "JoJo" series was born in the 1980s. With its highly fashionable character designs, it has collaborated with luxury brands such as Gucci, Glamb, and Bulgari. Luckin's partnership with JoJo this time is a relatively rare example in recent years of a domestic coffee brand collaborating with a well-known anime IP.

A co-branding collaboration is essentially two brands each extracting their core elements and jointly designing a new content carrier. This new product directly printed anime characters onto co-branded cup sleeves and paper bags, and the two sides completed the collaboration in an efficient and concise way. For Luckin, leveraging JoJo can help it get closer to young consumer groups and drive sales of the new product; for JoJo, Luckin's online and offline channels can further expand the IP's influence in the Chinese market.

The co-branded cup sleeves and paper bags used large areas of high-saturation background printing, with bold color combinations that created a strong contrast with Luckin's white industrial-style stores, making them highly recognizable. Even ordinary customers who are not JoJo fans might be drawn in by this visual impact.

However, quite a few JoJo fans said bluntly that the cup sleeves and paper bags were "ugly," and some even created their own fan art because they could not stand it and posted the works on social platforms. Some netizens also felt the collaboration was just slapping on an appearance, complaining that the brand was "not putting in effort" and questioning, "Is ACG money really this easy to make?" In the Weibo comment section for the collaboration campaign, similar fan "protests" were not uncommon.

Although it may have "hurt" the feelings of some JoJo fans, judging from the sales data, this collaboration was undoubtedly a great success and did not dampen consumers' enthusiasm for having a cup of Raw Cheese Latte at all, with praise continuing to pour in. It is understood that next week Luckin will also launch a new Raw Cheese Stand product—"Orange Ocean · Raw Cheese Latte." Orange plus cheese? Fruit-flavored cheese? The combination of fruit, cheese, and coffee is indeed very creative and worth looking forward to.

The collaboration was officially announced as early as mid-to-late September. Compared with the earlier Coconut Palm partnership, which was first dug up by enthusiastic netizens, Luckin's marketing rhythm this time was stretched longer and much more high-profile. The new product could be described as "popular before release," and not long after the collaboration began, it set a double record, using a strategy of taste plus ACG IP collaboration to create this unprecedented hit.

Also in the ACG field, Heyt ea previously announced a collaboration with the mobile game "Genshin Impact," and the co-branded products sold out within 1 hour of going on sale, with related topics once topping the hot search list. Recently, Coca-Cola's creative platform "Coca-Cola Creations" just officially announced a limited co-branded release with "BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War," called "Soul Blast," which is the platform's first anime IP collaboration product.

It can thus be seen that in order to capture the new generation of consumers, the commercial value of the ACG community is being tapped by more and more brands and has become a new path for communicating with young people. For young people, ACG culture is not only a circle of their own, but also another mapping of the real world, and even a kind of mass culture, because it permeates every corner of growing up. As this generation of young people who grew up watching anime gradually becomes the backbone of society, everything they persistently love may influence the general direction of future brand marketing and market consumption.

Image source: Internet

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.