How Is Cafe Americano Fitting Into Chinese Breakfast?

Coffee is being paired with traditional Chinese breakfast foods across the country. M Stand has launched sets combining fried dough stick croissants and beef shaobing with coffee, and a Shanghai jianbing shop drew queues of over an hour for its 28-yuan jianbing and cafe americano coffee set. Cities including Ningbo, Chaozhou, Kunming, Jingdezhen, Shantou and Guangzhou now see pairings with ci fan tuan, rice noodle rolls and other regional items.

Data from Ele.me and Koubei Life Network shows soy milk and coffee as the top two breakfast preferences among Shanghai residents in 2021, and coffee has entered the most popular breakfast ranks in several regions. The jianbing shop opens at 7 a.m. to catch office workers, with Americano and latte as the main coffee options; Front Street coffee has also tracked these combinations for enthusiasts.

The pairing of coffee with Chinese-style breakfast is rapidly expanding across the country. M Stand recently launched a coffee set featuring fried dough stick croissants and beef shaobing, a Shanghai jianbing guozi coffee shop once had people queuing for over an hour, and cities like Ningbo, Chaozhou, Kunming, Jingdezhen, Shantou, and Guangzhou have seen combinations such as ci fan tuan, wu mi guo, meigan cai kou rou bing, fried dough stick wrapped in mochi, Chaoshan rice noodle rolls, and even beef offal rice with coffee. According to 2021 data from Ele.me and Koubei Life Network, the top two breakfast preferences of Shanghai residents are soy milk and coffee, and coffee has entered the ranks of the most popular breakfast items in multiple regions. This article reviews typical examples of this trend and retains relevant recommendations from Front Street Coffee for coffee enthusiasts' reference.

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Recently, M Stand officially announced on its website that it will incorporate fried dough sticks and shaobing into its coffee set combinations. Among them, the "fried dough stick croissant" highlights a crispy outer layer that crumbles with every bite, paired with a cup of coffee, making this East-meets-West combination feel quite viable. In addition to the original flavor, this series also offers "sausage fried dough stick croissant" and "beef shaobing."

Eating fried dough sticks and beef shaobing while drinking coffee in a coffee shop—the Chinese coffee market is indeed offering increasingly diverse options.

In fact, in February of this year, a "jianbing guozi coffee shop" in Shanghai brought the topic of Chinese-style breakfast plus coffee to trending status. It is understood that many netizens were even willing to queue for over an hour just to get this jianbing-plus-coffee breakfast set.

The jianbing + coffee set launched by the shop at the time was priced at 28 yuan. The jianbing contained 2 eggs, with optional add-ons such as fried dough sticks, crispy crackers, and pork floss, while the coffee paired with the jianbing was mainly Americano and latte.

The shop opens at 7 a.m. every day, exactly covering the needs of office workers and students in the surrounding community. The owner said the coffee shop has been operating for 7 years and began offering the "jianbing + coffee" combination in early February this year, never expecting it to suddenly become popular. "We prepare ingredients for about 200 jianbing a day, and sometimes they sell out before noon."

After "jianbing guozi + coffee" became popular in Shanghai, coffee + Chinese-style breakfast combinations launched across the country have also been well received, especially those attempts that incorporate local specialty breakfast snacks.

In Ningbo, there is "coffee + local breakfast 'ci fan tuan, fried dough sticks, scallion oil pancakes...'"; in Chaozhou, there is "wu mi guo/taro guo + coffee"; in Kunming, there is "meigan cai kou rou bing + coffee"; in Jingdezhen, there is "fried dough stick wrapped in mochi + coffee"; and in Shantou, there is "Chaoshan rice noodle rolls + coffee."

In Guangzhou, there is also a beef offal shop offering "beef offal rice + coffee," and so on. From this perspective, it's not just Chinese-style breakfast—even Chinese meals need a cup of coffee to feel complete.

In the past, we always thought that coffee and Western baked goods were the more contextual pairing, and it was common to see coffee shops offering bread, cakes, and coffee as a set. But thinking about it in reverse, coffee shops offering Chinese-style breakfast, or Chinese breakfast shops offering coffee, also seems entirely reasonable.

Netizens' "coffee + breakfast pairings"

Nowadays, coffee shops are gradually no longer catering only to Western palates with coffee + baked goods, but are increasingly turning toward everyday, down-to-earth, multi-consumption-scenario Chinese-style breakfast, which better meets the needs of Chinese consumers.

The breakfast subconscious ingrained in Chinese people is soy milk, fried dough sticks, baozi, and jianbing, as well as rice noodle rolls, shumai, and vermicelli. When coffee enters daily life and meets them, there is no need to resist—perhaps this is the opportunity for sparks to fly.

In 2021, Ele.me and Koubei Life Network jointly released information on breakfast across China. The top two items on Shanghai people's breakfast list are soy milk and coffee, and four major regions including East China and South China all listed coffee among the most popular breakfast items.

Compared with an afternoon tea, breakfast is a more everyday and higher-frequency consumption scenario. This also shows from another angle that coffee has gradually fully entered the breakfast world and become part of many people's daily lives.

Image source: Internet

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