How Is the Coffee Industry Shifting Toward Wellness Drinks?
Cotti Coffee has launched a rice milk latte series made with Wuchang rice from Northeast China, positioning it directly against Luckin Coffee's sauce-flavored latte. The poster line "late-night alcohol harms your liver, morning congee nourishes your stomach" signals a wellness angle rather than an alcohol-coffee hybrid. The move follows the Moutai-Luckin collaboration and shows how co-branding has become a central tactic in the coffee industry.
The launch fits a wider shift: coffee drinks in China increasingly resemble milk tea or congee, and brands compete for attention with unusual flavors. Online users have floated cilantro coffee, garlic coffee, stinky tofu latte, century egg latte and oyster iced Americano. Whether coffee after drinking alcohol stays popular or wellness-themed drinks take over is now the question both chains are testing in stores.
The afterglow of Luckin Coffee's collaboration with Moutai had barely faded when Cotti Coffee fired back strongly with a rice milk latte series, blending Wuchang rice from Northeast China with coffee and playing the "wellness" card, with copy directly targeting Luckin's sauce-flavored latte. This collaboration not only teased its competitor but also positioned itself against the trend of alcohol-coffee hybrids. Netizens kept making memes, from cilantro coffee to stinky tofu latte, with bizarre flavors emerging endlessly, while Cotti seized the initiative through reverse thinking. The trend of coffee drinks becoming more like milk tea or congee is becoming increasingly obvious, and the battle for attention among brands has entered a white-hot stage. This article will walk you through the ins and outs of this commercial war and see where the coffee world's next hit will head.
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Before the buzz from Luckin and Moutai's partnership had cooled, Cotti Coffee made a new move—pairing coffee with the "top star" of rice, Northeast China's Wuchang rice, to launch a rice milk latte series. The promotional poster for the new product reads, "Late-night alcohol harms your liver, morning congee nourishes your stomach," clearly taking aim at Luckin. This move not only poked fun at Luckin's new product but also directly positioned itself opposite the recently popular alcohol-coffee route, using the "wellness" concept to ride the wave in reverse. Netizens sighed one after another: "Cotti, you really know how to play!" "When it comes to commercial warfare, you're still the best!"
Cotti's launch of this rice milk latte series can be said to have accurately grasped consumers' mentality of "enjoying the drama without fearing it will get too big." With a topic-exploding product like the sauce-flavored latte leading the way, before other coffee brands could react, netizens themselves started making memes, with all kinds of outrageous coffee flavor combinations popping up one after another. Cilantro coffee and garlic coffee were already considered restrained—after all, Magic Water Master, which specializes in weird-flavored drinks, had long ago launched a comical-looking "garlic plus coffee." But even more eye-popping ones like stinky tofu latte, octopus coffee, century egg latte, and oyster iced Americano truly stirred up everyone's curiosity.
Although everyone was having a great time with memes and thought even the most bizarre flavors had already been thought of, in reality Cotti was indeed one step ahead. It has both the ability to break out of conventional thinking and the capacity to drive new trends. While netizens were still joking about alcohol-coffee collaborations and various strange flavor combinations, Cotti had already unveiled a new move. This wave of "wellness collaboration" was truly unexpected, combining reverse thinking with teasing competitors like Luckin, with the main appeal being both reasonable and hilarious.
"First Moutai and Luckin, then Wuchang and Cotti"—novel pairings in the coffee world always keep emerging, and recently they've been coming in waves, constantly grabbing consumers' attention. Faced with this phenomenon, funny yet precise snarky memes are the most contagious and are truly the key to heating up this "invisible commercial war." "Luckin's real rival is here!" "High-end commercial warfare often adopts the most plain methods." "You have your baijiu, I have my staple food." "Each side plays its own game"—these jokes appear to come from netizens' spontaneous mockery, but in reality they are also an important part of brands' new product hype. Faced with the dense and flashy marketing tactics of domestic brands, combined with Cotti and Luckin's low-price strategy of "letting customers fleece them" first, it's not hard to understand why Starbucks, with its slightly lagging marketing level, is increasingly struggling in the domestic market.
Some netizens pointed out sharply that "this new round of commercial warfare with Luckin is for nothing else but consumers' attention." Cotti's collaboration with Wuchang rice precisely reflects the trend in recent years of coffee drinks becoming more like milk tea or congee. Whether it's "going to a coffee shop to drink alcohol" or "going to a coffee shop to drink congee," in any case, just drinking coffee is absolutely not enough.
Coffee brands are competing with endless tricks, and the "congee-ification" trend is just one of the elements providing consumers with novelty. However, it's not just Cotti—recently, more than one well-known coffee brand has collaborated with rice products (whether rice milk or others). Don't forget Starbucks' September new "rice brew" series, featuring both rice and fermented rice wine, which suddenly makes people feel that the entire coffee industry's marketing categories are full of coincidences and connections.
Slow-to-catch-on netizens, looking at the bustling early autumn of September, after a round of chaotic battles and spectating, finally realized their wallets were empty again. So here's the question: what new tricks will the next hit product play?
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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
