How does what does arabica mean connect to the Gucci case?

Gucci ran limited coffee pop-ups in four cities with Blue Bottle Coffee, %Arabica, and Grid coffee. The Beijing stop with Grid offered Single-Origin Salted Mocha and Single-Origin Salted Chocolate. A Beijing cafe owner said the salted mocha copied her signature drink, developed from 2020 and launched in 2022 with Bingbo as the milk base.

Grid described the drinks as upgrades of its own salted mocha and salted cocoa, and reaction split between support for the owner and claims of coincidence. The case raises questions about ownership of drink recipes and where inspiration ends, a live issue for arabica coffee brands building limited-edition menus around single-origin beans.

Luxury brand Gucci recently teamed up with Blue Bottle Coffee, %Arabica, and Grid coffee to launch limited-edition pop-up coffee shops in four cities. Among them, the Beijing stop's collaboration with Grid coffee, featuring the "Single-Origin Salted Mocha" and "Single-Origin Salted Chocolate," sparked widespread discussion both inside and outside the industry. An independent coffee shop owner in Beijing publicly stated that the salted mocha among Gucci's limited-edition drinks was suspected of copying her signature product, which she developed in 2020 and officially launched in 2022 with Bingbo (ice-blog) as the milk base. The incident quickly escalated, with voices both supporting originality and arguing it was purely a creative coincidence rising one after another. This article will sort out the sequence of events, present multiple perspectives, and explore the copyright dilemma and market implications of creative coffee beverages.

▲

Click to follow | Daily specialty coffee culture magazine Coffee Workshop

Not long ago, luxury brand Gucci simultaneously collaborated with three coffee brands—Blue Bottle Coffee, %Arabica, and Grid coffee—to set up limited-time coffee pop-up shops in four cities. Judging from the menus circulating on social media, the limited-edition drinks the three brands created for Gucci all carried distinct styles of their own.

The Beijing Gucci coffee pop-up shop partnered with local specialty coffee brand Grid coffee, offering two limited-edition products during the event: Single-Origin Salted Mocha and Single-Origin Salted Chocolate. According to the brand's official description, these two drinks use single-origin coffee beans and single-origin cocoa ingredients, and are upgraded recreations based on its original salted mocha and salted cocoa.

However, recently a coffee shop owner in Beijing posted on social media, directly accusing Gucci's collaboration drink of plagiarizing her shop's salted mocha. The owner recalled that she began experimenting with making this drink in 2020, and by March 2022, she adjusted the recipe using the then-popular Bingbo as the milk base, then officially named it "Salted Mocha" and brought it to market.

The owner emphasized that after the product launched, she shared the recipe free of charge with multiple specialty coffee shops, and did not mind other cafes using this recipe. But when she learned that Gucci's limited-edition drink was directly named "Salted Mocha," she said she could not accept it, believing the brand should respect others' original creations and should not package salted mocha as its own classic product for publicity.

Regarding this controversy, netizens' views showed clear division. Some stood by the shop owner, believing that from the timeline, the owner's salted mocha appeared before Gucci's limited-edition salted mocha, "it indeed constitutes plagiarism," and criticized that "taking someone else's star product as one's own is truly inappropriate."

Another group of netizens pointed out that by comparing the introductions of the two salted mochas, one can find that their main selling points are not the same: the Gucci limited edition highlights single-origin ingredients, while the owner's version emphasizes the Bingbo milk base. Therefore, they speculated that the two sides may differ in R&D logic and recipe, and they should be regarded as two different products.

Some netizens also suggested that coffee drinks cannot be patented, so from a legal perspective it is difficult to determine whether Gucci's limited-edition drink constitutes product plagiarism; a more accurate description is that the two sides "collided" in product creativity.

In addition, some netizens believed that if the owner's "salted mocha" merely means "mocha with a salty taste," then Starbucks' sea salt mocha launched in 2017 could also fall into this category, and before Starbucks' sea salt mocha officially launched, baristas at home and abroad had already tried salty-sweet coffee drinks. Therefore, some netizens felt that if we trace the owner's salted mocha back to its roots, perhaps predecessors had already made it long ago, and calling "salted mocha" original is not appropriate.

The birth of a creative drink is often backed by the creator's painstaking efforts of repeated experimentation and constant adjustment, and in the creator's eyes it is like their own child. Therefore, when this posting shop owner saw her achievement labeled with someone else's name, it is completely understandable that she felt complicated.

But as netizens said, once certain creative drinks involve many participants, it becomes very difficult to trace their "biological parents." Rather than agonizing over whether the brand "borrowed" her creativity, the shop owner might as well use this opportunity to promote her own product. After all, many consumers do not care who the original creator is; they only care whose "salted mocha" tastes better.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

Disclaimer: Some images in this article are from the internet. For some content on the website, such as images, we will respect the original author's copyright and indicate the source, but due to the large quantity, there may be individual images or texts that have not yet been credited. Please forgive us. If the original author has any disputes, they may contact the website for handling, and once verified we will immediately correct it. Compiled and edited by "Coffee Workshop"; please indicate the source when reposting. If there is infringement, please inform us for deletion. Thank you~!

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