Why Did Luckin Coffee Remove Eight Drinks at Once?

Luckin Coffee has removed eight drinks from its nationwide menus, including Peach Peach Coffee, Frozen Coconut Latte and Green Shasha Latte, several of them launched within the past six months. Stores were told to pour unopened, still-in-date ingredients down the drain after closing, under in-store camera recording, before new items such as Milk Skin Latte and Coconut Mango Pomelo Sago arrive.

Employees shared notice screenshots online, prompting debate over food waste and inventory handling, with some veteran staff saying they are used to the cycle. The move shows the tension between fast product rotation and ingredient management at large chains, and it raises questions about whether Luckin and similar brands might route surplus stock to discount channels instead of disposal.

Luckin Coffee recently implemented a centralized removal of several drinks, involving products launched within the past six months such as Peach Peach Coffee and Frozen Coconut Latte. The brand required stores nationwide to pour all unopened, still-within-shelf-life ingredients down the drain after closing, sparking widespread discussion among employees and netizens. Some veteran employees have grown accustomed to this, while more people question the serious waste caused by this handling method and call on the brand to adopt more reasonable inventory disposal channels. The incident reflects the contradiction between rapid product iteration and ingredient management for chain coffee brands.

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Opening boxes of unopened coconut jelly and mung bean-flavored fresh milk, cutting open the packaging one by one, and pouring all the liquid inside into the sink—this was an operation that Luckin store employees had to complete after closing last night.

Luckin plans to launch a new batch of products such as Milk Skin Latte and Coconut Mango Pomelo Sago, so the brand had earlier issued a notice to stores nationwide requiring several drinks to be removed uniformly, and the remaining raw materials in each store had to be completely destroyed before the new products were officially launched.

According to the drink removal list published by the brand, after taking inventory and shutting down the ordering system last night, employees at all Luckin stores, under the full recording of in-store surveillance cameras, poured bottle after bottle of brand-new ingredients that were still within their shelf life and had never been opened or used into the drain.

Judging from screenshots of the notice shared by employees, a total of 8 drinks were removed by Luckin this time, including products launched within the past six months such as Peach Peach Coffee, Frozen Coconut Latte, and Green Shasha Latte. It is worth noting that several drinks, including Green Shasha Latte and Osmanthus Lychee Jelly, had collaborated with popular IPs when they were launched, once attracting considerable consumer attention.

However, according to store employees, the popularity of these co-branded drinks was basically concentrated only during the campaign period. Once the collaboration ended, the brand neither continued to promote these drinks nor offered corresponding discounts, so consumers gradually lost interest and stopped repeatedly buying these novel-tasting drinks. As a result, these drinks, whose sales never picked up, mostly could not use up their ingredients, which could only pile up in boxes in warehouses gathering dust.

Some Luckin employees also pointed out that the brand actually tries to use up ingredients as much as possible, and one way is to recombine some materials into new products. For example, the coconut jelly used in the Frozen Coconut Latte launched in April reappeared in the Osmanthus Lychee Jelly launched in June, which amounted to an additional channel for digesting inventory. But even so, judging from the material destruction scenes photographed by store staff, many stores still had large stockpiles of unused ingredients.

So for veteran employees who often experience destruction scenes, all of this is already commonplace. If they discover during the pouring process that the drain has been blocked by jam, they can still skillfully grab a tool and clear it. But for others, watching dozens or even hundreds of bottles of flavored milk being poured all at once into the sink still makes them unable to help but exclaim, "What a waste."

Many onlooking netizens admitted that if expired materials were being destroyed to ensure food safety, they could completely understand. But now, merely because drinks are being removed, the brand requires employees to dump large quantities of brand-new, unexpired ingredients. On the one hand, this destruction method easily causes drain blockages and may put an extra burden on nearby sewage pipes; on the other hand, it indeed causes serious waste.

It is understandable that chain brands maintain a certain frequency of product updates to attract consumers and accordingly adjust their menus. But every time Luckin removes some drinks, it requires employees to pour out large amounts of production ingredients, which in the eyes of netizens is somewhat inappropriate.

Most people feel that the brand should come up with a more reasonable plan to handle excess inventory, such as distributing ingredients to employees as benefits, or offering discounts and promotions on drinks that need these ingredients, using sales growth to speed up material consumption, rather than adopting the crude and simple destruction method of pouring them into the drain.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

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