Shanghai kicks off Spring Coffee Festival
Spanning a 1.5 kilometer waterfront and encompassing 17,000 square meters of riverside space, the 2024 Shanghai International Coffee Culture Festival has kicked off with vigor as part of the "Double Five Shopping Festival" in the airy Xuhui riverside area. This year’s event, themed "Taste the World in Shanghai," focuses on "internationalization" and "boosting consumption," further polishing Shanghai's new calling card of "coffee culture."
Building on the success of the previous three editions, this year's "Coffee Culture Week" has been elevated to a "Coffee Culture Festival," becoming a highly influential urban festival IP. How does a simple cup of coffee meet the developmental stride of Shanghai city? Shanghai answers: Coffee is not just a drink; it is a medium that continuously enriches the coffee culture, innovates coffee consumption scenarios, and blends international perspectives with local innovations. Traditional culture and contemporary trends merge with commercial forms and cultural sentiment, making the aromatic fragrance of coffee a vibrant footnote to the city's "open, innovative, and inclusive" character, adding a lively touch to the city's soft power.
Coffee Economy: Shanghai as a Key Player in the Global Coffee Landscape
The "2024 China Urban Coffee Development Report" reveals that last year, China's coffee industry reached a size of 265.4 billion yuan, with an average annual compound growth rate of 17.14% over the past three years. The per capita annual coffee consumption has nearly doubled from 9 cups in 2016 to 16.74 cups. With a total of 9,553 coffee shops, Shanghai continues to lead the nation, underscoring the city's massive coffee consumption scale.
"China's coffee industry continues to grow rapidly," states Xu Jian, Vice Dean of the School of Media and Communication at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Shanghai is becoming a "bridgehead" for the export of China’s coffee industry. In upstream industries, last year, the total value of coffee beans exported by Shanghai enterprises accounted for more than 40% of the national total. In coffee products, Shanghai's exports of concentrated essences or coffee-based products exceeded 21.45 million yuan in 2023, a growth of over 70% compared to 2019. Shanghai rightfully stands as an important hub in the global coffee landscape.
Global coffee giants continue to innovate store formats in Shanghai. Starbucks introduced a creative new product, Olive Espresso, at the event. Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, passionately promoted this new product in Shanghai last March, asking, "Who would have thought we would pair olive oil with coffee?" Starbucks currently boasts over 1,000 stores in Shanghai, leading the world in numbers, and its variety of outlets—from the Shanghai Roastery to pet-friendly and sign language stores—integrate seamlessly with the city's development.
Coffee Culture: Providing More Possibilities for Cultural and Tourism IP Development
At 2 PM at the Xuhui Riverside Community Service Center, a performance from the Shanghai Yue Opera Theater brought the ancient and modern together with a rendition of "Dream of the Red Chamber - Reading the Western Chamber." Enjoying coffee while watching opera, Yue Opera steps out of the theaters and meets coffee in the culturally vibrant West Bank area.
Outside the service center, a "Coffee + Culture and Tourism Commercial Exhibition" carnival is underway along the 1.5 km waterfront, featuring 180 coffee market stalls blending coffee, flower shows, culture, sports, performances, and commercial brands. This fusion creates the largest "Coffee + Life" consumer new IP and a new landmark for culture and tourism consumption along the Pujiang River.
Coffee, more than just a beverage. Cultural venues like the Shanghai Grand Theatre also bring their own "cultural coffee" experiences. At the "Ferris Wheel" cultural performance ticketing platform booth, many citizens received a limited-edition souvenir ticket for the Shanghai International Coffee Culture Festival. Through transparent viewfinders, they interacted with the spring market, shared experiences on Xiaohongshu, and received discounts ranging from 50 to 500 yuan for performance tickets. Liu Zhou, CEO of Ferris Wheel Ticketing, believes that coffee culture is an essential carrier of Shanghai's culture and memories, and theater culture is another city card for Shanghai. By combining coffee and performing arts, more possibilities can be created for Shanghai’s cultural and tourism IP development.
As coffee fragrances waft through the carnival, cultural venues across the city are similarly infused with the aroma of coffee. Adjacent to the Xuhui riverside, the Wanping Theatre, known as "Shanghai's Fan," brings a refreshing and graceful opera breeze. Combining the theatre's aesthetic education brand "Da Wan Collection," the coffee bar launched activities like "Opera + Coffee." The store staff introduced that the "Top Scholar's Cap X Opera Coffee" event is very