Starbucks, Luckin Coffee, and Lian Coffee delivery review: which one tastes the best?

Author: Li Wenxian, intern Hu Su

The coffee delivery market is gaining momentum. Luckin Coffee, a rising star, has invested 1 billion yuan under the banner of new retail, threatening to "kill" Starbucks. The coffee giant Starbucks responded calmly: "We will not participate in hype." In order to ensure the taste of coffee, Starbucks focuses on offline coffee operations and actively plans for catering retail. It has joined forces with Nestlé, which is firmly in the top spot in global retail, and handed over the coffee retail business outside stores to this powerful partner.

One is Starbucks, which was founded 47 years ago and has 3,300 stores in China, and the other is Luckin Coffee, which was founded less than 9 months ago and made a big splash in the coffee industry. Whether it is a "fraud" or a true "anti-monopoly", coffee delivery will undoubtedly become the focus of the industry. Indeed, compared with the 200 cups of coffee consumption per capita in Japan and South Korea, the Chinese coffee market still has at least 50 times of room for growth.

There are not many players in the coffee delivery market, and Starbucks does not do delivery itself. In addition to Luckin Coffee, Lian Coffee, which was founded in July 2012, originally engaged in the business of purchasing coffee brands such as Starbucks chain, and finally focused on the delivery of its own brand Coffee Box. In March 2018, Lian Coffee announced the completion of a B+ round of financing of 158 million yuan, led by Qiming Venture Partners and followed by Gaorong Capital. There are reports that Luckin Coffee has also recently completed a round of A financing with a financing scale of 200-300 million US dollars, but Luckin Coffee has not made any official statement on this.

In order to truly experience the coffee delivery service, Yiou purchased 6 types of lattes from Starbucks, Luckin Coffee, and Lian Coffee through the delivery service, and randomly selected 10 testers for a blind test, hoping to obtain market evaluations of the delivery coffee.

10 testers on-site evaluation

Evaluation Process

Evaluation time: 3:00 pm on June 12

Evaluation location: Meeting room on the 3rd floor of Beijing Yiou Network Alliance Technology Co., Ltd.

Participants: 10 randomly selected participants, 5 males and 5 females

Product tested: One cup of hot and cold latte from Starbucks, Luckin Coffee, and Lian Coffee

Evaluation content : packaging scoring, blind taste test, etc.

6 coffees were numbered and blind tested by testers

Purchase experience: Delivery time exceeds 30 minutes, even coffee delivery time is limited

Yiou found during the purchase that Lian Coffee uses WeChat as the entry point, and orders can be placed through WeChat service accounts and mini programs. Among them, the mini program focuses on group buying, and the WeChat service account can purchase all products. The page design of the mini program is relatively complicated and cumbersome, and the friendliness still needs to be improved. Luckin's ordering software is only an app, with a clear page design and simple operation, but the download of the app consumes more traffic, which is not as convenient as Lian Coffee. Starbucks needs to order products on third-party food delivery platforms such as Meituan and Ele.me, and delivery starts at 46 yuan. The ordering process was basically smooth and the purchase process experience was good.

In terms of delivery time, although Luckin Coffee claims to cooperate with SF Express and can deliver within 10 to 15 minutes after placing an order, Yiou’s purchasing experience is not very satisfactory. Among them, Luckin Coffee and Lian Coffee took more than 30 minutes from order placement to delivery, which is five minutes later than the estimated delivery time shown on the platform, and there is no corresponding compensation. Starbucks has the longest delivery time and requires prompting. The whole process takes one hour. At the same time, there are spills during delivery. In comparison, its delivery service is inferior.

In addition, on June 8, when Yiou placed an order at its office near Sanyuan Bridge, Lian Coffee showed that the delivery was full and could not be delivered. It can be seen that its logistics cannot fully meet the customer's order needs.

Lian Coffee delivery is fully booked and cannot be delivered on the same day

Marketing experience: Luckin Coffee and Lian Coffee have strong promotional efforts and focus on social marketing

“Buy 2 get 1 free”, “Coffee red envelope”, “First cup free”, “Coffee red envelope”… Luckin Coffee’s crazy promotions easily remind people of the crazy O2O era, where large user subsidies have become the most effective means for Internet coffee to exchange for traffic.

Lian Coffee also emphasizes that coffee is shared and circulated based on interpersonal relationships. Its mini-programs have designed activities such as "Coffee with Heart" and "Group Buying for 1 Yuan" with the obvious intention of attracting consumers to forward to their friends.

Luckin Coffee's CMO Yang Fei bluntly stated in his new book "Traffic Pool" that "coffee is a typical social drink. Using most of the advertising costs as user subsidies to encourage old users to share with friends and attract new users will be the core means of acquiring customers."

Although Starbucks has also launched corresponding discounts on food delivery platforms, such as 0.99 yuan special coffee, the promotion is still much weaker than Luckin Coffee and Lian Coffee. For the same two cups of latte, Starbucks' delivery price is the highest, costing 58 yuan. Lian Coffee and Luckin Coffee are not much different, at around 48 yuan.

In this evaluation, 40% of the testers believed that price was the primary factor in choosing coffee delivery, followed by taste and delivery speed, accounting for 30% and 20% respectively, and only 10% of the testers chose brand. It can be seen that compared with Starbucks, Luckin Coffee and Lian Coffee’s biggest advantage is still price.

Brand experience: Starbucks is the most popular coffee packaging needs to pay attention to environmental protection

In brand building, Luckin Coffee’s celebrity endorsements can naturally gain higher recognition. However, in this evaluation, 60% of customers still prefer Starbucks. This shows that Starbucks, as a coffee giant, has been recognized by most consumers.

Lian Coffee, Luckin Coffee and Starbucks have their own advantages in delivery packaging, but the packaging scores of the three are not much different. Among them, Starbucks' packaging is the most popular among reviewers, followed by Luckin Coffee. Lian Coffee's packaging design is unique, with a small card inside and coffee in an insulated box. However, the design is not easy to carry and is not environmentally friendly, so it scored the lowest in the evaluation.

Taste experience: Starbucks tastes the best, Luckin Coffee scores the lowest

The evaluation results show that Starbucks has the highest average score of 6.45 points, and 75% of the experiencers are willing to buy again; Luckin Coffee has the lowest average score of 5.25 points, and only 20% of the experiencers are willing to buy again. Specifically for individual products, Starbucks hot latte scored the highest, and Luckin Coffee iced latte scored the lowest. It is worth noting that all the coffee taste scores in the evaluation are below 8 points, and the evaluation is average, which shows that delivery does affect the taste of coffee to a certain extent.

The testers said that Starbucks' latte tastes the best, because its latte tastes sweet, and it still has a milky aroma after being left for a period of time, and the iced latte has more ice cubes, which can maintain the best taste. Lian Coffee's hot latte tastes bitter and difficult to drink. Its iced coffee tastes good, slightly bitter but with a sweet aftertaste, and there is still room for improvement. Luckin's iced latte tastes lighter in coffee and has no ice cubes, but it is still acceptable overall. The hot latte tastes sour, which is very different from other brands of hot latte and is not popular.

In general, Starbucks focuses on offline sales. Although it does not have a dedicated delivery platform, its taste is indeed of a high standard. Starbucks uses retail to expand into more areas, and its focus is on the coordination of taste and convenience. Lian Coffee's marketing method is more thoughtful, but the taste of coffee needs to be improved. The packaging of the delivery box is very distinctive, but it needs to be improved from an environmental perspective.

Luckin Coffee has a clear marketing strategy, and its brand and design are quite textured, but the taste needs to be further improved to achieve a higher repurchase rate. Lian Coffee and Luckin Coffee are very similar in terms of price and marketing route. If they want to highlight their own brand characteristics, they need to add more brand elements. In this evaluation, the average age of the experiencers was 24 years old, and most of them were white-collar workers in the company, but only 50% of them occasionally chose coffee delivery, which shows that this market still needs more cultivation. However, the common problem faced by Luckin Coffee and Lian Coffee may be how to get consumers to continue to pay after the high subsidies stop.

Recommended Reading

Starting from Luckin Coffee’s conflict with Starbucks, is coffee delivery really a good business?

Before talking about the underlying logic of Luckin Coffee, let’s first throw away the name “Luckin”?