While Luckin Coffee and Cotti Coffee remain locked in battles over scale and pricing, and international giants like Starbucks face increasing market pressure, a distinct player has quietly emerged in China's chain coffee sector: Nowwa Coffee.
Founded in 2019, this coffee brand carries a strong internet DNA. Among its four co-founders, three hail from Ele.me, including former Ele.me executive Guo Xingjun.
Its store expansion model similarly reflects an internet-style approach: by standardizing the "store-in-store" format, Nowwa Coffee opens new outlets within convenience stores, snack discount shops, hotels, and other channels at a pace of one new location every 7 to 14 days, presenting a unique case study in chain coffee expansion.
Leveraging this model, early this year—the brand's seventh year—Nowwa Coffee announced its store count had surpassed 10,000. Notably, in 2025 alone, the brand added approximately 8,000 new locations. It is reported that of Nowwa's current over 10,000 stores, 80% are store-in-store formats, with dedicated stores comprising the remaining 20%.
However, this has led to a somewhat curious phenomenon. Many consumers' first impression of Nowwa is often: where is this store located?
Recently, during the FBIF2026 Food and Beverage Innovation Forum, Li Lixu, Partner and Senior Vice President of Nowwa Coffee, shared with media, including Time Finance, the brand's strategic considerations regarding its store-in-store model and other operations, offering a glimpse into the rise of an internet-born coffee brand.
**Selling Coffee in Convenience Stores, Opening a New Store in as Fast as 7 Days**
The traditional franchise model for chain coffee brands typically follows a fixed division of labor: franchisees pay a fee and bear costs for site selection, rent, equipment, fit-out, labor, and utilities; the brand owner is responsible for raw materials, product development, quality control standards, and brand marketing support.
Nowwa Coffee's store-in-store model deconstructs and reassembles the conventional expansion logic, embedding coffee points into existing consumption scenarios like convenience stores, hotels, and internet cafes.
Under this model, Nowwa Coffee manages the supply chain, product development, equipment, fit-out, and a range of brand promotion initiatives. Partners—chain brands like convenience stores, hotels, snack discount shops, as well as franchisees with resources in specific regions or channels—provide the physical space and existing staff, cooperating with Nowwa to ensure food safety and standardized product output.
To achieve scaled expansion, Nowwa Coffee has turned the store-in-store model into a standardized process: from site selection and store setup to operational procedures like barista training, a new store can be opened within 7 to 14 days. However, this ultra-lightweight expansion model initially faced limited market acceptance.
"In the early stages, various convenience store brands had their own business priorities. At that time, even proposing a store-in-store partnership was difficult to advance as a key initiative. Partners might reluctantly try it but wouldn't invest significant resources or effort. Consequently, even if a single collaboration succeeded, it couldn't be replicated at scale," Li Lixu explained.
Nowwa Coffee's expansion pace clearly reflects market sentiment. The brand launched its store-in-store model in 2019, growing to about 800 stores by 2021. However, from 2022 to 2024, the brand slowed its store-in-store rollout, shifting focus to standalone stores. It wasn't until 2025 that the number of store-in-store locations surged again.
Changes in the market environment fueled Nowwa's store explosion.
In recent years, competition in the chain coffee industry has intensified. High rents and labor costs, increasingly scarce prime locations, and lengthening payback periods for individual stores have placed immense pressure on the traditional single-store model. Since 2024, as Cotti Coffee introduced new store types like express stores and convenience store formats, embedding coffee consumption into channels like convenience stores, the lighter-asset, lower-barrier store-in-store model began moving toward the mainstream.
During the same period, convenience store brands, whose foot traffic and average transaction values were impacted by emerging retail channels, began seeking new growth opportunities.
At this juncture, Nowwa Coffee恰好 offered an incremental option. According to Li Lixu, for store-in-store locations within convenience stores, every 100 cups of coffee sold can drive sales of 20 to 30 high-margin merchandise items.
The cost of this business is not high. "A standalone coffee shop needs a daily sales volume of 250 to 300 cups to be profitable. But for our partners, the store-in-store model has almost no fixed costs. Nowwa invests in the machines and fit-out, while the partner already bears the space and labor costs. This means that for every cup of coffee sold in a store-in-store, after deducting the material cost and utilities for that cup, almost everything else is pure profit," Li Lixu stated.
Currently, Nowwa Coffee has established partnerships with chain convenience store brands including Meiyijia, Jianfu, and China Resources Vanguard Lawson. According to data from the China Chain Store & Franchise Association, as of 2025, Meiyijia had over 40,000 stores, making it China's largest convenience store brand by store count, while Lawson and Jianfu had over 7,000 and over 3,500 stores, respectively.
**Targeting Convenience Stores and Snack Discount Channels, Aiming for the Next 10,000 Stores**
Having tasted the benefits of scale, Nowwa Coffee sees significant potential expansion opportunities within the convenience store and snack discount store sectors. Data from the China Chain Store & Franchise Association shows that in 2025, the top 100 convenience store enterprises in China collectively operated 208,000 stores. Currently, just two companies, Mingminghenmang and Wanchen Group, already operate nearly 40,000 snack discount stores.
Li Lixu noted that while Nowwa Coffee currently has over ten thousand stores, the convenience store sector boasts a scale exceeding 200,000 stores, leaving substantial room for penetration. Since 2026, Nowwa Coffee has secured partnerships with several leading brands in the snack discount sector. Additionally, sectors like internet cafes and hotels represent existing markets with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of locations, offering ample exploration potential. Li Lixu judges that in the short term, Nowwa Coffee's expansion will not encounter significant bottlenecks.
This rapidly replicable, standardized expansion model has also attracted capital attention. Since its founding in 2019, Nowwa Coffee has completed over 8 funding rounds, raising a cumulative total of several hundred million yuan. Investors include prominent consumer industry institutions such as GSR Ventures, Challenger Capital, Belle Group Consumer Fund, and New Hope Genoben Capital. While the broader consumer sector funding wave has receded, Nowwa Coffee completed a several hundred million yuan Series C funding round early this year.
While continuously embedding itself within domestic retail formats, overseas expansion represents another growth avenue for Nowwa.
In August 2025, Nowwa Coffee officially launched its international expansion. To date, the brand has entered over 8 countries and regions, with relatively smooth progress in markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand.
Overseas, Nowwa Coffee has adopted its domestic store model, operating both directly managed standalone stores and store-in-store formats in parallel. A key feature of its international strategy is following domestic partners abroad to open store-in-store locations. Additionally, its overseas franchisees include franchisees of Din Tai Fung and leading retailers in various countries.
Li Lixu revealed that dine-in consumption accounts for a high proportion of coffee sales in overseas convenience stores, while delivery services are relatively underdeveloped. To some extent, Nowwa Coffee is coordinating its overseas push with platforms like Didi and Keeta (Meituan's international food delivery brand) to boost product delivery sales in foreign markets.
Given Nowwa Coffee's "embedded" expansion model, scale itself is not the primary challenge. However, the potential impact of the store-in-store format on brand recognition, and the practical test of brand premium capability amid industry price wars, warrant attention.
Addressing the view that the store-in-store model weakens brand influence, Nowwa Coffee's response is that the consumption context itself is a form of marketing. "When consumers see Nowwa in convenience stores, snack discount shops, gyms, and hotels—when we can reach consumers in all scenarios—that is our strongest marketing," Li Lixu stated.
Currently, aside from个别 promotional items priced around 10 yuan, Nowwa Coffee's overall price range is between 15 and 25 yuan.
Li Lixu emphasized that Nowwa Coffee is the only brand in the industry primarily focused on zero-sugar, low-sugar, and low-calorie offerings. "We pioneered the 'fruit and vegetable coffee' category. To some extent, we don't need to engage as fiercely in price competition because we possess a certain premium capability. People who care about health won't hesitate to spend a little more on healthy products."
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