Grid Coffee on Specialty Coffee: Lipstick Effect vs. Self-Treating
Summary
Greed’s bet is not today’s cheap coffee, but the upgrading demand that will see Chinese consumers move from flavored coffee to classic coffee and then single-origin coffee over the next 5–10 years.陈子宇 believes Luckin and Cotti are bringing incremental customers into the entire category, while demographics, cups consumed and maturing palates all point to continued growth in specialty coffee; as of recording, Greed had expanded from a 2022 Sanlitun pushcart to 57 stores nationwide.
Greed’s product moat is making single-origin beans a chain-wide standard while refusing to add sugar or syrup. That means more expensive inputs, more frequent bean changes and R&D, extraction calibration and staff training, as well as far fewer easy substitutes than with blends; 陈子宇’s view on food is direct: “Good soup should need no salt, and good fish should be steamed.”
The hardest part of scaling specialty coffee is not the fit-out, but standardizing grinding and extraction as beans degas and air humidity changes. Greed uses IoT-enabled coffee machines to send extraction parameters back to headquarters and make real-time adjustments, allowing baristas to step away after grinding; its view is that “90% of a cup’s quality comes from the beans and 10% from the brewing,” so good inputs should be standardized as far as possible.
The price war has not eliminated room for specialty coffee; it has clarified the industry’s roles: Starbucks anchors the RMB30-plus psychological price point, Luckin acquires customers at RMB9.9, and Manner strips out space costs with small stores. Greed sells independent-shop-grade inputs at mainstream chain prices—for example, an entry-level salted-milk coffee costs about RMB32 for delivery—and uses scale procurement and standardized production to offset part of the cost rather than entering the low-price everyday-coffee fight.
Offline coffee has not yet reached a true rent floor, while delivery creates structural pressure through repeat-purchase traffic. Merchants already pay rent to acquire offline traffic, then pay again when platform subsidies and commissions shift the same customers to delivery; 卫诗婕 calls delivery platforms “online real estate,” a view 陈子宇 shares, adding that some tier-2 and tier-3 malls have yet to fully reflect traffic losses in their rents.
Greed sees coffee as an affordable trade-up purchase in a weak cycle: “Coffee is the lipstick of our era.” RMB30 buys access to origin, terroir and culture, while RMB100–200 can buy 100g of good Panama green-label Geisha; with luxury stores empty but coffee shops still crowded, 陈子宇 argues that consumers have not abandoned quality—they are shifting budgets toward self-treating experiences at lower absolute prices.
陈子宇’s final answer to “middle-class entrepreneurship” is not making a bigger splash, but “being aggressive in a conservative way.” The decade of imported overseas lifestyles and social-media-driven experience premiums is nearing its end; the next phase depends on product fundamentals and compounding brand equity, which is why Greed is wary of one-off influencer check-in venues and keeps bringing its communications back to “good beans, good water and good ingredients,” believing that “the answer to breaking through is not far from where you started.”
Deep dive
1. Greed grew out of lifestyle and internet entrepreneurship, but it is not a founder-personality brand
陈子宇 has worked in media and built lifestyle internet businesses: around 2013, he launched the social-review product 饭本, which later evolved into the transaction-enabled Enjoy. Editors sourced niche, high-end restaurants and packaged them into set menus for sale.
He traces his interest in food, drink and lifestyle back to his family in Guangdong. His mother was always discovering new restaurants and taking the extended family out to eat. He “started eating, drinking and having fun” from childhood; later, he simply turned that instinct for discovery into a product.
Although outsiders call him the operator of the brand, 陈子宇 stresses that Greed “is not a founder brand in the traditional sense.” Traditional founder brands typically express the owner’s personal views, whereas Greed designs the brand around a business objective; he is also vice president of consumer products at 看云集团, with primary responsibility for this business.
The growth story laid out at the start of the episode is straightforward: Greed was born in 2022, amid repeated Covid disruptions and a wave of shakeout in coffee, starting with a pushcart in Beijing’s Sanlitun and built around single-origin coffee. As of recording, it had 57 chain stores.
2. Specialty coffee starts with 80-point beans, then demands restraint in handling flavor
陈子宇’s industry definition is clear: coffee made with beans scoring 80 or above under the SCA, the Specialty Coffee Association, qualifies as specialty coffee. The SCA’s “Golden Cup” extraction theory also provides guidance on finished-drink strength and extraction yield.
Coffee beans come from coffee cherries, which are naturally sweet and acidic fruit. Roasting caramelizes and chars them, creating the familiar bitterness; selling roasted coffee beans also requires a roasted-goods business license.
Commercial coffee typically uses darker roasts to produce a stronger, more uniform bitterness, which can overwhelm the additional flavor value of better beans. Specialty coffee uses better beans and medium-light roasting to preserve their flavor compounds, making the acidity more pronounced.
卫诗婕 offers the most accessible analogy, using a Qingyuan chicken: good ingredients should not be covered by heavy seasoning. “You can’t prepare it in the style of Sichuan mala.” The point of specialty coffee is not to manufacture complexity, but to preserve the ingredient’s identity.
3. A coffee that hit like a punch turned a daily drink into a treasure hunt
陈子宇 first came close to today’s specialty-coffee experience at Seesaw on Shanghai’s Yuyuan Road a decade ago. Coffee was only the vehicle; the shop packaged space, graphic design, origin and terroir into a single proposition for about RMB30, and the result felt entirely new to him.
The real sensory turning point came at Intelligentsia in New York. A roughly 240ml Americano with a medium-light roast and relatively high concentration “hit me like a punch.” Beyond bitterness, it had pronounced acidity followed by citrus and floral-fruit aromas.
He realized that coffee, like perfume and wine, could be described through a common sensory vocabulary, with different beans leaving different finishes. “A cup of coffee can contain far more flavor than I imagined,” and buying beans to test whether sellers’ tasting notes were accurate became a treasure hunt.
4. Starbucks, Luckin and Manner split the category into pricing, acquisition and space
陈子宇’s retrospective view is that Starbucks defined the standard form of commercial coffee in China and anchored the psychological price at RMB30-plus. “At the time, it definitely felt as if everything Starbucks did was right.” That high anchor later left room for brands priced at RMB20 and even RMB9.9.
Luckin’s role in the industry was to bring the threshold down to RMB9.9 and acquire a large customer base for coffee. 卫诗婕 presses the point: if a RMB9.9 Luckin and a RMB32 Starbucks are not far apart in product value, the extra RMB10–20 is understood as payment for space, work and social settings.
Starbucks’ problem is therefore not just price. A high-priced product no longer necessarily represents the industry’s leading edge. 卫诗婕 observes that young people in Shanghai do not go to Starbucks as often, and 陈子宇 adds that business customers also have plenty of alternatives.
By 陈子宇’s recollection, Manner was founded around the same time as Luckin, with the 2 companies exploring low-priced everyday coffee in different ways. Manner was first to separate the coffee counter from the customer area, using Shanghai’s dense foot traffic and small street-front shops to retain only a bar and trade smaller footprints and lower rents for lower prices.
5. Low-priced everyday coffee is educating the next generation of specialty users
When Greed was founded, Luckin had already reached 10,000 stores. 陈子宇 therefore concluded that a new brand could not compete head-on in low-priced everyday coffee and had to differentiate in the team’s stronger area: consumption upgrading.
His long-term thesis rests on 3 certainties: China’s coffee users and total cups consumed will continue to grow; Luckin and Cotti are bringing new customers into the category; and as the market matures, taste will move from flavored coffee toward classic coffee. Together, these point to more specialty-coffee users over the next 5–10 years.
He compares the process with Western-food education. Consumers first encounter steak on sizzling plates at chains, then explore different cuisines and more ceremonial specialty restaurants once they are familiar with the category. Everyday coffee is not the opposite of specialty coffee; it is the customer-acquisition funnel.
陈子宇’s own progression was “Frappuccino—caramel macchiato—latte—Americano—single-origin pour-over or cold brew.” Specialty shops used to be hidden in hutongs or office parks and suited to weekend destination visits; chains have brought more advanced products into everyday commercial settings.
6. A single-origin lineup and no-syrup policy give Greed a clear brand boundary
SOE means Single Origin Espresso prepared as an espresso; when the beans are brewed by drip, the result can be called SOC, or Single Origin Coffee. Single-origin beans are not unusual at ordinary shops, but they are typically offered only as an upgrade.
Greed chose to make single-origin coffee the standard across the entire lineup. 陈子宇 says a chain doing this “does not exist anywhere in the world,” allowing consumers to understand immediately that the brand is positioned as specialty coffee and will not be priced too low.
The second rule is no sugar or syrup, with drinks built from natural ingredients. 陈子宇 compares it to selecting seafood from a blackboard at a British restaurant only to have the kitchen coat it in flour and deep-fry it: if the ingredient is good enough, it should not be buried under an aggressive flavor.
This boundary deliberately narrows the audience, but he believes a new brand in an overcrowded market first needs product and brand separation. “Only this brand is offering this kind of product with distinctive value” matters more than widening acceptance with larger cups, more water and more milk.
7. The flavor map of single-origin coffee includes both naturalists and “tech and tricks”
陈子宇’s simplified map for beginners is that Ethiopia often brings citrus notes and Kenya often brings berry notes. These are only “stereotypes”; each origin remains highly diverse internally.
One American branch is the naturalist camp represented by purebred Panama Geisha: low in intensity but marked by delicate white-floral aromas and tea-like notes. When 卫诗婕 asks whether “white-floral aroma” means he can actually taste a color, 陈子宇 explains it as the clean, light sensation associated with an elegant perfume.
The other branch is the “tech and tricks” camp represented by Colombia, with more processing and fermentation techniques. Yeast may be added, and some methods can produce flavored beans that consumers would rather not see. The approach can create a highly explicit flavor profile, but it also raises the question of whether the result is natural.
Chinese consumers are generally more receptive to beans with obvious floral and fruit aromas, where strawberry, blueberry or raspberry can be identified immediately. Heavy anaerobic naturals that produce an over-fermented, soybean-paste-soup flavor are closer to a red line.
8. Ethiopian heirlooms are a natural blend, while top coffee offers accessible luxury
Asked which beans he likes most, 陈子宇 first jokes, “I like expensive ones,” before giving his actual recommendation: Ethiopian heirlooms. Farmers pick whatever grows naturally on the mountain, rather than a single selectively bred variety—a “blend given to you by nature.”
Compared with the delicacy of Panama Geisha, Ethiopian heirlooms are often more complex and balanced: “a hexagon warrior—they have a bit of everything.”
Specialty coffee’s distinctive value is that top-tier experiences remain affordable. The world’s best wine or whisky can cost a fortune, but 100g of good Panama green-label Geisha costs roughly RMB100–200, putting the experience within reach of ordinary consumers.
Greed is not trying only to sell expensive beans; it first wants to improve access. The goal is to get more people drinking entry-level specialty coffee, then offer menu upgrades to the subset who develop the desire to explore further.
9. Small cups and acidity are consequences of specialty strength and medium-light roasting
Customers passing through commercial locations tend to ask 2 questions: “Why are your cups so small?” and “Why is this coffee sour?” These are the standard points of friction when an independent specialty product enters a mass-market setting.
One office-building store received a negative review describing the coffee as having a “sour, weird taste.” 2 or 3 days later, another customer saw the comment and took it as evidence that the shop was a specialty-coffee store, visited to verify it and left positive feedback. 陈子宇 accepts the first customer’s candid reaction because it may also screen for and attract people who genuinely like the product.
The small cup follows from extraction constraints. The espresso basket has a fixed capacity, and the amount of espresso liquid has an upper limit; the larger the cup, the more water or milk is added and the lower the concentration. For semi-automatic specialty espresso, about 240ml is ideal; 360ml is close to the upper bound, and anything larger may no longer meet specialty strength.
Greed’s Sanyuanli store in Beijing offers a “bean flight,” serving 4 beans from different origins in a fixed brewing sequence so customers can experience the differences directly. The beans change monthly or quarterly.
卫诗婕 asks why the brand does not accommodate demand for larger cups. 陈子宇 acknowledges that doing so would broaden the audience, but says a new brand in a hyper-red ocean needs clearer differentiation. “One person’s path to progression” can take more than 10 years; a brand cannot expect customers to accept everything overnight and can only trust the trend.
10. Bean changes impose hidden costs far above those of an independent shop
Single-origin coffee is expensive to buy, but the larger indirect cost comes from limited supply. Once a batch sells out, the beans must change, and every change triggers new R&D, extraction calibration, store training and supply-chain adjustments.
At an independent shop with 3 employees and an owner on the floor most of the time, those changes can be absorbed through individual experience. In a chain, reproducing the same bean consistently across stores and operating conditions is a fundamentally different challenge.
Blends allow a component to be replaced when a raw material is unavailable; single-origin coffee has no true substitute. Exchange rates, international logistics and geopolitical tensions therefore flow straight into the menu. On one occasion, a supplier said beans could not arrive on time because a merchant vessel had been seized during the Red Sea crisis; the reference image was reportedly a ship in flames.
Greed prepares backups by sending some beans by sea and others by air. Bean selection is organized around themes: during Kenya season, it first narrows the origin and then selects 3 or 4 beans with clearly different flavor profiles so customers can explore them side by side.
11. IoT coffee machines centralize each store owner’s experience at headquarters
A semi-automatic machine separates grinding from extraction. Beans continue to degas after roasting, their density changes, and variations in air humidity alter their physical state, so grind settings must be adjusted continuously. Medium-light roasts may be more sensitive to these changes and require more human intervention.
Grind problems ultimately show up as extraction problems, such as more bitterness or negative flavors. Experienced drinkers may not be able to work backward to the grind setting, but they can taste that the result is wrong; independent shops rely more heavily on an owner’s experience on site to fix such issues.
Greed has taken an aggressive automation approach on equipment. Some stores use IoT-enabled coffee machines that automatically send extraction parameters back to headquarters, allowing the team to inspect the status of every shot and make real-time corrections in place of some manual adjustments.
陈子宇 summarizes the philosophy as “90% comes from the beans and 10% from the brewing.” Once the raw material is good, brewing should be standardized as far as possible; after grinding, the barista can step away and spend the time explaining the coffee and engaging with customers.
12. Scale procurement and standardization put independent-shop ingredients into the mainstream price band
卫诗婕 initially assumed that a lineup built entirely around single-origin beans had to be expensive, but bought an entry-level salted-milk coffee for about RMB32 through delivery. 陈子宇 says that is neither cheap nor outrageous: the price is close to the mainstream band of leading chains, while the quality targets independent specialty shops.
Compared with independent stores, a chain’s store count creates purchasing leverage. Standardized equipment and processes also reduce labor per drink, creating a cost advantage that offsets part of the higher input and operating costs.
Stores still sell a setting beyond the coffee itself. About 30% of customers take their drinks away, roughly 40% sit down to socialize after buying, and the program does not break out the remainder. The first group is buying caffeine or a self-treating experience; the second is also buying social space, business meeting space and a place to work.
陈子宇 still puts the product ahead of the space. Greed is not built around a short-lived design or fit-out dividend, but around the long-term trend over the next 5–10 years toward “returning to the ingredient” and “not adding sugar.” Space is an extension of product value.
13. Content becomes sustainable social growth only when it converts into conversation and repeat purchases
The program summarizes Greed’s business model as “content drives social, social generates consumption, and consumption generates content.” The magazine 追山羊 takes its name from the legend of coffee’s origin: goats ate coffee cherries, became excited and danced, and shepherds chased them before discovering what the fruit did.
A “lifestyle proposition” can be a new bean and its origin story, a new recipe inspired by history, or the value proposition behind a collaboration. The brand should offer products and services that make customers feel, “I know this, but you don’t yet,” rather than requiring them to take a class before buying.
Greed runs 2 origin seasons a year: an international origin in the first half and Yunnan in the second. The Kenya season used coffee’s “sweetness” as its theme, expressing the note visually through pairs of elephants, lions or rhinos leaning into each other. The world’s last 2 female white rhinos were also turned into charms, giving customers an emotional connection to the origin and a reason to share it.
卫诗婕’s test for content-driven social growth is whether the content can become conversational currency. 陈子宇 likewise sees collaborations as partnerships around shared sensibility or shared beliefs, not simple exchanges of traffic.
14. Collaborations strengthen brand recognition, while Shanghai exposed market saturation and a status hierarchy
Greed has collaborated with Gucci, evian and Miss Dior. 陈子宇 admits the Gucci collaboration contained an element of luck: both brands were in Taikoo Li, while Greed was emphasizing origin and a return to classics, which happened to align with Gucci’s Ancora red campaign at the time.
Before that, Greed tested Shanghai with pop-up stores open for only 1–2 months at Qiantan and Shangsheng Xinsuo, receiving the reaction, “Why should a brand from Beijing sell coffee in Shanghai?” After the collaborations and broader brand-building, that criticism had almost disappeared by the time it opened a permanent Qiantan store at the end of September this year.
Shanghai is difficult because of supply density. The program cites roughly 8,000 coffee shops and 400M cups a year, or about 160 cups per store per day on average. At an average ticket of RMB20, monthly revenue would be about RMB100K, which 陈子宇 believes would “most likely” mean a loss.
On the claim that “of every 10 stores, 6 lose money, 3 break even and 1 makes money,” he says it is “probably about right.” Coffee-shop fit-outs and branding costs are no lower than those of bubble-tea shops and may be higher, while customer throughput and sales velocity per unit of time are weaker.
15. Offline rents have not bottomed, and Greed is aggressively conservative in returning to fundamentals
陈子宇 does feel the market cooling. Locations he could not secure 1 or 2 years ago are often reopening after their former tenants fail, and malls that once rejected low offers may return to renegotiate 6 months later. But he does not believe rents have bottomed; some tier-2 and tier-3 malls may still have further to adjust.
Delivery is rewriting store economics. Merchants already use rent to buy offline traffic, while platforms use subsidies and commissions to convert dine-in traffic into delivery, forcing merchants to pay for the same customer again. “Delivery platforms are online real estate”; online commissions and offline rent should belong to the same customer-acquisition cost pool.
Optimism about returning offline in 2021 drove brands to open stores aggressively. Some malls ended up with a dozen-plus coffee brands but not enough traffic to support the supply, and the industry was broadly difficult in 2022. Greed still calls opening about 30 stores a year conservative. Site selection depends less on whether a city understands specialty coffee than on whether the right venue exists and whether the brand can quickly open a second, third and fourth store after the first to build momentum.
陈子宇 recalls a specialty coffee shop in London’s Covent Garden with production at the back: a staff member poured hot water from a milk pitcher without weighing or timing anything, simply because the beans were fresh and the ingredients were good enough. It made him question whether China’s coffee market had skipped product fundamentals and gone straight to technique, marketing and emotional value.
In a weak cycle, 陈子宇 still believes “coffee is the lipstick of our era”: for RMB30, consumers can buy origin, terroir and culture, making coffee the cheapest symbol of lifestyle quality in a mall. As the experience dividend fades and low-price sentiment risks collateral damage to good products, he argues against one-off influencer venues and wants every campaign to compound recognition of “good ingredients”—“being aggressive in a conservative way,” because “the answer to breaking through is not far from where you started.”