Seesaw, a local specialty coffee brand, becomes the business card of Chinese coffee, the first plant-based oatmeal milk cover brings a surge

At the just-concluded 2021 Hotelex Shanghai International Hotel and Catering Industry Expo, Seesaw, China's No.
1 specialty coffee brand, brought a variety of creative coffee bursts to surprise appearances, and there was a long queue in front of the booth.
Since the second half of last year, Chinese coffee brand Seesaw, based on consumer insights in the local market, has launched a number of creative coffee products that will surprise the market, firmly advancing on the road of creating new coffee drinks that Chinese people love to drink.
According to the brand, in the current fierce competition in the coffee market, Seesaw's performance is still soaring with its accumulated deep brand power and continuous innovation of creative coffee products.
In March, its performance increased by more than 20% month-on-month, including the repurchase of creative coffee products.
The rate rose to 41%.

Seesaw initiative: the best possible milk cap coffee

Seesaw initiative: the best possible milk cap coffee

On March 1, Seesaw launched a variety of spring limited creative coffees as scheduled.

On the first day of the new launch, many stores lined up to try new things.
Even if it takes 30 minutes to wait for a cup of coffee, coffee lovers are still full of expectations.
It is reported that the spring limited edition includes the gardenia pear latte known as first love coffee, the spring apple pie latte that is like a ray of sunshine, and the cloud peach cold extract that can go up to the sky after drinking.
The three Qingchun special tunes are full of creativity and fun in terms of product concept, styling and taste, and soon occupy a lot of social media pages such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin.

One of the best-selling spring creative coffees, "Yunduo Peach Cold Brew", uses a plant-based oatmeal milk cover originally developed by Seesaw's in-house creative coffee Lab team.

Using special whisking technology, 0 sugar and 0 addition, the oat milk is processed into light milk foam, which tastes as dense and rich as hops.
Unlike some other beverage milk caps on the market, Seesaw's first oat milk cap uses only one ingredient of oat milk, without any syrup or plastic ingredients added.
This is also the most suitable milk cap collocation for coffee that the Seesaw Creative Coffee Lab team has explored after a long period of research and development attempts.

Industry experts’ first WBC (World Barista Competition) Chinese female lead judge, Wang Minmin, also praised this product: “It’s delicious and healthy!” It is understood that the research and development ideas for this series of products are based on the market insights of the Seesaw team: “Great Most Chinese people are intolerant to lactose, and plant-based milk provides more options than milk.

Seesaw is willing to work to lead the new trend of coffee in China.
"

Big coffee's choice: Danone Plant-based's preferred coffee brand for cooperation in China

Big coffee's choice: Danone Plant-based's preferred coffee brand for cooperation in China

At this year's Hotelex exhibition, plant-based beverages were a big hit, and the blockbuster among them was the plant-based brand Alpro, a subsidiary of the international giant Danone.

In its Chinese marketing strategy released to the media, cooperation with specialty coffee brands occupies a core position.
As for the choice of the preferred coffee brand for cooperation in China, Danone has set its sights on Seesaw, which is growing into China's coffee business card.

At the beginning of March, Seesaw and Danone Alpro launched a plant-based concept collaboration and launched the "Plant-based Life Project" to introduce more plant-based options to customers in the store.

After that, the two parties will also develop more in-depth cooperation around plant-based creative coffee.
According to Danone's disclosure to the media, Seesaw is the first choice for international giants to enter the Chinese market because of Seesaw's innovative and leading position in China's specialty coffee industry.

At the same time, Seesaw also strategically takes the "health trend" as an important direction of its product innovation.

In the future, in addition to the creative application of plant-based products, it will also focus on creating more healthy products.
At the "Refined Women's Fitness Brand Forum" not long ago, Seesaw CEO Wu Xiaomei also attended as a guest and talked about the possibility of consumer integration between the coffee market and the fitness market.
In the future, the fitness circle will also be penetrated as a key marketing circle.

Chinese coffee business card: "Seesaw Shanghai Blend" released

Chinese coffee business card: "Seesaw Shanghai Blend" released

Shanghai has become the city with the most coffee shops in the world, with 6,973 coffee shops in total.

Shanghai has also been committed to promoting local coffee culture and building it into a coffee capital with both international charm and local cultural integration.

At the opening ceremony of Shanghai Coffee Culture Week held concurrently with the exhibition, Li Lin, president of the Shanghai Food Association, released the "Seesaw Shanghai Blend" concept product created by Seesaw.

40% Colombian coffee beans, 30% Ethiopian coffee beans, plus 30% Yunnan coffee beans, "Seesaw Shanghai Blend", has a strong aroma and a mellow taste.
Next, this coffee product will be put on the Seesaw store, as a business card of Shanghai coffee culture, inviting the world to come and experience it.

In addition, Seesaw also released the 2021 plan of its "Yunnan Ten-Year Plan" during the exhibition, and held a Yunnan coffee seminar at Seesaw's Shanghai Vientiane City store with the big coffee industry leaders in Yunnan.

The "Yunnan Ten-Year Plan" was first proposed by Seesaw in 2014.
It is committed to continuously improving the quality of Yunnan coffee, and spent 10 years of meticulous cultivation to enhance Yunnan's place on the world coffee map.
Seesaw is also the first domestic brand to propose a Yunnan coffee plan.

Seesaw, who has been soaring all the way, is daring to create and willing to create.
"Chinese coffee culture is in Shanghai, and Shanghai coffee representative is in Seesaw.
" According to the media's comment, the future of Chinese coffee is promising.

Seesaw upgrade

Seesaw upgrade

As a brand that started to invest in the specialty coffee track earlier, Seesaw has a good reputation in the coffee industry.
In 2012, its first store in Shanghai Yuyuan Road Jing’an Design Center (after the store is the Coffee Training Academy) not only attracted coffee from all over the world The attention of the circle, and it is also a list of brands that the management of commercial coffee brands has focused on, and it is also a popular destination for review and content-grass apps.
In 2012, defined by the media as the first year of the budding of specialty coffee in China, Seesaw's first store was also included as an important landmark event in the history of Chinese coffee development.

The main body of this store is the Jing'an Design Center, which itself is a historic building that gathered many creative workers in Shanghai at that time.
Coupled with Seesaw's modern and simple space design style, and hand-made specialty coffees such as Aurora Geisha, it has attracted the attention of coffee lovers from all over the world, space design media and lifestyle brands from all over the world.
It can be said that Seesaw has basically laid its core elements of creativity, space design + specialty coffee products.

In terms of coffee concept, Seesaw's medium-shallow roast, which is completely opposite to Starbucks heavy roasting, gives coffee the possibility of more flavors, and also provides the theoretical basis for the sinicization of coffee.
The Chinese do not like the strong and anxious stimulation of Europeans and Americans, but prefer the balanced and light coffee taste.
The source of the Seesaw brand name is the balance of the seesaw, which means that good coffee is the balance of sour, sweet, bitter, and mellow.

The unique way of cultural dissemination of specialty coffee, store creative experience and product power are the core barriers of the brand, which is where it differentiates from chain brands such as Starbucks.

However, before the completion of the 45 million yuan A round of financing in 2017 (investor is PFAFF Holdings), Seesaw's development was not fast.
Since its establishment in 2012, it has only opened 7 stores in 5 years, most of which are in Shanghai.

Seesaw CEO Wu Xiaomei (Sally) said that before founding Seesaw, core team members have inspected the local (referring to South Korea) chain coffee industry in Seoul, South Korea twice.
Seoul has more than 500 local chain coffee shops, so they believe that the comparison The city of Shanghai also has the potential to achieve this magnitude.
Doutor Coffee, a local coffee chain in Japan, has a scale of 3,000, surpassing Starbucks.
These Asian coffee brands have achieved the localization of coffee and achieved commercial scale.

According to statistics, there are currently about 8,000 coffee shops in Shanghai, of which more than 600 are Starbucks.
In addition, there are a large number of other international chain coffee brands, local chain brands and independent coffee shops, but the market is not saturated.

After the financing was completed, Seesaw began a relatively rapid expansion.
With its personalized stores and coffee quality, it quickly opened up 4 mature markets in Beijing and Shenzhen.
By 2019, it has smoothly increased to about 25 stores.

But at this time, the Seesaw team found that their expansion has encountered certain obstacles.
This may also be a common problem encountered by all specialty coffees in the local market, that is, how to break the circle further.
When it comes to boutique, there are certain definitions in the coffee circle, such as technological improvement, niche, advertised taste, etc.
However, consumers do not have a clear concept, and often judge by brand and price.
The professional and obscure technical language of coffee in the boutique circle cannot be popularized by mass consumers and cannot achieve commercial sustainability.
And a better creative coffee can not only show the creativity of the brand, but also make more people accept coffee.

Sally said that the audience of coffee lovers is very small.
They have knowledge of boutiques and Seesaw, but it is not so easy to break the circle.
Because most people are not tasting coffee when they drink coffee on a daily basis, it is even more difficult to attract consumers who do not drink coffee before.

At this time, Seesaw was reminded of all kinds of "Chinese New Tea Drinks" in the same hot market.

1.
Chinese new tea drinks quickly conquer the city among young people with their renovated taste and appearance;

2.
The new Chinese tea drink has allowed many people to develop the habit of "drinking a drink if something is all right", which has also cultivated some consumers (or can be said to cultivate each other) for coffee with similar attributes.

"At this time, we thought of "creative coffee.
" We think it is easier to communicate with consumers, easier to accept, so the audience is also wider," Sally mentioned.
Seesaw soon started to test the water after getting this idea.

In short, creative coffee is the combination of coffee and other elements to form a new delicacy.
In the WBC competition (world barista championship), creative coffee is also one of the important projects.
The original intention of the competition is to encourage baristas to show their understanding of the coffee base, and their grasp of the overall taste of a cup of coffee beverages, and expand coffee Audience base, to provide customers with creativity and surprise.

In most mature coffee markets, consumers have a high level of awareness and acceptance of creative coffee.
The more common collocations include classic chocolates, as well as a variety of wines and beverages.
Many independent cafes will have their own creative coffee.
A cup of amazing creative coffee products can make people have more and deeper memories of the cafe.

Seesaw has taken a different approach in the creative coffee section, combined with the taste characteristics of the Chinese market, launched various new products of coffee + fruit + plant milk, as well as various cross-border products.
After three quarters of three rounds of testing, it has successfully expanded its customers.
group.
According to back-end testing data, the proportion of customers in the z-era after the launch of the new product (mainly young people or college students who have just entered the workplace) increased from 5% to 17%.
Some of these people were exposed to coffee for the first time and were directly attracted by creative coffee.
Into the pit.
The monthly repurchase rate of creative coffee is also very high, reaching 35%.

In June 2020, Seesaw officially launched the upgrade of its brand.
The brand proposition has also changed from "a good cup of coffee" to "a good cup of coffee".
To popularize specialty coffee, first of all, the consumer group must be popularized.

Source: China Business Magazine

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