China seeks to become an international coffee capital by establishing several new industrial processing, roasting, and storage facilities, as well as additional free trade zones.
China continues to increase its investment in the coffee sector by opening several new processing facilities and coffee trade zones. On March 27, the Qingdao area of the China (Shandong) Pilot Free Trade Zone hosted an exchange event for Chinese and Brazilian coffee enterprises. This event marked the inauguration of two key facilities: the Brazilian Specialty Coffee China (Qingdao) Promotion Base and the Qingdao Free Trade Zone Coffee Industry International Expansion Base.
The event, sponsored by the Brazilian Export and Investment Promotion Agency (ApexBrasil), focused on promoting specialty coffee and industry matchmaking, attracting representatives from the Brazilian Specialty Coffee Association, 12 leading Brazilian coffee companies, and over 40 domestic industry organizations.
These facilities serve as a hub for the display, distribution, and cultural promotion of Brazilian specialty coffee and help Chinese coffee companies expand into the Brazilian market, thereby promoting the development of the coffee industry in China and Brazil.
In January 2026, the International Coffee Industry Park project in the Daxing area of Beijing's Airport Economic Zone was selected for implementation. The Lingkong International Coffee Industrial Park aims to become Northern China's first international coffee transshipment and distribution center, a hub for exhibition, trade, and consumption, and Beijing's first specialty coffee industry cluster.
This project has a planned construction area of approximately 22,000 square meters, fully leveraging the policy functions of the comprehensive bonded zone to build a full-chain service platform encompassing roasting and processing, bonded warehousing, R&D, and innovation. Phase I includes a 2,000-square-meter specialized roasting and processing center, with 20,000 square meters reserved for expansion in Phase II.
Also, Kunshan city in Jiangsu province released an ambitious three-year action plan to position itself as the “Capital of the International Coffee Industry” from 2025 to 2027, targeting a trillion-yuan scale and a strong cultural brand identity by leveraging its proximity to Shanghai.
In its ninth year of deep cultivation in the coffee industry, Kunshan managed to carve out nearly 50,000 square meters from almost saturated space to build the nation's most professional green coffee bean distribution center, attracting numerous well-known companies engaged in green coffee bean trading, including Louis Dreyfus of France and Mitsui & Co. of Japan.
The city’s professional temperature and humidity-controlled green coffee bean warehouse, proposed by several local coffee companies in Kunshan to meet the shared needs of green bean storage, can store 50,000 tons of green beans at the same time; the second phase of the project, currently under construction, will add another 40,000 tons of storage capacity.
On a larger scale, Yizheng Foods is building its second-phase factory in Kunshan, which is expected to increase roasting capacity by nearly 50,000 tons annually; Luckin Coffee has invested $120 million in Kunshan to build a second fully automated, intelligent roasting facility to match its Fujian center. To date, Kunshan accounts for nearly 60% of the nation's green bean roasting volume, with an annual roasting capacity of 63,000 tons.
From introducing the first coffee company to attracting more than 40 leading coffee companies — including Vietnam's Trung Nguyen Coffee and Salim Group, Indonesia's largest integrated food company that recently announced a significant expansion of its green coffee bean trading strategy in Kunshan — to building the nation's first coffee culture museum, Kunshan has developed coffee into not only a billion-dollar industrial chain but also a cultural IP and lifestyle shaped by the deep integration of industry and urban culture.