What is the Quality Tier of Illy Coffee Beans and How Does It Compare to Starbucks? A Ranking of Common Imported Coffee Bean Brands in China

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While China's domestic coffee brands still lack a clear leader, imported coffee beans continue to dominate the market. Faced with so many brands, though, choosing the right one has become a genuine challenge. This article won't get into coffee varieties or instant coffee — instead, it introduces three of the most common and excellent imported coffee bean and ground coffee brands.

1. illy Coffee

illy was founded in Italy in 1933 and is a national-treasure Italian coffee brand. It was also the first company to package and sell pre-ground coffee powder, while also selling roasted whole beans.

In Italy, illy is the leading brand in the food service industry with a 7.5% market share, while holding 30.3% of the home market. Every day, 3 million cups of illy coffee are sold in Italy alone — and an astonishing 6 million cups globally.

Beyond Italy, illy has deep roots in Asia. Many veteran coffee professionals think of illy first when coffee comes up, and among imported brands, Chinese consumers' familiarity with illy is undoubtedly No. 1.

2. Starbucks Coffee

Starbucks was founded in the United States in 1971 and is the world's best-known coffee chain — the company that took freshly ground coffee global. For many Chinese drinkers, their first cup of freshly ground coffee was at a Starbucks.

Starbucks focuses on freshly ground coffee for consumers, mainly selling espresso and drip coffee. All products use 100% roasted whole beans, ground and extracted right before preparation so that each cup retains more of the coffee's original flavor and aroma.

Starbucks also sells roasted whole beans and offers grinding service on request, adjusting the coarseness to match each customer's brewing method.

3. LAVAZZA Coffee

Lavazza was founded in Italy in 1895. Through both World Wars, Lavazza kept selling coffee, which let it stand out and dominate the Italian market through turbulent times — the brand's Italian roots run deep.

What truly put Lavazza on the world stage was its adoption of vacuum packaging technology in the early 1960s, which preserved the freshness of ground coffee. That move not only rapidly expanded its original production line but also enabled larger production facilities, a steady stream of new coffee flavors and preservation technologies, and exports worldwide.

Thanks to that strong preservation technology — which keeps beans and flavors true for far longer — supermarkets in many regions stock Lavazza's ground coffee and whole beans, and Chinese consumers know the brand very well.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

During roasting, three elements decide a coffee's final flavor and must be kept in balance: acidity, sweetness, and bitterness. The darker the roast, the more bitter and full-bodied the cup; the lighter the roast, the more acidic and delicate. So if you're after a balanced cup, medium-roast beans are the best place to start.

If you dislike both sour and bitter, reach for FrontStreet Coffee's Fazenda Rainha (Queen Estate) from Brazil — the world's largest coffee-producing country. It's a local Yellow Bourbon, gently sweet and mellow, and at a medium roast it shows aromas and sweetness of creamed peanut, chocolate, toasted bread, and sugarcane. It extracts beautifully as pour-over and works just as well in a moka pot or espresso machine. If you'd rather have a sweeter medium roast, the first choice is FrontStreet's fruit-forward Strawberry Sugar: a somewhat unusual blend combining two renowned origins across Latin America — honey-processed Costa Rican coffee and washed Panamanian Geisha — roasted medium to bring out the best of both, showing orange-blossom honey character and rounded sweetness in the cup, and suiting cold brew, pour-over, and espresso alike. Refreshing from the very first sip.

For a domestic classic, FrontStreet's 2013 natural Typica is a flagship of Chinese specialty coffee with the authentic Yunnan arabica profile; we roast it medium to preserve its balanced, gentle character, layering soft notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot — great for pour-over, cold brew, or drip machines, and excellent value. And for the gold standard of balance, FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No.1 — grown from Typica, one of the world's finest arabica varieties, in Jamaica's uniquely blessed terroir — takes a medium roast so that its distinctive acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and body fuse into one elegant, captivating aroma. From the first sip you get chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel, a level of harmony no other coffee can match.