FamilyMart Opens Boutique Coffee Shop! Is This Set to Compete with 7-Eleven?

FamilyMart Opens Coffee Shop!

FamilyMart's coffee brand Let's Café has been cultivating the coffee field for as long as 16 years. Now, FamilyMart's first independent coffee experience store has officially opened, marking another step forward in coffee.

On December 22nd, the Let's Café PLUS store at No. 71, Section 2, Zhongshan North Road, Taipei began trial operations -- FamilyMart's first independent coffee experience store. According to reports, current business hours run from 7:30 AM to 9:00 PM. After several days of trial operation, it will enter its formal business stage on December 26th.

FamilyMart was founded in 1972 and is a Japanese chain convenience store group. Its main products include typical convenience store items such as beverages, snacks, bento boxes, magazines, and comics. In August 1988, FamilyMart expanded into Taiwan, establishing its first store in Zhongshan District, Taipei, jointly set up by Japan's FamilyMart and Taiwan's Hefeng Enterprise Group.

FamilyMart in Taiwan launched the coffee brand Let's Café in 2006, while FamilyMart on the mainland launched ParCafé. The positioning was meant to compete with CITY CAFE, which belongs to the rival convenience store brand 7-ELEVEN. The opening of Let's Café PLUS marks another step forward for the brand.

In 2018, FamilyMart in Taiwan, aiming to create "a convenience store within a coffee shop," opened its first Let's Café flagship store in Taipei. That store, however, was a quick coffee shop attached to a FamilyMart convenience store.

The Let's Café flagship store specifically targets urban consumers' demands for coffee taste and light food spaces. Beyond introducing single-origin beans usually found in specialty coffee shops -- such as Yirgacheffe, Golden Mandheling, and Alishan -- it also invested heavily in importing the "Coffee Master" professional pour-over coffee machine costing millions, along with UCC's globally patented foam coffee machine.

According to reports, annual sales of Let's Café coffee in Taiwan's FamilyMart have already reached 160 million cups. The goal is to achieve annual sales of 200 million cups by 2023, with the annual growth rate of single-origin coffee reaching 15%-20%. Years of deep cultivation and astonishing sales have given the brand enough confidence to open independent stores.

Store Design and Features

The Let's Café PLUS store design completely avoids FamilyMart's green, instead adopting deep blue as the main tone -- Let's Café's brand color. The store area spans over 130 square meters and provides 30 seats. The interior space is square and rectangular, very bright, with extensive use of wood elements that create an atmosphere inviting people to linger.

Menu and Offerings

The store offers several series: single-origin coffee, cold drip, bubble coffee, Americano, honey Americano, single-origin Yirgacheffe, and cocktail coffee. Single-origin prices range from NT$80-500 (RMB 18-115). A daily Americano and latte cost NT$100 and NT$130 respectively -- all within normal price ranges.

The most expensive coffee beverage is NT$500. This one can genuinely be called rare: a limited-edition cold drip coffee made with beans called "Taiwan Yunlin Gukeng Geisha," available in limited quantities every day. A hot drip coffee made with these beans costs NT$400.

If you don't like coffee, that's fine too. The store also offers several types of Twinings tea beverages, along with freshly made smoothies and milk drinks such as blueberry-banana milk smoothies and a seasonally limited strawberry milk smoothie. All the dairy used comes from smallholders' fresh milk.

For light food there are nearly 30 options -- honey pancakes, chocolate, mentaiko cheese, cream puffs, salads, and sandwiches -- priced from NT$70-250 (RMB 15-60). Overall value for money is quite good.

Let's Café PLUS also continues FamilyMart's core environmental philosophy, providing environmental measures such as free rental of reusable takeaway cups, discounts for bringing your own eco-friendly cup, and wheat-based eco-friendly straws.

Image source: Internet

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If a convenience-store coffee bar's single-origin lineup caught your eye, you can brew those same profiles at home. FrontStreet's washed Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Gudingding delivers the jasmine, citrus, and berry character of a classic Yirgacheffe, with a green-tea finish that makes it an easy everyday cup.

For the Golden Mandheling style, choose FrontStreet's PWN Indonesia Golden Mandheling -- deep-roasted, very low in acidity, and full-bodied, with clear woody and caramel tones thanks to triple hand-sorting and one machine-sorting.

And if the Gukeng Geisha on the menu intrigued you, FrontStreet's Boquete Geisha from Panama is the approachable way in, showing the variety's signature citrus, honeyed florals, and delicate sweet-sour fruit at a friendlier price.