Starbucks' New Coffee Products Criticized by Netizens for Over-Recycling Old Concepts! Coffee Product Development Should Focus More on Taste

Starbucks China's Product Innovation Dilemma

Consumers are craving new flavours more than ever, and tea and coffee brands worldwide keep rolling out special, sensible, fresh-tasting drinks to keep pace with the market.

Starbucks China (excluding Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan), however, seems remarkably unhurried about product development. It has slipped into a pattern where a new release is little more than a reshuffle of the last one, changing neither the drink nor its flavour, and netizens have been quick to call it out:

In an era when freshness drives traffic, everyone is thinking about how to win over more consumers with new flavours. Starbucks China moves like a 2G signal, only catching up after domestic tea and coffee brands have already ridden the wave and even started to cool off.

Flower-Flavoured Coffee

Take flower-flavoured coffee. Camellia drinks took off in 2021, yet Starbucks only introduced them in 2022. Then, in 2023, while everyone else was launching spring tea-coffee series, Starbucks was still pushing its camellia latte.

Before camellia arrived, Starbucks had leaned on cherry blossom products from 2019 to 2021. Several variants appeared, but the ingredient combinations barely changed, the only real difference being whether the coffee went in before or after everything else. This year brought a small twist with the addition of light cream cheese, moving away from the old cherry blossom-matcha pairing.

Limited-Season Offerings

Two limited seasons draw the most attention from Starbucks each year: New Year and Christmas. Every country keeps one bestselling classic for these windows while developing one or two flavoured variants. Starbucks China, though, serves up the same old options year after year: chestnut and peach, toffee and white mocha.

Its other limited releases rarely escape the formula of flavoured syrup + milk + espresso. In other regions, Starbucks devotes itself to launching new cold brew combinations as the weather warms, such as grapefruit cold brew and apple peach cold brew.

Starbucks China keeps to its own path. From spring to summer, when people's tastes shift from rich and heavy to light and refreshing, it dutifully relaunches the almond milk coffee it first brought out back in 2018. Many consumers and partners can hardly bear to watch.

Festival Products

Beyond the lack of novelty in drinks, the Dragon Boat Festival and Mid-Autumn Festival seasons, which Starbucks China values most, turn its annual zongzi and mooncakes into a running complaint among partners: "Can we change suppliers and come up with some new flavours?! It is the same thing every year, and every year they taste bad. I do not even know how to talk customers into buying them."

Look at Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan: their mooncakes have flowing centres, and their zongzi-warabi cake pairings look genuinely appetising. The small gifts and packaging are appealing too. Compare that with the domestic version: the eternal tote bag, the eternal paper box, all sold on being multifunctional.

Looking Back and Forward

Looking back over these years, more and more brands have entered the market, and Starbucks' once-dominant position has begun to waver. The brand is committed to service experience, but products are what actually draw consumers in.

Starbucks may not want to play in the affordable coffee market, yet no business survives without young consumers. Simply swapping flavours will not win a new young customer base. Making product flavours answer to the seasons is the real innovation to focus on.

April 26th is coming around again. Word has it that this year's Frappuccino mooncakes cut the quantity without cutting the price, going from a 10-pack to an 8-pack with the flavours largely unchanged, and the early-purchase gifts have been dropped as well.

Readers who have made it this far are probably already shifting in their seats.

Image source: Internet

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