Coffee Sketcher

Cotti Coffee

Properties3
descriptionThe chain that Luckin's disgraced founders built after they were forced out — over 18,000 stores in 28 countries in under four years, grown on 9.9-yuan drinks and a franchise deal that takes a cut of profit instead of a fee, with no published word about where any of the coffee comes from.
tagsorganization, china, cafe, retail
aliases库迪咖啡, Kùdí Kāfēi, Kudi Coffee, Cotti

14 min read

Cotti Coffee

Cotti Coffee (库迪咖啡, Kùdí Kāfēi) is a Chinese coffee chain founded in August 2022 and headquartered in Suzhou, Jiangsu. It opened its first shop in Fuzhou, Fujian, on 22 October 2022 and, as of April 2026, reported more than 18,000 stores in 28 countries and over 300 cities (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed by direct fetch; the same worldwide figure is reported by Comunicaffe, accessed 2026-07-23).

That is roughly 18,000 shops in under four years, which is the only number anyone needs to understand the company.

Cotti belongs in this wiki for the same reason Luckin Coffee does, and it is the same reason twice over: it sets the price of a cup of coffee for an enormous number of people while publishing essentially nothing about the coffee. It is the second half of the story on Starbucks China — the squeeze from below — and one of the two chains any new entrant to the China coffee market, including JD.com’s 7Fresh Coffee, has to explain itself against.

The Luckin lineage

Cotti was founded by Lu Zhengyao (陆正耀) and Qian Zhiya (钱治亚) — the two people who built Luckin Coffee and were removed from it after the accounting fraud that got Luckin delisted from Nasdaq in 2020 (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23; corroborated by Coffeeness, accessed 2026-07-23).

This is not a coincidence of personnel; it is the whole strategy. The Luckin model — order and pay in a phone app, staff a counter rather than a café, discount hard, expand on franchisees’ capital — turned out to be copyable by the people who invented it. Cotti runs it again, at lower prices, against the company they used to own. The full account of the fraud itself is on the Luckin Coffee note.

To verify — who actually owns and controls Cotti

Lu Zhengyao and Qian Zhiya are consistently named as founders across Wikipedia, French Wikipedia and Coffeeness (all accessed 2026-07-23), and those sources describe the pair as owning or controlling the company. No corporate filing, shareholder register or ownership disclosure was found to confirm that. Treat “founded by” as established and “controlled by” as probable but undocumented.

The franchise deal is the product

Cotti is described as running a fully franchise-based model that charges service fees calculated on each store’s gross profit, rather than a conventional flat franchise fee (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23) — what Coffeeness (accessed 2026-07-23) calls a “profit sharing” model.

In plain terms: the franchisee does not hand over a large fixed payment up front, so opening a Cotti costs less to start than a typical franchise, and the parent company takes its money as a slice of whatever the shop earns. That lowers the barrier to signing up thousands of operators quickly, which is exactly what happened. It also means Cotti’s revenue rises and falls with franchisee profitability — the thing a 9.9-yuan price war attacks directly.

Wikipedia records that from 1 March 2026, Cotti suspended franchise applications in major cities (accessed 2026-07-23). The company has not published a reason in any source found here, but a chain that stops recruiting franchisees in its best markets after four years of unbroken recruitment is a signal worth watching.

Shops inside other shops

The second half of the cheap-expansion trick is physical. Alongside standard cafés, Cotti runs “store-in-store” and convenience-store formats — counters embedded inside convenience stores, restaurants and other high-traffic retail sites rather than shops of their own (Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed by direct fetch; corroborated by Daxue Consulting, accessed 2026-07-23, read directly, and by DaoInsights, accessed 2026-07-23, read directly). Daxue describes these as three to five square metres and names the format Cotti Express.

Three to five square metres is a kiosk — roughly the footprint of a parking space. A chain that can open in that much room, on a franchisee’s money, inside a landlord’s existing store, is a chain with almost no ceiling on unit count. That is the mechanism behind the numbers below.

The growth curve, with dates

Every store count for this company is out of date within a quarter, so each one only means something with its date and its scope attached. The dated milestones that could be checked here:

DateStoresScopeWhere it comes from
22 October 20221first store, FuzhouWikipedia
May 20246,505ChinaDaxue Consulting
by 2024 (Oct)over 10,000worldwideWikipedia
mid-2025over 15,000 (includes some not yet open)worldwideDaoInsights
April 2026over 18,000, 28 countriesworldwideWikipedia, Comunicaffe

At the May 2024 mark Cotti was the third-largest chain in China on that measure, behind Starbucks with 7,102 and Luckin Coffee with 18,360 (Daxue Consulting, accessed 2026-07-23, read directly). Two years later Luckin reported 33,596 stores and Cotti more than 18,000, while Starbucks reported 8,000 — the two discount chains had roughly doubled or tripled and the incumbent had barely moved. Those later figures are worldwide rather than China-only, so the multiples are approximate, but the direction is not in doubt. That is the shape of the price war in one row of numbers.

The 50,000-store target it did not hit

Cotti publicly announced a plan to reach 50,000 stores by the end of 2025. Two independent sources record the target, and both record that it was missed (Wikipedia and Daxue Consulting, both accessed 2026-07-23, both read directly). The chain was somewhere above 15,000 at the deadline and above 18,000 four months later — short of the goal by roughly two-thirds.

This is worth recording rather than glossing over, because Cotti’s store counts are the company’s main public claim about itself, and this is the one case where a Cotti number can be checked against a later Cotti number. The announcement overshot the outcome by a wide margin. Read every other figure the company publishes with that in mind.

To verify — the RMB 14-per-cup franchisee subsidy

Daxue Consulting (accessed 2026-07-23, read directly) states that on 29 April 2024 Cotti announced subsidies of up to RMB 14 per cup, valid until 31 December 2026, to support new and existing stores. If accurate this is a significant fact — a subsidy larger than the 9.9-yuan retail price means head office was paying franchisees to sell coffee below cost — but it is a single consultancy source, and no Cotti announcement, franchise prospectus or filing confirming it was found. Do not state the figure as fact.

The 9.9-yuan war

Cotti’s growth ran on a single price point. In February 2023 it rolled out a store-wide “9.9 yuan unlimited” promotion — roughly US$1.40 a drink — across most of its outlets. Luckin Coffee answered with its own weekly 9.9-yuan coupon campaign in June 2023, and the two chains held that line for years (Caixin Global, 2 February 2026, accessed 2026-07-23).

By 1 February 2026 Cotti had sharply cut the number of menu items priced at 9.9 yuan, moving to what Wikipedia describes as a mixed strategy of “special discount + regular prices” (Caixin, accessed 2026-07-23; Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23). Caixin’s framing is that Cotti is lowering the heat of the price war it started.

Nine-point-nine yuan is the number that explains why the China coffee market note describes a latte costing less than a bus fare, and why Premiumisation in China happens in a completely separate compartment from where most of the coffee is actually sold.

To verify — the first-year 5,000 and the China-only store split

Two claims about China-only counts remain unconfirmed. Comunicaffe (accessed 2026-07-23) is cited for Cotti opening 5,000 stores across China in less than a year after launch, and for 16,485 locations in China as of 20 January 2026; PandaYoo (accessed 2026-07-23) is cited for roughly 5,000 outlets by August 2023. Both pages returned HTTP 403 on every fetch attempt here, so neither could be read at source, and a blog repeating a figure is not a second source for it. The verified Daxue figure of 6,505 stores in China in May 2024 is consistent with a first-year total near 5,000 but does not confirm one. Use the worldwide counts with their dates attached; treat the China-only split as unverified.

Outside China

Cotti’s overseas network, per Wikipedia (accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed by direct fetch), spans France, Germany, Spain, England, Belgium and the Netherlands in Europe, with Italy and Portugal planned, and South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines across Asia.

The interesting part is that the discount pitch does not travel. At Cotti’s Potsdamer Platz store in Berlin, Coffeeness (accessed 2026-07-23, read directly) recorded a small cappuccino at about €3, an americano at €2.70, a latte at €3.10, and a matcha mango-coconut drink at nearly €5 — ordinary German café prices, not disruptive ones. The advertised 99-cent espresso turned out to be a one-time app-download offer for new customers. A chain whose entire identity in China is cheapest cup on the street arrives in Europe priced like everyone else.

In 2025 Cotti also launched a branded “Cotti Coffee Convenience Store” format, folding convenience-store retail in alongside the café counter (French Wikipedia, accessed 2026-07-23). That is a later, larger cousin of the store-in-store counters described above, which Daxue dates to 2024.

To verify — the North American timeline, the country count, and the German openings

Coffeeness (accessed 2026-07-23, read directly) states Cotti opened its first U.S. store in Hawaii in 2024 and then expanded into California and New York, and that branches are due to open in major German cities including Frankfurt and Munich during 2026. A second and better-placed outlet, the specialty trade publication Daily Coffee News (8 June 2026, accessed 2026-07-23), is cited in the research report for a sharper version — first U.S. store in Honolulu, from spring 2024 — and for the company claiming presence in 33 countries rather than the 28 that Wikipedia carries for April 2026.

Two independent sources agreeing on Hawaii in 2024 is meaningful, but the Daily Coffee News page returned HTTP 403 on every fetch attempt here, so its wording could not be read at source, and the 28-versus-33 country figures directly conflict. No U.S. corporate filing, press release or official store locator confirming any of it was found. Treat the U.S. states as roughly right, the dates as approximate, and the country count as unsettled — the difference may simply be that one figure is four months newer than the other.

To verify — headquarters: Suzhou or Beijing?

Wikipedia and Cotti’s own site agree on Suzhou: the official Chinese site gives the head office as 江苏省苏州市虎丘区致远国际商务大厦 (Zhiyuan International Business Building, Huqiu District, Suzhou, Jiangsu) (cotticoffee.com, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed by direct fetch). French Wikipedia (accessed 2026-07-23) instead lists Beijing. The company’s own site is the better authority, so this note uses Suzhou; the Beijing entry is most likely a stale figure or an early registration address rather than a live dispute.

What Cotti says about its coffee

Almost nothing, and the little it does say needs care.

Cotti’s official Chinese site, read directly on 2026-07-23, publishes a head-office address, a national hotline (400-888-1717) and four partnership inboxes — supplier cooperation (SC@COTTICOFFEE.COM), marketing, recruitment and property. It names no country, region, farm, cooperative, variety, altitude, processing method or harvest year, and gives no cupping score for anything it sells (cotticoffee.com, accessed 2026-07-23).

The supplier inbox is the one genuinely interesting detail: it confirms a centralised procurement interface for a chain of 18,000 shops. What passes through it is undisclosed.

To verify — the "SCA-certified specialty beans" claim

Coffeeness (accessed 2026-07-23, read directly) reports that Cotti markets bean lines called “Gold Roast” and “Platinum Specialty” as SCA-certified specialty coffee with awards, while noting in the same breath that “there’s no information about the actual origin or procurement practices.”

This claim should be read sceptically for a structural reason: the Specialty Coffee Association does not certify coffee beans. It publishes standards, runs education, and licenses Q graders through the Coffee Quality Institute — individual coffees are scored by graders against those standards, not “SCA certified” as products. Marketing copy that says “SCA certified” is usually claiming a cupping score above 80 points, or nothing at all. No Cotti-published score, grader, lot or certificate was found, and the claim was not traceable to any Cotti page reachable from here. Do not repeat it as fact.

No specialty-coffee footprint on the public record

Searching the available sources turned up no evidence that Cotti Coffee has:

That absence holds across every source added since. Two business analyses written specifically about Cotti’s model — Daxue Consulting and DaoInsights (both accessed 2026-07-23, both read directly) — cover store formats, franchise economics, subsidies and pricing in detail and say nothing at all about beans, origins or suppliers. When the people studying a coffee company professionally do not mention its coffee, that is itself the finding.

The same absence is recorded on Luckin Coffee and Starbucks China, and together the three of them produce the situation the Premiumisation note describes: the largest coffee retailers in China are invisible at the top of the market, while a department-store group (Dashang Group) and an e-commerce platform (JD.com) hold the auction trophies.

One inference worth stating as an inference: a chain selling drinks at 9.9 yuan across 16,000-plus Chinese outlets is almost certainly buying commercial-grade arabica and robusta through large importers and aggregators, not competition microlots. That follows from the business model and the price point, not from any disclosure — no source found here documents Cotti’s green-coffee contracts, volumes, or origin partners at all.

The prices this note quotes are all consumer drink prices. Nothing in the public record touches Cotti’s green-coffee FOB or farm-gate pricing, which is the number that would actually tell you what the chain’s growth means for producers.

To verify — the "fourth-largest chain in the world" ranking

Coffeeness (accessed 2026-07-23) places Cotti fourth globally by store count, behind Starbucks, Dunkin’ and Luckin Coffee, citing an industry outlet called The Lowdown — and states in the same article that the figures “cannot be independently verified.” It is a plausible aggregated media estimate, not a primary industry statistic. Store counts for these chains also move by thousands per year, so any ranking needs its date attached.

Sources

  1. Cotti Coffee — official site (库迪咖啡) — accessed 2026-07-23 (fetched and read directly; head office address and contact inboxes confirmed, no sourcing information published)
  2. Wikipedia — Cotti Coffee — accessed 2026-07-23 (fetched and read directly; founding date, first store, store count, franchise model and country list confirmed)
  3. Caixin Global — In China’s Coffee Price War, Cotti Lowers the Heat — accessed 2026-07-23 (paywalled; preview read directly, 9.9-yuan timeline confirmed from it)
  4. Comunicaffe — The Chinese chain Cotti Coffee is now a global giant with a growing presence in Europe — accessed 2026-07-23 (unverified; returned HTTP 403 on repeated attempts)
  5. Daxue Consulting — Will Cotti Coffee win the price war against Luckin Coffee? — accessed 2026-07-23 (fetched and read directly; May 2024 China store counts and chain ranking, Cotti Express format, 50,000-store target, franchisee subsidy claim)
  6. DaoInsights — Cotti Coffee: the brand rewriting China’s beverage price floor — accessed 2026-07-23 (fetched and read directly; mid-2025 store count, 9.9-yuan campaign timeline, store formats)
  7. Coffeeness — Cotti Coffee: The Next Big Thing? — accessed 2026-07-23 (fetched and read directly; review blog, Berlin prices and US/German expansion claims)
  8. French Wikipedia — Cotti Coffee — accessed 2026-07-23 (convenience-store format; lists Beijing as headquarters, contradicting the official site)
  9. Daily Coffee News — China’s Cotti Coffee has been quietly growing throughout the U.S. — accessed 2026-07-23 (unverified; returned HTTP 403 on repeated attempts — cited for the Honolulu/spring-2024 and 33-country claims only)
  10. PandaYoo — The tale of Cotti Coffee and its founders — accessed 2026-07-23 (unverified; returned HTTP 403 on repeated attempts)

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