This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on January 12, 2024.
This article is based on an interview by Anli with Lin Hao, founder of Tasogare Coffee, published in January 2024. It reflects the company’s thinking at that time on value positioning, cross-border ecommerce, supply chain, and offline brand-building.
Over the previous year, aggressive coffee pricing in China pushed the category further away from a lifestyle niche and toward a true mass market. Luckin was one driver of that shift; Tasogare Coffee was another.
Founded in 2015, Tasogare became known for high-value drip-bag coffee and coffee concentrate, growing rapidly online. Its transaction value exceeded RMB 1 billion in 2022. According to Anli’s reference to Jiuqian data checked by Mingliang Company, in Tmall’s Q1 2023 “instant and brewable coffee” category ranking, Santonban and Yongpu were both declining, while Tasogare continued to grow and ranked second only to Nestle by transaction value.
Unlike coffee brands built mainly around lifestyle imagery, Tasogare emphasizes coffee’s functional role. Lin Hao, who became a heavy coffee consumer while working overseas, said the core logic of coffee consumption is its role as an energy and alertness tool. His positioning for Tasogare is “daily-ration coffee”: not a photo prop, but an everyday product that helps people get through work and life.
That positioning explains the brand’s pricing. Compared with major competing products, Anli described Santonban at about RMB 4-6 per cup, Yongpu at about RMB 3-10, and Tasogare at about RMB 2-3. Near-expiry products could be discounted to just over RMB 1 per cup.
Tasogare’s stated ambition was to become a leading coffee brand in China and globally, ranking among the top online and offline coffee players over the next five to ten years.
Lin said the 2023 consumer environment was not optimistic and created meaningful pressure for the team. From the second half of 2023, Tasogare placed more emphasis on overseas markets and cross-border ecommerce.
His logic was pragmatic: China’s domestic market was highly competitive, with expensive traffic costs and intense price pressure. Redirecting part of the marketing spend overseas, even just over 10%, could potentially produce a better return.
Tasogare’s international pricing may differ from its China value strategy. Lin gave Japan as an example: Tasogare sold one drip-bag coffee for JPY 50, roughly RMB 2-3, similar to its China price. But local leading drip-bag coffee products could sell for JPY 25, making Tasogare more expensive in that market. Lin said that although Tasogare was not yet outselling the local leader, the ability to retain profit margin and still win some market recognition suggested future opportunity.
The company was also planning to enter Russia and the Middle East. Lin said China’s coffee market would keep expanding, but not in a straight-line growth pattern. By contrast, cross-border ecommerce overseas was developing quickly, similar to China several years earlier.
He also tied Tasogare’s partnership with the Hangzhou Asian Games to international exposure. The company became the official designated coffee of the Hangzhou Asian Games, which Lin said helped many countries notice Tasogare in a short period.
Cross-border sales had already reached the tens-of-millions-of-renminbi level annually before 2023, and Lin said 2023 sales grew by multiples. He described 2024 as a potentially suitable time to push harder.
Although overseas expansion was becoming a priority, Lin said supply chain remained his core focus. In his view, supply chain is not one project or a single manufacturing link. It covers raw-material integration, production, channels, and pre- and post-sale service.
He argued that Tasogare’s advantage is supply-chain integration. Because the team understands the full chain and key technologies, he said supply in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia would not be the main bottleneck. Global raw materials can be allocated according to each market’s strengths.
Lin described supply chain capability as a slow accumulation process. Upstream suppliers already had factories globally, and when Tasogare looked outward, those suppliers could introduce resources. But simply identifying a factory that produces for Tasogare and asking it to manufacture a similar product does not mean a startup has mastered supply chain.
For coffee, Lin said the deeper work involves knowledge of food ingredients and packaging materials: equipment, processes, bean treatment, flavor development, degradable packaging, and freshness control. He specifically cited the need to keep residual oxygen below 1% in the package, because lower residual oxygen helps preserve coffee quality and freshness.
Lin said all fast-moving consumer goods require value for money. If a product is too expensive, in his view, it can only become a flower, not a tree trunk.
He linked the idea to his own experience as someone who saved money on many things but would not save on coffee, because he saw it as a healthy tool for staying alert. That led him to connect coffee consumption with urbanization. Tasogare’s mission, as he put it, is to make “daily-ration coffee for Chinese people,” especially ordinary consumers.
When asked about the company’s long-term target, Lin said Tasogare hoped to become a major coffee player in China and globally. Over five to ten years, he wanted the brand to rank near the top among all online and offline coffee brands.
He also said the broader objective was to help China’s coffee industry chain develop. If more people drink coffee, more participants enter the industry and help China’s coffee sector expand outward. He said Tasogare would be satisfied with 3%-5% of a larger market and believed the company had that capability.
After eight years with a mainly online domestic business, Tasogare opened its first offline flagship store in Hangzhou. Lin described it as a brand project, not simply a retail expansion.
The store is located in one of Hangzhou’s representative commercial districts, near West Lake. Lin said he wanted it to create a collision between traditional Chinese culture and an imported coffee culture.
In practice, that could mean a tea master preparing tea alongside a coffee master preparing coffee, letting customers compare beverages and cultures while learning about Tasogare. Lin described the flagship as a social space, a cultural space, a venue for crossover events, and a “brand savings jar.”
He also connected the store to the idea of an Eastern “third place.” As China’s economy develops, Lin said, Chinese brands should help define their own aesthetic system and interpret local culture through third spaces.
For the Hangzhou flagship, the design keywords were Yunnan and blank space. Yunnan suggested color, mountains, and stone, so the store was built around stone as a design foundation. Blank space was intended to leave room for future cultural interpretation and show the inclusiveness of Chinese culture.
Lin said his more than 20 years living in Japan gave him a strong appreciation for cultural diversity. He cited examples such as Japanese-developed games based on Chinese classics, iced oolong tea emerging after a long tradition of hot tea, and canned coffee from abroad becoming popular in China.
These influences shaped Tasogare’s product diversification, according to Lin. The company introduced drip-bag coffee from Japan early on and was also early in launching shelf-stable coffee concentrate, which he said received strong market feedback.
Beyond the flagship store, Tasogare planned to express its cultural identity through activities such as music festivals and the Asian Games, as long as they fit the brand’s personality.
Lin argued that brand competition is not only about supply chain, price, channels, and products. Ultimately, it also becomes cultural competition. He said the era after 2022 marked a shift away from aggressive replication and mass production toward a period of accumulation in 2023 and 2024. In his view, brands without distinct personality and characteristics would struggle to survive.
Note: Forward-looking targets, market-share ambitions, cross-border goals, and sales figures are historical statements from the January 2024 source.