(Yicai) Oct. 31 -- Chinese coffee brands have started scouting for foreign coffee beans to meet the rising domestic demand for the beverage in recent years.

"Domestic coffee needs are increasing, and consumers are looking for more differentiated flavors and higher quality," said Piao Zhongxiong, general manager at Borong, a Shanghai-based trade firm dedicated to coffee bean purchase, sales, and distribution.

China's coffee bean imports almost doubled to 125,000 tons last year from 2017, with the import value surging nearly 150 percent to USD1.1 billion, according to customs data.

In early October, Piao visited Colombia to scout for coffee beans. He reached cooperation with five local plantations and signed exclusive supply deals for some local products.

Domestic coffee bean trade was in surplus before 2016 but has been in deficit for six straight years since 2017, according to a report from Yunnan province's Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

Yunnan is a major coffee producer in China that boasts Starbucks, Nescafe, and Luckin Coffee among its main clients. The coffee planting area in the province was about 93,000 hectares, with a total output of 108,700 tons of coffee beans in 2021, statistics from the local agriculture and rural affairs department showed.

While in the past China's coffee market was dominated by foreign brands such as Starbucks, now more and more domestic brands, including Luckin and Manner, are accelerating their development to seize a larger market share.

In the second quarter of the year, Luckin's revenue rose 88 percent to USD855 million from a year earlier, exceeding that of Starbucks for the first time. The US coffee chain reported revenue of USD822 million in the three months ended July 2in China, up 51 percent from the same period last year.

Meanwhile, foreign brands are introducing new products and strategies to attract more Chinese customers.

Starbucks announced in September last year that it would increase the number of its coffee stores in China by almost 40 percent to 9,000 by 2025.

Costa Coffee, another foreign coffee chain, said it plans to open new stores in the next few years to reach a total of over 1,000 outlets in China from 450.

Canadian coffee chain Tim Hortons opened its first store in China in 2019. It has over 700 Chinese stores now and hopes to reach 2,750 before 2026, Cater Xia, Tim Hortons China's chief operating officer, told Yicai in an exclusive interview.

But China's coffee market is still in a development phase. According to the above report by the Yunnan government, China was the world's seventh biggest coffee consumer last year, with over 280,000 tons, up 14.3 percent from the previous year. However, the country still lags behind countries and regions such as the European Union, the US, and Brazil, where over one million tons of coffee are consumed each year.

Editors: Xu Wei, Futura Costaglione