café trends Archives

Shanghai – Qahwa World

Shanghai is no longer just a financial giant or a global trade hub — it has become the beating heart of Asia’s coffee revolution. In this city, coffee is not merely a beverage but a cultural experience, a sensory journey, and a form of art that mirrors the city’s energy and sophistication.

According to Dao Insights, Shanghai had over 9,115 cafés in 2024 — more than any other city in the world. Meanwhile, coffee consumption in China has surged by 150% over the past decade, reaching 6.3 million 60-kg bags, as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This exponential growth has positioned Shanghai at the center of China’s rapidly evolving coffee landscape.

A New Coffee Culture

In Shanghai, cafés are not just places to sit; they are creative spaces where art, science, and culture meet. Each café tells a story — some focus on visual aesthetics, pouring coffee in delicate, layered forms, while others emphasize scientific precision, measuring temperature to show how heat transforms flavor.

The city has become a living laboratory for coffee innovation, where craftsmanship and curiosity coexist.

Boundless Imagination

Shanghai’s coffee scene is defined by its fearlessness. Here, one can find orange-infused Americanos, latte served in green bell peppers, or espresso blended with durian. What might seem eccentric elsewhere has become a signature of the city’s inventive spirit.

Local chains have embraced fruit-based coffee drinks, offering seasonal flavors like apricot, pineapple, and watermelon. This trend reflects Shanghai’s creative confidence — redefining coffee on its own cultural and sensory terms.

The Afternoon Ritual

Unlike Western cities that start their mornings with coffee, Shanghai comes alive in the afternoon. Between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., cafés are filled with professionals, students, and artists seeking focus or inspiration.

Most cafés open around nine in the morning and stay active late into the evening, reflecting the city’s dynamic rhythm. Coffee here is not a wake-up drink — it’s a pause, a conversation, and a source of renewal.

From Cup to Knowledge

High-end cafés like Coffee Spot and Spot Table offer an “All-in-One” experience — one coffee served three ways: black, with milk, and as a signature creation. Inspired by World Brewers Cup competitions, this concept invites guests to discover coffee as both science and art.

Each serving comes with an information card detailing origin, processing, and temperature, turning a simple tasting into an educational experience.

Coffee as Visual and Emotional Art

Shanghai’s cafés are built around design as much as taste. From concrete walls and soft lighting to carefully placed cups and textures, every detail adds to the experience. Coffee is not a commodity here; it is culture itself.

Some cafés accompany drinks with flavor charts and temperature notes, while others treat every cup as a moment of meditation — a meeting point between beauty, aroma, and emotion.

The Festival of Coffee and Creativity

Every year, the Shanghai Coffee Culture Festival takes place in Jing’an District, attracting over 50,000 visitors from across China and abroad. The event showcases daring creations such as coffee infused with aged vinegar from Shanxi Province or brews inspired by traditional Chinese medicine, featuring dandelion, licorice, and Sichuan pepper.

The festival has become a true reflection of Shanghai’s identity — a blend of tradition and innovation, experimentation and respect for flavor.

A City Connected by Coffee

Coffee has woven itself into the fabric of Shanghai’s society. In small alleys and glass towers alike, cafés have become meeting points for designers, entrepreneurs, and students. Independent micro-roasters sit beside luxury lounges, together shaping a vibrant community built on creativity.

Among the most influential names are Yunnan Dehong Dehome, which promotes locally grown Chinese coffee from Yunnan Province — once overlooked, now celebrated for its delicate sweetness and cocoa-like finish.

From a Cup to a Culture

Coffee in Shanghai is more than a drink — it is a reflection of the city’s soul: its speed, precision, and openness to the world. From street kiosks to coffee palaces spanning 9,000 square meters, the city lives and breathes coffee every day.

No longer a borrowed tradition, coffee has become a distinctly Chinese expression — a symbol of modern life, creativity, and identity. And at the heart of it all stands Shanghai, the new global capital of coffee, where every cup tells a story of progress, passion, and imagination.

Dubai – 16 September 2025 – (Qahwa World) – A café in China’s southwestern Yunnan province has launched two seasonal drinks that blend coffee with penny bun (porcini) mushrooms, priced at 23 yuan (about US$3) per cup. The offerings are a “Cheese Americano with Penny Bun” and a “Penny Bun Oat Milk Latte,” an innovation built on uniting two local signatures in one cup: Yunnan coffee and premium wild mushrooms.

The preparation details point to a measured flavor approach: the Cheese Americano is served with mushroom powder, a coffee base, a layer of cheese cream, and a cookie shaped like the mushroom, while the oat-milk latte is made with coffee, mushroom powder, and oat milk. Each is priced at roughly 23 yuan. These formulations have been attributed to “Forleaf Coffee” in Yunnan, according to recent regional coverage.

Crowds have shown up from the early days. Staff at the café say they sell around 50–70 cups of mushroom coffee daily, with customers coming specifically to try the two drinks. The venue has previously offered a “black truffle coffee,” suggesting a pattern of seasonal, attention-grabbing innovations that ride the wave of curiosity.

The timing is no accident; June through September is wild-mushroom season in Yunnan, when celebrated varieties—such as matsutake, termite mushrooms, and penny bun—top the lists of those seeking forest-driven flavors. This seasonal context helps explain the widespread interest and the early impression that “the mushroom here is part of the terroir,” not a passing add-on.

On social platforms, opinions split between those who see mushrooms as “too precious to be mixed with coffee” and others who found the taste “surprisingly delicious.” These differing positions have accompanied news of strong sales, giving the innovation a debate that goes beyond mere “trendiness.”

Even so, short-term success does not guarantee continuity. Management at Forleaf Coffee has indicated that repeating the drinks next year is not assured and will depend on the cost of ingredients—chief among them the mushroom. For reference, penny bun prices in August ranged between 40 and 80 yuan per kilogram, a band wide enough to make the decision to continue primarily an economic one before it is a marketing call.

The Yunnan experiment fits into a broader Chinese wave that blends coffee with local or unusual components. In 2024, Starbucks China offered a pork-flavored latte for Lunar New Year—priced at 68 yuan per cup—in a notable example of limited editions serving as both flavor testbeds and marketing tools. In recent months, other controversial drinks—such as a “pork-intestine latte” in Sichuan—have also spread widely on social media.

What distinguishes the Yunnan case is that the “mushroom” here is not “functional” in the wellness sense common in global mushroom-coffee blends (like lion’s mane and chaga), but an edible porcini used for flavor—crafting a new profile that marries a gentle umami with coffee’s sweet-bitter edge. This approach relies on the ingredient’s rootedness in the region’s forests and daily life, not on physiological claims or dietary supplements.

Despite the momentum, repeatability is constrained by several factors: price volatility during the harvest season, the cost of developing and localizing recipes inside production lines, and the café’s ability to maintain powder quality and a stable supply. While queues often mark the initial “buzz,” turning the novelty into a seasonal signature requires a precise balance of feasibility, supply, and flavor. Local coverage—explicitly and implicitly—has tied the drink’s fate to input costs and annual availability.

In sum, this is a flavor-first experiment that draws more on terroir than on “novelty for novelty’s sake,” while capturing the spirit of rapid innovation in China’s highly competitive coffee market, where local blends become shareable stories that drive visits. Between admiration and objection, the future of “mushroom coffee” in Yunnan rests on seasonal pricing—numbers alone will decide whether the craze returns next season or remains a memory of 2025.

Tag: café trends

Shanghai: The New Global Capital of Coffee