Chinese coffee giant Luckin opened its first flagship with premium drinks as the company takes on Starbucks Reserve.Luckin CoffeeBEIJING — China’s Luckin Coffee is taking direct aim at Starbucks’ high-end roastery chain with a new flagship store in the country’s south that sells premium drinks.It’s Luckin’s first major departure from its original strategy of operating budget-priced coffee kiosks – a move that helped the company overtake Starbucks in terms of the number of storefronts in China.Now, with the U.S. company selling off most of its struggling China business to a local investment firm, Luckin is proving it’s more than made a comeback from fraud allegations in 2020 that forced it to delist from the Nasdaq. The Chinese company on Sunday officially opened its two-floor Luckin Coffee Origin Flagship in Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong.In contrast to Luckin’s typical offerings priced at roughly $1 or $2 for an Americano or latte, the flagship store has nudged prices slightly higher for a range of pour-over and cold brew coffee drinks. Customers can choose beans from Brazil, Ethiopia or China’s Yunnan province, as Luckin taps into the geographical sourcing “origin” theme popular with Starbucks and other coffee companies. The new store also sells several specialty drinks such as a “tiramisu latte” with a pastry on top, according to posts on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. Users have started posting about 1 to 3 hour waits for the drinks since the store’s soft launch on Jan. 20. The 420-square-meter (4,521 square feet) store signals how intense the competition in China has become for Starbucks. Back in 2017, the U.S.-based coffee giant chose Shanghai for its second-ever Reserve Roastery “megastore,” after launching the premium store concept in Seattle three years earlier.But as coffee has taken off in China, traditionally a tea-drinking market, Starbucks has run into a slew of competitors from boutique cafes to chains such as Cotti Coffee and Manner — which often sell drinks at half the price as Starbucks.Luckin reported revenue of $1.55 billion for the three months ended Sept. 30, 2025, a nearly 48% increase from a year earlier. That’s just for t …
