How Did the Flat White Become Popular in China? | Market Inventors

This is a Starbucks play. Behind its relentless promotion lies the fear of falling behind.

When the Shanghai specialty café Café del Volcán opened three years ago, the flat white was already on the menu. Today the flat white and the latte are the shop's two best-selling drinks, each ordered nearly half again as often as the third-placed cappuccino.

The specialty coffee camp classifies coffee by bean: where it is grown, how it is roasted and how it is brewed determine its flavor. Lattes, cappuccinos and mochas, by contrast, are different ways of making milk coffee. At bottom they are just different ratios of coffee to milk, plus flavorings such as chocolate powder or cinnamon; sellers chasing novelty add sea salt, matcha powder, even rum.

Most people do not care much about the difference between these two ways of thinking. The drink names are a mouthful, and they only caught on after years of coffee marketing. You may remember how, after the singer Xiao Yaxuan released a song called Cappuccino, a lot of people suddenly started saying the word. Coffee was still a luxury then. That was 1999, well before people linked "Starbucks" with "petite bourgeoisie" — it was the year Starbucks entered China, opening its first café next to the China World Hotel in Beijing.

Now, just as "cappuccino" did back then, the flat white has become the latest fashionable thing. Anyone who has set foot in a Starbucks knows how hard the company is pushing it. But times have changed. Far more people know the flat white today than knew the cappuccino then, and their view of it is not mainly envy of a "higher-class lifestyle". It is more the curiosity of "why not try it", and sometimes even disdain for global chain coffee culture.

Of course, countless places besides Starbucks serve the flat white, including Café del Volcán, the specialty café at the start of this article. But the reason people talk about it so much now is that Starbucks has been pushing it.

In this column, "Market Inventors", we usually answer a question like "How did the flat white become popular?" But as you will see, its popularity long predates Starbucks's campaign. So the more accurate question is: "Why is Starbucks promoting the flat white now, and what does it get out of it?"

What exactly is a flat white?

There is no clear definition of a flat white. Did it originate in Australia or New Zealand? In the 1970s, the 1980s or the 1990s? The arguments have gone on for years. Hugh Jackman — "Wolverine" — who runs the Laughing Man coffee shop in New York, once said: "A flat white is just a latte with a bit more coffee and a bit less milk."

Broadly speaking, it is a milk coffee from Australia and New Zealand. It usually takes a double shot of espresso, which makes it taste more bitter than a latte. What sets it apart from other milk coffees is the foam. A latte's foam is usually more than 1 centimeter thick; a flat white's almost never exceeds 5 millimeters.

Still, there is no single standard. To baristas, there are only different interpretations of the drink. Starbucks presses the Ristretto button on the machine to pull 2 shots of espresso, steams the milk for 3 seconds, and finishes with a white dot of latte art. At Vincent The Dog, a specialty café in Melbourne, baristas extract 19-22g of coffee and combine it with milk in a 150ml ceramic cup, keeping the foam as thin as possible, about the thickness of a latte's. Café del Volcán's standard is to extract 21-30g (about 30ml) of coffee from 21-24g of beans, then add about 2mm of foam.

One thing is certain, though: a flat white is somewhat harder to make than other milk coffees.

On September 29, Starbucks China launched the flat white at its first Coffee Culture Festival and gave it a Chinese name, "Fu Rui Bai". "Bai" translates "white" and also refers to the white dot of latte art; "Fu Rui" sounds a little like "flat" and suggests a rich, fragrant taste. These very Chinese-looking characters are still a transliteration, but they are a subtle shift from the plain sound-alike "cappuccino". You can see Starbucks China's effort to court Chinese consumers: the elaborate characters seem to carry a classical, lasting elegance — though many young people say the name is "a bit cringey".

The flat white was in China long before Starbucks

Leaving aside the small specialty coffee shops, COSTA Coffee and McDonald's McCafé both sell a flat white too. But do you remember them?

At McCafé, the flat white goes by the Chinese name "Te Nong Nai Xiang" ("extra-rich milk aroma") and sits on the regular menu alongside the latte and cappuccino. McCafé has it mainly because McCafé was founded in Melbourne in 1993 — the flat white's home town. In 2009 McDonald's launched McCafé in 7 Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuhan, and the flat white followed it into the Chinese market.

McDonald's "Te Nong Nai Xiang"

In March last year COSTA Coffee launched its flat white in China under the Chinese name "Chun Yi Bai". In the UK, where COSTA is based, the drink had been on the menu since 2012 as one of its core coffees.

COSTA's "Chun Yi Bai"

COSTA has its own explanation for the name. "Chun" stands for the rich, mellow mouthfeel of blended coffee and milk; "Yi" ("craft") means it is made by hand; and "Bai" ("white") comes from the flat white's long-standing nickname, "Xiao Bai" ("little white"). The name has been used since the drink first launched, and is meant to feel familiar to Chinese consumers.

This September, COSTA and the creative agency Argon & Krypton Interactive ran a social-media campaign called "Famous 5 Five-Star Coffee". By then COSTA no longer treated the flat white as new; it was promoting an even more obscure milk coffee, the cortado ("Ke Ta Duo").

Have you ever wondered why Starbucks can popularize the flat white when COSTA could not make the cortado take off?

Back to the flat white. Although their reach was limited, McCafé and COSTA did introduce a fair number of consumers to it. So in this "movement" to build a flat white culture, Starbucks is best seen as a powerful leader: it did not start the trend, but it can spread it widely in a short time.

Why only Starbucks can turn the flat white into a trend

Starbucks thought carefully about bringing the flat white to China and calling it "Fu Rui Bai".

In January this year Starbucks announced it would launch the flat white in North America. Nine months later it brought the drink to China, the third market to get it after the United States and Canada. Autumn is Starbucks's most important promotional season of the year. The first Starbucks opened in Pike Place Market in Seattle in the autumn of 1971, and the company has since treated this time of year as its anniversary, rolling out one event after another. In the US, the seasonal pumpkin spice latte has been a runaway seller for several years. In China, the seasonal specials last year and this year were the French Vanilla Latte and the Dark Caramel Latte.

China is without doubt Starbucks's most important overseas market. By the end of last year it had 1,500 stores there and was still opening about one a day. That is far short of its more than 10,000 stores in the US, but in China it gives Starbucks an overwhelming lead.

In other words, even when it is forcing a coffee culture on people, Starbucks can reach a great many of them. Most people do not go to McDonald's for the coffee, and one flavored coffee is hardly McDonald's highest-margin product, so despite all its outlets McDonald's does not push it hard. COSTA is keen to promote, but its store network is far weaker than Starbucks's, and it makes much less noise.

You think Starbucks really wants to sell flat whites? No. It wants to say, "We are a coffee shop with taste"

If that were the whole story, the flat white would not be very interesting. But you can see Starbucks's flat white push as its biggest effort yet to raise the value of its brand.

"I think Starbucks is pushing the flat white because the market forced its hand," said Wu Lingbo, a roaster at the specialty café Shaoshupai and China champion at the 2014 World Cup Tasters Championship.

In Australia, the flat white's birthplace, Starbucks faces a problem unlike anywhere else in the world. Melbourne is full of specialty cafés, yet has only about 6 Starbucks stores. Against those cafés, Starbucks has no edge in coffee quality, interior design or price, so it naturally struggled to stay in business.

Australia is a warning. Its coffee culture is several lengths ahead of other markets, but Starbucks can learn a lesson from it: if it does not offer enough extra value, customers who learn enough about coffee will readily abandon this fast-food brand of the coffee world. When it comes to taste, after all, there is plenty to criticize. Even as Starbucks keeps winning new customers, keeping ever more knowledgeable coffee drinkers is a growing problem. If Starbucks no longer satisfies them, what must it do to win them back?

You may remember that at the end of last year Starbucks opened its largest flagship store in the world at its Seattle headquarters, the Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room. It puts the roasting equipment on display and lets customers experience coffee in a heavily industrial space — at the very least, it deliberately creates an air of high-quality coffee. Go back further, to 2010, and Starbucks launched its Reserve line in North America, aimed at the premium coffee-bean market. It describes the mouthfeel and flavor of each bean in the line in detail, and packages the origin of each into a good story.

QDaily has reported on many Starbucks attempts to "make itself look more upscale". All of them aim to add value to the brand. Not every store needs to offer them; letting you know Starbucks cares is enough to give the brand new life.

"More people now care whether coffee tastes good. Once they learn to taste sweet-sour notes, a mild bitterness and berry flavors in a cup, rather than the traditional burnt bitterness, do you think they will still be happy with a milk coffee full of coarse foam?" Wu Lingbo said.

China is a bet for Starbucks. Will it win?

In March this year Douglas McWilliams, founder of the British economic think tank Cebr, published a book called The Flat White Economy. It describes how, for London's hip, arty young people, drinking flat whites is no longer just a lifestyle. They drink flat whites while doing new kinds of work, and this, he argues, will reshape the economy and society of the future.

You may not realize how popular the flat white is in London. As one of the drink's earliest stops abroad, London proved fertile ground for independent cafés. In 2005 a café called simply "Flat White" opened in Soho, staffed entirely by Australians, from the owner to the baristas. It appears on many lists of London's best independent cafés.

COSTA Coffee, mentioned above, saw sales rise 9.5% within three months of launching the flat white in the UK — a sign of how popular the drink was.

That is not what we mean by "the flat white becoming popular in China". In China the trend is still going from nothing to something; the explosion in sales has not yet come.

On the Starbucks website, the name "Fu Rui Bai" is followed by a TM mark, meaning Starbucks has applied to China's trademark office to register it. The name does not yet carry the circled R of a registered trademark, but Starbucks can already block others from filing for the same name, and has priority to use it.

Starbucks is usually very cautious about which drinks it stocks when it opens stores in second- and third-tier cities. At the store it opened in Luoyang, Henan province, in May this year, for example, it offered basics such as the latte, cappuccino and Americano, and none of the new drinks then rolling out in first-tier cities. This time, though, "Fu Rui Bai" went on sale in stores across the country at once.

All this suggests Starbucks has high hopes for the flat white and bigger commercial ambitions behind it. It has placed a sizable bet.

But turning a fad into a habit takes a long time. For many people who have tried a "Fu Rui Bai", the strongest impression besides the taste is the price.

"I'll probably go back to lattes. They taste a bit weak, but 30 yuan versus 36 yuan for a large is a world of difference. People like me who treat coffee as a drink aren't the same as people who treat it as a religion," said Mean, who had just finished a "Fu Rui Bai" and did not want to give her real name.

As we said at the start: in China, buying coffee has never been only a matter of taste.

"Market Inventors" is a QDaily series that looks for things that suddenly become popular and traces how they caught on and what ignited demand. Tell us what you think is trending.

Illustration by Lin Yuyao; images from McDonald's China, flatwhitesoho, toodaylab, urban75, nudge-book, urbanwalkabout, cityam