US coffee behemoth Starbucks inaugurated yesterday its first shop in Pu’er City, in southwest China’s Yunnan Province.
Yunnan is the main coffee area of China, with 52,600 hectares of coffee plantations and an annual trading volume of 100,000 tonnes of coffee, accounting for over 80 percent of China’s total output.
More than 80 percent of all coffee beans produced in Pu’er are shipped to over 30 countries and regions including the US and Germany.
Starbucks China Belinda Wong said she hopes the store in Pu’er will help boost China’s industrial coffee chain.
Starbucks built the company’s first coffee bean plantation support center in Asia in Pu’er in 2012.
Surrounded by undulating green hills, Pu’er, a border city in Yunnan, is traditionally known as the home of China’s most sought-after tea, Pu’er.
It wasn’t until Nestle first introduced the Catimor coffee bean to Pu’er in the late 1980s that China’s coffee business really took off.
