From intelligent manufacturing equipment to brand going overseas, how does a cup of coffee travel from Guangzhou to the world?

How can AI and intelligent manufacturing promote Guangzhou’s global deployment of coffee equipment?

Jiemian News Reporter | Zhang Xilong

In the Techno Intelligent Factory in Huangpu, Guangzhou, the unmanned production line is operating at full speed: robotic arms precisely assemble core modules of coffee grinders and brewers, transforming a single production line that normally requires 10-20 workers into fully automated operation; in the smart warehouse with tens of thousands of SKUs, AGV robots automatically handle sorting and distribution. This factory can produce 260k fully automatic coffee machines annually, which are ultimately sold to over 110 countries and regions worldwide.

Liu Yonghui, the Marketing Director of Techno Intelligent, who just finished the 139th Canton Fair, has been busy welcoming visiting clients—two Spanish buyers inquiring at the Canton Fair site then came to visit the company in person, interested in exploring business opportunities on models like JL560 and other fully automatic coffee machines. At this year’s Canton Fair, the company secured on-site signing orders from buyers in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other regions.

At the just-concluded 2026 Guangzhou Coffee Culture Season, the company’s intelligent coffee machines also drew significant attention from many industry professionals. The five-day event gathered over 230 coffee brands from 13 countries and 43 cities, attracting more than 130k visitors and boosting surrounding commercial district consumption by over 260k yuan.

The “Guangzhou Coffee Industry Development White Paper (2026)” released during the Culture Season shows that Guangzhou plays multiple roles in the national coffee industry: a transfer hub, processing factory, consumption hub, and export port. It functions as a city with four core features: a “green bean trading hub,” a roasting processing base, a coffee equipment intelligent manufacturing center, and a high-end consumer terminal.

Techno Intelligent Factory Photo taken by Jiemian News

A cup of coffee from Guangzhou to the world

As a key hub for coffee trade in China, Guangzhou’s entire coffee industry chain had an output value of 67 billion yuan in 2025, directly creating over 150k jobs. Data shows Guangzhou has 8,017 coffee shops, ranking second nationwide and first in South China. The city is not only an important gateway for raw green beans entering China but also a major hub for the export of creative coffee and intelligent equipment.

Liu Yonghui told Jiemian News that Europe, known for its strict coffee quality standards, is the company’s largest export market. Currently, overseas revenue accounts for 70% of the company’s total, with a network of agents across more than 50 countries and regions. The downstream application scenarios are extensive: from Dallmayr, a century-old German coffee chain, to global hotel chains, convenience stores, office building vending terminals, and even high-end home kitchens.

In the core modules of grinding, brewing, and milk foam, Techno Intelligent has built three automated production lines for core modules, each with an annual capacity of 400k units, filling a gap in the domestic high-end smart coffee equipment market. “As Chinese coffee machine quality continues to improve, going global with coffee equipment brands is an inevitable industry trend,” Liu said. “We currently have mature OEM manufacturing services and are also continuously expanding our own brand’s global presence.”

Their self-developed IoT platform further elevates Techno Intelligent beyond price competition. On the remote management system dashboard, a device located in a European convenience store displays real-time data on operation status, bean hopper levels, daily sales, fault alerts, and other metrics. “Customers deploying 100 coffee machines worldwide essentially hold 100 digital storefronts,” Liu explained. This means each sold coffee machine supports the company’s transformation into a full-scenario solutions provider and digital operation service provider.

Coffee machine assembly Photo by Jiemian News

If Techno Intelligent has solidified Guangzhou’s industrial foundation for coffee exports through device manufacturing, local companies like Goli Coffee are creating a differentiated global path at the raw material end of the industry chain—bundling self-developed robotic coffee machines and intelligent coffee equipment with customized roasting raw materials and full-chain supply chain services. Extending the export boundary from consumer products to upstream areas like global green bean trade, bonded processing, and full-chain supply chain services is a key competitive advantage for Goli Coffee, setting it apart from traditional Chinese coffee companies that mainly export roasted beans. It also represents a crucial expansion of Guangzhou’s coffee export map.

Goli Coffee’s first factory is located in Huangpu, Guangzhou, and in 2023, its headquarters moved to Nansha District. Its modern roasting plant in Nansha covers 6,000 square meters, with an hourly capacity of 1 ton of coffee beans; currently, the brand’s annual roasting volume exceeds 3,000 tons, supporting an annual supply of 130 million cups of coffee, with peak daily capacity capable of meeting 360k cups. With the commissioning of a 240kg large-scale roaster in 2026, this will become the largest coffee roasting factory in South China.

Starting in 2024, Goli Coffee will scale up its overseas expansion. Its coffee beans are now entering markets such as the UAE, Thailand, the Philippines, and Russia. Huang Wenhui, Chairman of Goli Coffee, told Jiemian News that, based on opportunities from the Canton Fair and other exhibitions, the company plans to focus on expanding into the Middle East, Thailand, the Philippines, and Northern Europe, through both brand development and local channel partnerships.

Huang Wenhui mentioned that leveraging the logistics advantages of Nansha Port’s world-class deep-water port, combined with the policy benefits of the free trade zone bonded area, allows coffee beans to be shipped from Guangzhou overseas in just a few days, significantly reducing cross-border transportation times. The supporting intelligent equipment also lowers operational barriers for overseas clients. Coupled with port and large-scale capacity cost advantages, the overall cost of exporting roasted beans is 15%-20% lower than local overseas procurement.

Accelerating the internationalization of the catering industry

The rapid overseas expansion of coffee brands is a microcosm of Guangzhou’s broader food and beverage industry going global. The local catering sector is moving from experimental points to a systematic new phase of internationalization—starting from Guangzhou-style street stalls and developing into a global presence. Yuan Ji Yun Jiao, originating from Guangzhou markets, launched its overseas expansion strategy at the end of 2024, now with over 30 stores worldwide, covering Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the UK; Zhiming Zhai, a traditional brand, officially entered the Malaysian market in 2026; Jiumaojiu Group’s Taier Sauerkraut Fish opened its first overseas store in Singapore in 2021 and has since expanded to Malaysia, Canada, the US, Thailand, Indonesia, and New Zealand.

Southeast Asia has become a primary entry point for many food brands. Huang Wenhui told Jiemian News that the reason for choosing Southeast Asia as the first stop is because many of their client brands have opened stores there, and the company’s own overseas business has grown accordingly. The coffee market in Southeast Asia has significant growth potential, with local consumers preferring convenient, rich-flavored coffee, which aligns well with the company’s product positioning.

Nansha Port Photo by Jiemian News

Tong Jianlei, Vice President of PingPong, analyzed to Jiemian News that for domestic brands, Southeast Asia offers proximity advantages, plus a large Chinese population that is more familiar with Chinese food culture. From a supply chain and management perspective, Southeast Asia is the preferred springboard for overseas expansion.

“He pointed out that current trends in Southeast Asian food and beverage internationalization include moving from single-store replication to systematic management, driven by strong demand, unsaturated supply, and full digital penetration; fragmented but advancing toward integrated payment systems; and payment evolving from a tool to a growth engine.” According to platform research, the dispersed markets and unique cultural backgrounds in Southeast Asia pose major challenges for overseas expansion, including market fragmentation, local operation difficulties, high logistics costs, fragmented payment systems, and risks in fund recovery.

Although the national codes for cross-border interconnection are rapidly covering Southeast Asian countries, overseas fund management remains a major pain point for chain brands, involving fragmented payments, cross-border billing chaos, and ways to reduce collection risks.

“Fund management has entered an era of core infrastructure. We have proposed corresponding solutions: front-end aggregation of local mainstream payment methods via a single API; mid-end intelligent revenue sharing, automatically splitting funds into store profits, headquarters management fees, and supply chain payments; and back-end local acquiring and settlement to reduce exchange rate losses and cross-border procedures,” Tong explained. Previously, chain restaurants would set up different accounts in different countries to handle payments, involving multiple systems or finance staff. Now, with integrated payment systems, a single platform can cover multiple regions, significantly lowering financial costs and improving reconciliation efficiency.

To date, PingPong has served over 50 chain restaurant brands, including Yuan Ji Yun Jiao and KKV. Tong mentioned that, for example, a listed domestic tea brand with 14 stores in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, can now, through the platform’s omnichannel payment solution, complete one-time API integration to support local wallets, international card organizations, and country-specific payment codes, reducing reconciliation errors, labor, and operational costs by over 50%.

Emerging local coffee cultivation

It’s worth noting that although Guangzhou is not a traditional coffee-growing region, local coffee cultivation has achieved a breakthrough from zero to one. Huangpu District is at the core of this emerging track. Official statistics show that Huangpu’s coffee planting area has reached 45 acres, accounting for over 80% of Guangzhou’s total, ranking first in the city.

Huangpu’s Changzhou Island Hongbaihe Ecological Park Coffee Valley is a key benchmark for Guangzhou’s local coffee cultivation. Covering 120 acres in total, with 40 acres dedicated to coffee planting, it is currently the largest coffee ecological landscape in Guangzhou. Relying on the Yunnan Dehong Tropical Agricultural Science Research Institute, a national-level research institution, the park has introduced nearly 20 high-quality coffee varieties from home and abroad, successfully cultivating 100k coffee seedlings of different types, filling a gap in the local coffee ecology within the Greater Bay Area’s urban core.

“We have been selecting the most suitable coffee seedlings for Guangdong’s climate and soil conditions, and have made phased breakthroughs,” said Wang Hongxing, Technical Director of Hongbaihe Coffee Valley, to Jiemian News. Last year, the park partnered with agricultural research institutes to produce a small batch of 2,000-3,000 coffee seedlings. This year, they further collaborated with professional coffee research institutes to scale up cultivation to 100k seedlings, aiming for commercial seedling sales and opening a coffee tree adoption program where adopters can pick coffee beans during harvest season.

Huangpu’s coffee planting area reaches 45 acres. Photo by Jiemian News

Chen Rong, senior engineer at South China University of Technology and expert at Hongbaihe Ecological Park, told Jiemian News that the park began its local planting layout in 2022, transplanting campus coffee trees to Changzhou Island and simultaneously introducing small-grain coffee seedlings from Yunnan. In 2023, the first batch of 7,000 coffee seedlings was trial-planted, with varieties like Katim P3, P4, and Pacamara performing excellently. The first year of trial planting yielded about 6 kilograms per plant, surpassing the local yield levels of traditional main production areas like Yunnan.

Currently, Hongbaihe Ecological Park has developed deep-processed products under the “Kafei Kamei” brand, including green coffee drip bags, coffee bread, and coffee cookies, and is also building a micro-smart coffee estate. The local coffee planting map in Huangpu continues to expand rapidly, with plans to reach 100k seedlings by 2026, 300k by 2027, and 2 million by 2028, completing a key part of Guangzhou’s full industry chain with localized cultivation.