Luckin opens giant Qingdao roasting plant, claims world’s largest coffee roaster
Luckin opened a RMB 3 billion Qingdao roasting hub and said it holds the world’s largest single coffee roaster, a signal of how fast China’s coffee machine is scaling up.
Luckin Coffee opened its Qingdao smart roasting center on April 22, adding a new piece of industrial muscle to a company that has spent the past few years turning itself into one of China’s most aggressive coffee operators. The chain said the site, built with an investment of about RMB 3 billion, contains what it calls the world’s largest single coffee roaster and is designed for annual roasting capacity above 55,000 metric tons.
The Qingdao plant matters less as a trophy than as a signal. Luckin said it is building a four-site roasting network across Qingdao, Pingnan, Kunshan and Xiamen, with Xiamen still under construction, and that combined capacity across the network is expected to exceed 155,000 tons. For a coffee market that has long leaned on imported beans and fragmented processing, that kind of scale suggests a faster, more centralized model, one built to squeeze costs, tighten product consistency and reduce dependence on outside roasters.
The Qingdao complex is set up as a highly automated operation from green-bean handling through roasting, packaging and warehousing. Luckin also said the facility includes an FRTO emissions system and green-building certifications, while Qingdao Port gives it direct end-to-end shipment access for green coffee from Brazil, Colombia and Ethiopia. That port-side advantage is the point: the company is not just roasting more coffee, it is trying to control more of the chain between origin, import, processing and the cup.
This is the third of Luckin’s four major roasting sites, following a 15,000-ton plant in Fujian and a 30,000-ton plant in Jiangsu. The fourth, planned for Xiamen, is also designed for 55,000 tons. A 2024 industry report said Luckin broke ground on the Qingdao project in September 2024, which means the company has moved from construction to commissioning in roughly a year and a half, a pace that fits the rest of its expansion story.
Luckin ended 2025 with 31,048 stores and more than 450 million cumulative transacting customers, after adding 8,708 net new stores during the year. That reach gives the company huge internal demand for coffee, and Qingdao looks built to feed it. It also underlines how thoroughly Luckin has rebuilt after its accounting scandal: the company agreed to a $180 million SEC penalty in 2020 over fabricated transactions, and investors later reached a $175 million securities class-action settlement. Jinyi Guo, who has served as chief executive since July 2020 and was chairman until April 2025, is now presiding over a business that is trying to win not just on store count, but on manufacturing scale.
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