JD 7Fresh opens Beijing robot café, cup made in as little as 20 seconds

Beneath Beijing’s Galaxy SOHO, a customer taps an order into a mini program and waits for a cabinet to open. JD 7Fresh’s new 24-hour unmanned coffee shop uses a fully automated line and an embodied robot to make and deliver drinks, with a cup ready in as little as 20 seconds.

The speed comes from dividing the job into tightly controlled steps. Machines place the cup, add ice, brew the coffee, attach the label and run quality checks; the front-of-store robot then carries each drink to the pickup cabinet. JD 7Fresh says the line can brew seven to eight cups at once, with stable output within 30 seconds. On opening day, it delivered 202 drinks in an hour, a Guinness World Record for a robot coffee shop.

For customers, the format looks much like a regular 7Fresh order. Prices remain 6.9 to 12.9 yuan, and an AI personalization feature lets users adjust sweetness and coffee strength, although it currently applies to only four drinks. For JD 7Fresh, the stated problem is operational: high staff turnover and uneven manual quality in the fresh-coffee-and-tea business.

Concretely, the change is most useful where a shop needs steady service but struggles to keep staff. Industry observers point to gas stations and scenic spots as more plausible early locations than traditional cafés. The machines could keep drinks moving through the day and reduce the work involved in each order, but they do not remove the need for people.

That limit is visible in the economics. The initial equipment outlay exceeds 200,000 yuan, while the annual labor cost of three staff is about 180,000 yuan. Human monitoring and maintenance are still required, and Wang Zhendong of Shanghai’s Feyue Investment says robots cannot yet perceive subtle problems such as stale milk or damp beans, or replace the interaction regulars value. China’s coffee sector reached 354.9 billion yuan in 2025, up 13.3 percent; robot cafés now have to show that fast, standardized coffee can earn a place alongside experience.