How Do You Make Thousands of Stores Behave Like One?

Opening a few hundred beverage stores is primarily a real-estate and hiring problem. Operating thousands of them consistently is a systems problem.

The interesting difference between beverage chains is therefore not simply what they sell. It is where they put the control that keeps one store behaving like another.

Mixue has built control into its supply network and franchise system. Chagee has built control into the production process itself, standardizing how the drink is made rather than just what reaches the store. Kopi Kenangan has built control into the organization, retaining ownership of nearly all its stores and connecting that company-operated network to a first-party digital customer layer.

The result is three different answers to the same scaling problem.

Mixue: Control the Network

Mixue's model starts with a deliberate separation between the company and the individual store.

As of December 31, 2025, Mixue operated 59,823 stores worldwide, run through a franchise system of 27,450 independent franchisees. The company generates most of its revenue not from franchise royalties but by selling ingredients, packaging and equipment to those franchisees.

That changes where standardization has to happen.

If tens of thousands of stores are operated by independent franchisees, the company cannot rely on every operator making identical decisions about ingredients, packaging or equipment. Those inputs need to be standardized before they reach the store.

Mixue has therefore built a substantial supply infrastructure behind the retail brand. Its 2025 annual results describe five production bases, a network of 28 warehouses in China, and an integrated, end-to-end supply chain covering procurement, production, logistics and R&D. Franchisees are required to purchase key ingredients, packaging materials and equipment through the Mixue system, and to follow the company's standardized operating procedures.

The store is consequently less important as the place where the operating model is designed.

It is the place where a centrally defined operating model is executed.

The model effectively turns the supply chain into part of the franchise infrastructure.

A franchise store does not need to independently solve procurement, ingredient specifications or equipment sourcing. Those decisions are largely embedded in the network around it.

That is how Mixue can operate nearly 60,000 stores without the corporate organization directly owning all but a handful of them.

The control point is the network.

Chagee: Control the Production

Chagee takes a different approach.

Chagee has invested heavily in standardizing how the tea itself is prepared inside the store. The company's 2025 annual filing describes a network of "highly automated tea preparation processes" built around customized equipment, including proprietary Teaspresso machines and automated tea-making machines, co-developed with supply-chain partners, using standardized brewing parameters designed to preserve the recipe and control quality across every store.

Chagee has itself put a number on that consistency. In a 2024 company release, Chagee said its automated tea-making equipment had reduced its flavor-error rate to 0.2% and increased average serving efficiency to eight seconds per cup.

The important point is not the machine itself.

It is what the machine does to the operating model.

Instead of relying entirely on an experienced employee to remember the correct preparation sequence, measurements and extraction process, part of that knowledge is embedded in the equipment.

This pushes the control point closer to the moment of production.

Mixue standardizes many of the inputs before they arrive. Chagee standardizes more of the process after they arrive.

The distinction becomes especially important as a chain expands into markets where employee experience, training and local operating conditions can vary. Chagee's own entry into Indonesia is a useful data point here: the company structured the market as a 60/40 joint venture between its Singapore subsidiary, Tea Explorer, and Erajaya's PT Era Boga Nusantara, rather than a standard franchise arrangement.

A centralized recipe is useful.

A centralized recipe embedded into the production process is harder to execute incorrectly.

The control point is the production process.

Kopi Kenangan: Control the Organization

Kopi Kenangan represents a third model.

The company owns and operates almost all of its stores in its home market, Indonesia, as well as in Singapore, Malaysia and India. It uses franchising only in the Philippines and Australia, where its stores operate under the name Kenangan Coffee.

That creates a different set of incentives.

When the company owns the stores, it retains responsibility for the performance of each location. It also has a stronger reason to build centralized systems around customer acquisition, ordering, loyalty and store utilization.

Its technology strategy reflects that structure.

Kopi Kenangan's app provides ordering and loyalty functionality, while the company has developed a broader digital ecosystem around its customer base. In 2025, the company said its technology platform contributed to a 159% increase in new-customer acquisition, adding 4.47 million new customers through its digital ecosystem. Monthly digital transacting users reached 1.5 million by December 2025.

The physical store network and digital customer layer therefore reinforce each other.

A customer can be acquired through the digital ecosystem, order through the company's own channels, interact with the loyalty system and return to another physical location. The company can then use that relationship across the network rather than treating every store as an isolated retail operation.

The economics of that model also become visible as the network grows.

Kopi Kenangan reported its first full-year group profit in 2025, with US$17 million in net profit on US$184 million of revenue, up 45% year on year. It ended the year with 1,324 stores across six countries and added 347 stores during the year.

Those stores remain part of the company's operating system rather than being independent franchise units.

That gives Kopi Kenangan a different kind of control from Mixue and Chagee.

Mixue and Chagee can each distribute the cost and operational responsibility of individual stores to franchisees while controlling the network around them (and, in Chagee's case, the production process too). Kopi Kenangan retains more of that responsibility inside the organization itself, then uses software to extend that control into the customer relationship.

The control point is the organization and its digital layer.

Three Different Locations for Control

The differences become clearer when the three models are put next to each other.

Mixue asks: How can independent operators run stores according to the same standard?

Its answer is to standardize the network around them: supply, ingredients, packaging, equipment and operating requirements.

Chagee asks: How can employees produce the same product across many stores?

Its answer is to encode part of the production process into machinery and standardized workflows.

Kopi Kenangan asks: How can a centrally managed store network operate as one customer system?

Its answer is to retain organizational control and connect the physical network through software, ordering and customer data.

These are not three versions of the same technology strategy.

They are three different locations for control.

Technology Follows the Operating Model

The technology choices make more sense when viewed through the control each company has chosen to retain.

Mixue's systems reinforce a supply network designed to support a predominantly franchised store base. Chagee puts more automation directly into the store, using equipment such as Teaspresso to standardize preparation. Kopi Kenangan has invested heavily in the digital layer connecting a company-operated store network to customers.

None of these approaches is simply a question of how "technological" a chain is.

Each reflects a different answer to the same operating problem: Which parts of the business need to be standardized centrally, and which can be left to the store?

That question also explains why the three companies can use very different technologies without necessarily competing on the same dimension.

A supply-chain system solves a different problem from a beverage-making machine.

A loyalty platform solves a different problem from either.

The technology is downstream of the operating model.

First comes the decision about where control sits. Then comes the technology needed to make that control scalable.

The Bigger Lesson

The easiest way to compare fast-growing store networks is to look at how many locations they have, how quickly they are opening them, or how much technology they use.

A more useful question is: Where does the standard live?

For Mixue, much of it lives in the network surrounding the store: the franchise structure, supply chain and standardized inputs.

For Chagee, part of it lives inside the production process itself: the equipment and workflows that turn a recipe into a repeatable product.

For Kopi Kenangan, more of it lives inside the organization and the digital systems connecting its stores to customers.

The operating models are different, but the underlying problem is the same. A growing chain cannot rely on every individual store to independently reproduce the company's intended way of working.

At some point, the standard has to move out of people's heads and into the system.

Scale doesn't require one operating model. It requires control somewhere.

Sources

• Mixue Group: 2025 Annual Results Announcement (HKEX): 2025 store count, franchise structure, franchisee requirements, supply-chain infrastructure, production bases and warehouses.

• CHAGEE Holdings: 2025 Form 20-F (SEC): automated tea preparation, Teaspresso, automated tea-making equipment, standardized brewing parameters, store operating model and franchise-store count.

• CHAGEE Media Centre: International Tea Day 2024 release: CHAGEE's own reported eight-second serving time and 0.2% flavor-error figures, dated May 2024.

• Erajaya: Chagee joint-venture disclosure: 60/40 ownership structure between Tea Explorer Pte Ltd and PT Era Boga Nusantara for Chagee's Indonesia entry.

• Erajaya: Chagee's first Indonesia store: Chagee's Indonesian market entry and JV structure.

• Forbes: Inside the Indonesian Starbucks Challenger: Kopi Kenangan's ownership model by country and expansion plans.

• The Business Times: Kopi Kenangan's first profitable year: 2025 revenue, net profit, store count, new stores, customer acquisition and monthly digital transacting users.