Tech pours new life into Chinese coffee machines

Imagine waking up one morning and telling your conventional coffee machine: "I didn't sleep well last night. Make me something that won't hit too hard." The poor machine would be stumped. Does "not too hard" mean less caffeine, less bitterness or more milk — or all three?

A smart coffee machine made in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, would know what to do. Kaxfree, a home coffee machine brand developed by commercial coffee equipment maker Kalerm, is turning the machine that merely follows recipes into an "AI barista".

For decades, Europe largely set the standards for premium coffee machines, but artificial intelligence is beginning to shake up that hierarchy. Kaxfree is among the brands climbing the ranks, with products already sold in more than 100 countries and regions.

Yang Jiasheng, e-commerce director at Kaxfree, said: "In the past, Chinese companies were good at answering the question of how to build a good coffee machine. Today, we want to go a step further and answer the question of what the next generation of coffee machines should look like."

For Yang, incorporating AI into a coffee machine does not mean merely adding a voice assistant. The more ambitious goal is for it to understand vague requests, identify coffee beans and help decide how a drink should be brewed.

To do that, Kaxfree has given the machine "two brains". Alibaba's Qwen large language model handles natural language, context and conversation — the job of understanding the user, while Kaxfree's own coffee model then translates that understanding into parameters the machine can act on, including coffee dose, grind setting, temperature, pre-infusion, pressure, flow and milk ratio.

Despite all the excitement around AI, Yang said the technology is useful only if the machine in question can consistently brew good coffee.

That rests on the expertise Kalerm has accumulated over the past 16 years in grinding, brewing, water systems, temperature control, pressure, sensors and milk frothing.

"The real capability is not simply assembling components," Yang said. "It is bringing together research and development, engineering, mass production and global delivery."

Kaxfree is not alone in China. Casarte, Haier's premium appliance brand, unveiled an AI dual-extraction coffee machine that uses optical character recognition and image recognition to identify information such as a bean's origin and roast level.

Smart appliance brand Mova unveiled a six-axis robotic coffee system that can prepare over 20 drinks, make a cup in about 45 seconds, and hold six cups at a time to handle peak demand.

Guo Meide, president of AVC, a Chinese home appliance market consultancy, cautioned that some AI appliances are undermined by a gap between rapidly advancing technology and low consumer awareness, with products sometimes adding features that do not really solve any problem.

That is where Xing Kuan, a coffee engineer at Kaxfree, comes in. Xing typically drinks two cups of coffee a day in addition to product testing. He adjusts pressure profiles for light-and dark-roasted beans and helps translate sensory judgment into recipes that a machine can follow.

"We first need to listen to what kind of coffee the customer wants," Xing said. "Then we use our expertise to select and fine-tune a cup that matches those needs."

And if Xing had to choose a cup to represent Chinese manufacturing today, he would start not with imported beans, but with beans grown in Southwest China's Yunnan province.

Chinese specialty coffee has improved rapidly in recent years, he said. One washed Yunnan-grown coffee that he tasted carried distinct citrus and floral notes with balanced acidity and sweetness.

According to Xing, this represents a combination that would have been hard to imagine back when China was known mainly as the factory that made appliances for foreign brands: Yunnan beans, a precision coffee machine made in China and a Chinese-developed large language model all come together in one cup to produce the perfect brew.