Coffee in Taiwan from the 7-Eleven counter to the Alishan farm

Taiwan is known for tea, but it drinks a lot of coffee. In October 2024 the Ministry of Agriculture put consumption at 177 cups per person a year, third in Asia after Japan and South Korea, and said it had grown by more than 20% a year over the previous five years.¹ An International Coffee Organization figure for 2021 gave 122 cups a head.²

Almost all of it is imported. Taiwan brought in a record 52,600 tonnes of coffee in 2024, while its own farms produce about 950 tonnes a year.¹⁰ The local harvest is small and expensive, and it comes from places with a long history: the slopes of Gukeng in Yunlin, the Alishan range in Chiayi and the Dongshan hills behind Tainan.

City Café, Let's Café and the corner store

The biggest coffee seller in Taiwan is a convenience-store chain. At the end of 2023 the island had 13,706 convenience stores, one for every 1,703 people, most of them open 24 hours; 7-Eleven ran 6,859 of them and FamilyMart 4,234.⁵ 7-Eleven launched City Café in 2004, and in 2023 the brand's sales passed NT$17 billion, ahead of Starbucks Taiwan's NT$14.98 billion. Lattes and americanos each make up 40% of what it sells.³

FamilyMart's Let's Café started in 2006 and took in about NT$7 billion in 2023.³ It sold around 170 million cups in 2022 and set itself a target of 200 million for 2023.⁴ Prices at the machines have stayed low. A July 2026 price list for City Café gives the figures below; a chain café costs more, and Louisa Coffee raised its regular black americano from NT$55 to NT$60 in January 2026.⁶⁷

7-Eleven City Café prices as listed in July 2026.⁶

Ordering in Mandarin: 美式, 拿鐵, ice and sugar

Menus in Taiwan use traditional Chinese characters. An americano is 美式 (měishì, literally "American style") and a latte is 拿鐵 (nátiě). Put 熱 (rè, hot) or 冰 (bīng, iced) in front, and the size after: City Café sells 中杯 (medium), 大杯 (large) and 特大杯 (extra large).⁶

Iced drinks bring two more questions, borrowed from the tea shops. The Taipei Times bilingual column lists sweetness as 正常糖 (regular, 100%), 少糖 (less, 75%), 半糖 (half, 50%), 微糖 (light, 25%) and 無糖 (sugar-free), and ice as 正常冰 (regular), 少冰 (less), 微冰 (easy on the ice) and 去冰 (no ice).¹³ For here is 內用 (nèiyòng) and to go is 外帶 (wàidài).

Taiwan-grown coffee: Gukeng, Alishan, Dongshan

A British company brought the first arabica plants to Taiwan in 1884. Under Japanese rule, trials from 1902 at what is now the Hengchun Tropical Botanical Garden showed the variety suited the island, and seedlings went into the ground on Mount Hebao in Gukeng Township, Yunlin County.² Output peaked in 1941.⁹ After the war most fields ran wild, and in 1972 the government dropped the crop because local costs were too high.²¹⁶

Gukeng's comeback followed the 1999 Jiji earthquake, when a One Town, One Product policy made coffee the township's specialty and Yunlin County staged the first Taiwan Coffee Festival there.² Alishan in Chiayi now leads on quality: 13 of the top 20 lots in Taiwan's first Cup of Excellence in 2023 came from there, and in 2022 five kilograms of a sun-dried Geisha from Leye Village sold for NT$520,000 at auction.²

In Tainan, coffee grows in Dongshan District at 500 to 800 meters, near the Zengwen, Baihe and Wushantou reservoirs. Dongshan held 53.9 of the city's roughly 57 hectares in 2021, and most farms sit along County Highway 175, locally called Coffee Road, where about 100 growers and more than 30 coffee shops trade.⁹ Nationally, the main growing counties are Pingtung, Nantou, Taitung and Chiayi.¹⁰

Taipei's specialty bars and the world titles

Coffee shops are multiplying. Taiwan counted 4,824 of them in November 2024, 42.5% more than in 2018, and they sold NT$24.59 billion worth in 2023.¹⁰ Taipei is where Taiwan's best-known competitor started. Berg Wu, an electronics engineer, began selling coffee from a stall in Taipei in 2004 and opened his own shop, Simple Kaffa, in 2011; in 2016 in Dublin he became the first Taiwanese World Barista Champion and only the second from Asia since the contest began in 2000.¹¹

Taiwan holds other world titles too: Chad Wang won the World Brewers Cup in 2017, Pang-Yu Liu the World Cup Tasters Championship in 2014, and Jacky Lai the World Coffee Roasting Championship the same year.¹² Taipei hosted the world latte art, roasting and Coffee in Good Spirits championships at the Nangang Exhibition Center from 17 to 20 November 2023.¹²

Tainan and Kaohsiung: old houses and alleys

The southern cities have their own café style. Writing in the Kaohsiung city government's Takao magazine in 2016, a local café owner placed his city between Taipei, where coffee shops are new and busy, and Tainan, where many occupy converted Japanese-era houses down narrow alleys.¹⁴ The same article notes that Kaohsiung, long dismissed as a "cultural desert", has far fewer coffee shops than either.¹⁴

From Tainan, Dongshan's beans are within reach without a farm visit: they are sold at the Dongshan service area on Freeway No. 3, and the district's coffee festival runs each year around October or November.⁹ The city has sent Dongshan beans to the US-based Coffee Quality Institute for grading since the early 2010s, and by 2020, 21 of them had scored above 80 points, the line for specialty coffee.⁹

EasyCard, your own cup and the NT$5 discount

The transit card you ride the MRT with also pays for coffee. A standard EasyCard generally costs NT$100 and must be loaded with cash, which you can do at an MRT station or a convenience store; at 7-Eleven the reader is built into the register.¹⁵

Bring a cup. Since 1 July 2022, chain drink sellers, convenience stores included, have had to take NT$5 to NT$10 off for customers with their own cup; 7-Eleven and FamilyMart give NT$5 and Starbucks NT$10.⁸ At City Café the NT$5 applies to every size.⁶