JD's 7 Fresh Coffee Opens Fully Unmanned Beijing Café, Sets Guinness Record With 202 Cups in an Hour

7 Fresh Coffee, the coffee brand launched by JD.com in late 2025, opened a fully unmanned, 24-hour smart café at Galaxy SOHO in Beijing on 16 August 2026. The store operates without any staff: grinding, extraction, preparation and dispensing are handled entirely by automated machinery. On opening day, the café ran a continuous 24-hour livestream showing the production line in operation.

During that window, the store's automated system submitted a Guinness World Records challenge and achieved a rate of 202 cups dispensed in a single hour, claiming the record for the most cups of coffee served by a robot café in one hour. Customers visiting on opening day received one complimentary robotically prepared drink.

Orders are placed via a mini-programme, through which customers can adjust sweetness levels and coffee strength. An in-store display screen tracks each drink's progress in real time. The menu extends beyond coffee to include tea, sparkling water and probiotic juice.

The Galaxy SOHO location is the brand's second major opening of the year. 7 Fresh Coffee launched its first flagship — an ice-and-snow-themed store in Harbin — on New Year's Day 2026.

The opening is part of a broader push by Chinese consumer brands to stage automation as spectacle rather than back-end efficiency. A Guinness record attempt, a daylong livestream and a free-drink offer on launch day turn the unmanned format into a marketing event in its own right — the technology is the attraction. DQ's fully autonomous robot restaurant in Shanghai, covered previously by China Insider, signals that this model is gaining traction across food and beverage categories, with brands competing to frame their robotics credentials in the most visible and verifiable terms possible.