Market Adaptation of Italian Coffee Culture in East Asia: Focus on the Hong Kong Coffee Market Supervisor Prof. Vescovi Assistant supervisor Prof. Name Surname Graduand Mahsa Shirmohammad Matriculation Number 903599 Academic Year 2025 / 2026

This thesis examines how Italian coffee culture has found its footing—and in many ways transformed itself—within Hong Kong's peculiar and endlessly fascinating culinary landscape. I draw on frameworks from cultural globalization studies, production of culture theory, and glocalization scholarship to trace how Italian espresso traditions have been transplanted, reinvented, and sometimes barely recognisably altered within a market shaped by over 150 years of colonial history, strong regional Asian influences, the specificities of Hong Kong's post-colonial economic identity, and the particular demands and sensibilities of Hong Kong consumers. research follows Hong Kong's coffee story through three broad waves: from the cha chaan teng era where coffee was frankly an afterthought, something you drank after dinner, heavily sweetened, more habit than passion through the Starbucks-dominated second wave that introduced the concept of the café as a destination in its own right, to today's vibrant specialty scene with its almost obsessive attention to extraction times, single-origin beans, and the kind of quality discourse that would have seemed absurd to a Hong Kong coffee drinker in 1975. Italian coffee has woven itself through this entire evolution in surprising and often indirect ways, arriving via direct brand expansion (Lavazza finally opened a standalone store in 2025, which struck me as remarkably late given how strong the city's coffee culture already was by then), Italian expats missing their morning ritual and deciding to do something about it, and Hong Kong entrepreneurs who had fallen hard for Milanese espresso bars during gap years or business trips and came home determined to recreate something of that experience. What I have found, essentially, is that success in this market requires a kind of cultural code-switching. Brands that insist on pure authenticity tend to struggle; those willing to adapt, while keeping the quality standards that make Italian coffee worth caring about in the first place tend to thrive. This is not homogenization, though. What has emerged in Hong Kong is something genuinely hybrid: part Italian tradition, part American coffeehouse format, part Japanese minimalism, and part stubborn local innovation. The yuenyeung, that strange and wonderful coffee-milk-tea combination, remains defiantly Hong Kong and shows no signs of being absorbed into any global format. The thesis traces several pivotal moments: Jennifer Liu's 2003 launch of Habitu during the post-SARS economic gloom, when she set out to create what she described as "Hong Kong's own version of the Italian coffee experience"; Mario Barbagli bringing Caffè Pascucci and actual Tuscan food and culture to the Western District in 2008; and Lavazza's Central opening in late 2025, which signals that major Italian brands have finally recognised Hong Kong as more than a footnote in their Asia strategy. With roughly 250 cups consumed annually per person, this is a serious coffee market that deserves more serious scholarly attention than it has received. Methodologically, the study relies on historical analysis, market research, and case studies, working primarily from company documents, industry reports, trade press, and the admittedly scattered academic literature on coffee globalization. The broader argument is that Hong Kong's coffee story exemplifies culinary globalization at its most creative: not one-way transmission but genuine cultural exchange, shaped at every turn by the city's unique historical position as a place where East and West have been colliding, negotiating, and creating something new for well over a century and a half. Keywords: Italian coffee culture, Hong Kong, specialty coffee, cultural globalization, glocalization, espresso, market adaptation, third wave coffee, cha chaan teng, East Asian coffee markets, British colonialism, post-colonial identity