Suntory’s Ready-To-Drink brand BOSS Coffee is a highly recognized best-seller in its category for over 25 years among workers in Japan with 100M units sold annually and is commonly perceived as “the workers’ partner.”

Working styles for its key target audience continue to change, especially post-Covid, where supply chains transformed overnight, prompting a different approach to eCommerce. This was an opportunity for BOSS to reinvent the coffee experience with a new service that incorporates product customization powered by technology and debut a hyper-relevant model that makes sense today. This aimed to diversify consumption combining a social storefront with DtoC commerce capabilities that sell more than canned coffee or opening a café. Beyond its roots, BOSS challenged itself to deliver an altogether new way for coffee to reach its loyal consumers, one that matched their time-poor commuting routines and reduced the amount of unnecessary contact without compromising their safety.

Infamously crowded, the Tokyo morning commute is one of the busiest on Earth and getting morning coffee is a race against time. Through a new eCommerce experience, BOSS brought all the joy of coffee time into an on-the-go bespoke ordering service.

Establishing a new coffee experience standard, TOUCH-AND-GO COFFEE introduced the brand’s first social commerce experience that invited customers to delight in maximum beverage customization, in the shortest time, without face-to-face contact. This is Japan's first mobile ordering system that maximizes the utility of social app LINE as the centerpiece where coffee could be tailored to the extreme without the need for in-store waiting, unnecessary person-to-person contact while amplifying the customer experience through a safe commerce transaction.

TOUCH-AND-GO COFFEE elevated customer experience from BOSS’s traditional offering including more than just selling canned coffee at stores. In-depth interviews of consumer targets were carried out to identify their new expectations and habits to find the right time and place to get their attention. Consumers wanted more than the current lineup, they wanted customized drinks and flavor variations for richer brand experiences to what currently existed. In line with today's consumer lifestyles and expectations, we turned mere consumption into a fully customized commerce experience. LINE was leveraged for user comfort and commerce capabilities. With over 80% user penetration in Japan, LINE’s UI was instrumental to avoid unnecessary pain-points in the existing journey. This strategy included maximizing LINE’s existing commerce capabilities with cashless transactions, reconsidering the experience to systematically and seamlessly deliver at speed. From ordering to payment and pick-up, this new commerce experience was conceived to be custom, but fast.

Japanese user familiarity with LINE’s UI was crucial to facilitate adoption and engagement more efficiently instead of developing a dedicated app for the service. This functionality turbocharged BOSS Coffee to a never before seen social commerce experience capable of the highest level of customization: 120 flavor combinations, bespoke label designs, packaging that allowed for easy mobility and speedy pickups. TOUCH-AND-GO COFFEE is conciliating the compromise between fast services and rich customer experiences underpinned by a social-first storefront with seamless commerce capabilities.

Powered by LINE Pay, LINE’s own cashless system, or pre-registered credit cards, users are able to complete purchases on their mobile phone in real time and be notified within minutes with a unique code when their drink is ready for pick up at the designated TOUCH-AND-GO COFFEE unmanned store. The code opens a locker box with the ready drink and operates at a 10-second pickup time on average.

Within just a month since its launch, TOUCH-AND-GO COFFEE reported an acquisition of 40K new friends on LINE and sold out every day. This service acquired 27.4 million impressions on social media and triggered a user generated content trend from their customized label designs. The 10-second on average express pick up point reported a dramatically reduction of waiting times, unnecessary person-to-person contact, and liberating morning stress for customers to enjoy the experience. TOUCH-AND-GO COFFEE’s success has propelled Suntory to commit to scaling up this new commerce channel with the expansion of the number of pick up points nationwide in the near future.