Buying coffee gear directly from China

I bought the new Kingrinder K7 before it’s even available!

A coffee grinder similar to the popular 1Zpresso ZP6.

How is that even possible you think? Well, let me tell you that I’ve discovered Taobao.

Reddit is a great source for just about anything, including coffee.

There were discussions about this grinder, similar to the popular ZP6, just cheaper. The problem; it wasn’t officially released yet only a few individuals had gotten some from China.

So I went and searched places like Temu and Aliexpress and everything looked kind of fake and as if i’d waste my money for anything but that coffee grinder.

Temu and AliExpress are the more outside China facing platforms that have english translation and easy & fast shipping to pretty much anywhere. They look dodgy sometimes though.

Someone hinted Taobao, but the website was just all Chinese with terrible translation.

Taobao is a massive Chinese online store and not generally available outside of China.

But then I found the app, and the app actually worked really well. From the grinder manufacturers official website https://www.kingrinder.com/ I was able to find the official store on Taobao.

The similar ZP6 is about $200 USD which is about $350 NZD, so $175 is a nice discount. Shipping isn’t as good as with other merchants, but even ~$230 is decent here given that I was ordering from the manufacturers shop.

It took about a week to arrive and works well.

Kingrinder K7 vs 1Zpresso ZP6

You’ve probably heard stories like these before. Some product that is sold quite expensively from some established brand in some store, can be bought at similar quality for much cheaper.

This might be because it is quite literally produced in the same Chinese factory.

Turns out some guy on reddit thinks this might be the case for the ZP6 and the K7.

Either way, I’m quite happy with the grinder, as just as promised, it produces a good grind size uniformity, meaning that one can extract a lot of clarity and separate flavours from a cup.

So if it lists strawberry flavour on your coffee beans, you might achieve a good enough separation of flavours to clearly taste the strawberry.

The build quality is good. 1zpresso grinders might be a little better, but not quite justifying the almost double in price.

Timemore coffee scale

Another one of these Chinese brands is Timemore, they produce grinders, scales etc.

With the scale here, we have the same thing.

The product has a ton of great reviews and people on reddit seem to like it.

It has a US store, which sells the not so recent models for a much higher price (likely due to tariffs and import costs).

Forget trying to get it in places like New Zealand.

I’ll try Taobao again do see if I can get my hands on some more “cheap” high quality Chinese coffee gear.

Taobao seems to be a great way to explore the Chinese market of products. A world which often seems completely hidden from us.