Kopi Kenangan Is Going Omnichannel — and Malaysian Chains Should Be Paying Attention

Kopi Kenangan, Indonesia’s biggest homegrown coffee chain, is doubling down on omnichannel — tighter app integration, faster ordering, delivery that doesn’t make you wait through three platform handoffs — because Indonesian customers are done tolerating friction (via QSR Media Asia). Their partner in this push, Baba Rafi, is doing the same across its F&B brands. The message coming out of Jakarta is pretty clear: the next competitive war in Southeast Asian coffee isn’t fought over the menu. It’s fought over the rails the order travels on.

This matters to Malaysia more than it might first appear.

Kopi Kenangan and Zus Coffee are not the same business — Kenangan roasts its own beans and has positioned itself closer to the specialty-lite segment, while Zus has leaned hard into the value angle — but they’re fishing in the same regional pond. Both have hundreds of outlets. Both are chasing the same urbanite who wants decent coffee fast, doesn’t want to queue, and will switch apps without sentiment if the experience is smoother somewhere else. When Kenangan invests in frictionless ordering infrastructure, it raises the baseline expectation for every chain operating in this part of the world.

Zus already has an app with a loyalty programme and pre-order capability, and it’s arguably the most digitally fluent of Malaysia’s local chains. But “having an app” and “having an omnichannel strategy” are different things. Omnichannel means your pickup experience, your delivery integration, your in-store dwell, and your loyalty points all talk to each other without the customer noticing the seams. A lot of Malaysian F&B brands — coffee included — are still stitching those pieces together with tape.

Gigi Coffee, Bask Bear, and the newer wave of mid-tier Malaysian chains are at a stage where these infrastructure decisions get made and locked in for years. The brands that treat the digital layer as an afterthought now will be retrofitting it painfully later. Kenangan is essentially a case study happening next door in real time.

For independent cafés in KL and PJ, the lesson is different but still relevant. You’re not going to out-omnichannel a VC-backed chain. But the independents that have figured out how to own a loyal, returning customer — through a well-run WhatsApp group, a clean Grabfood profile, a simple stamp card that actually gets stamped — are doing the analogue version of what Kenangan is spending serious money to do digitally. The underlying logic is identical: reduce the effort required for a loyal customer to come back.

What’s interesting about the Kenangan story is that the pressure isn’t coming from Starbucks. It’s coming from the customer. Indonesians, according to the QSR Media Asia report, are specifically demanding faster and more frictionless experiences — not fancier drinks, not more locations. Speed and ease. Malaysian coffee drinkers are not far behind on that expectation curve, especially post-pandemic, when the habit of ordering ahead got baked in properly.

Starbucks Malaysia has the infrastructure but has been dealing with brand headwinds of its own. Zus has the momentum. The question is whether Zus — or any of the challengers in the Malaysian mid-market — is thinking about the digital experience as seriously as Kenangan clearly is, or whether they’re still treating it as a feature instead of a foundation.

The coffee in the cup matters. But in 2026, the chain that wins the next five years in Southeast Asia is probably the one whose app doesn’t make you want to hurl your phone into a drain.

Sources

• QSR Media Asia — Kopi Kenangan, Baba Rafi push for omnichannel as Indonesians demand faster, frictionless experiences

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