Bubble tea

Bubble tea (also known as pearl milk tea, bubble milk tea, tapioca milk tea, boba tea, or boba; Chinese: 珍珠奶茶; pinyin: zhēnzhū nǎichá, 波霸奶茶; bōbà nǎichá) is a tea-based drink most often containing chewy tapioca balls, milk, and flavouring. It originated in Taiwan in the early 1980s and spread to other countries where there is a large East Asian diaspora population.
Bubble tea is most commonly made with tapioca pearls (also known as "boba" or "balls"), but it can be made with other toppings as well, such as grass jelly, aloe vera, red bean, and popping boba. It has many varieties and flavours, but the two most popular varieties are pearl black milk tea and pearl green milk tea ("pearl" for the tapioca balls at the bottom).
Bubble teas fall under two categories: teas without milk and milk teas. Both varieties come with a choice of black, green, or oolong tea as the base. Milk teas usually include powdered or fresh milk, but may also use condensed milk, almond milk, soy milk, or coconut milk.
The oldest known bubble tea drink consisted of a mixture of hot Taiwanese black tea, tapioca pearls (Chinese: 粉圓; pinyin: fěn yuán; Pe̍h-ōe-jī: hún-îⁿ), condensed milk, and syrup (Chinese: 糖漿; pinyin: táng jiāng) or honey. Bubble tea is most commonly served cold. The tapioca pearls that give bubble tea its name were originally made from the starch of the cassava, a tropical shrub known for its starchy roots which was introduced to Taiwan from South America during Japanese colonial rule. Larger pearls (Chinese: 波霸/黑珍珠; pinyin: bō bà / hēi zhēn zhū) quickly replaced these.
Some cafés specialize in bubble tea production. While some cafés may serve bubble tea in a glass, most Taiwanese bubble tea shops serve the drink in a plastic cup and use a machine to seal the top of the cup with heated plastic cellophane. The method allows the tea to be shaken in the serving cup and makes it spill-free until a person is ready to drink it. The cellophane is then pierced with an oversized straw, referred to as a boba straw, which is larger than a typical drinking straw to allow the toppings to pass through.
Due to its popularity, bubble tea has inspired a variety of bubble tea flavoured snacks, such as bubble tea ice cream and bubble tea candy. The market size of bubble tea was valued at US$2.4 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach US$4.3 billion by the end of 2027. Some of the largest global bubble tea chains include Chatime, CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice and Gong Cha.
Bubble tea comes in many variations which usually consist of black tea, green tea, oolong tea, and sometimes white tea. Another variation, yuenyeung, (Chinese: 鴛鴦, named after the Mandarin duck) originated in Hong Kong and consists of black tea, coffee, and milk.
Other varieties of the drink include blended tea drinks. These variations are often either blended using ice cream, or are smoothies that contain both tea and fruit. Boba ice cream bars have also been produced.
There are many popular flavours of bubble tea, such as taro, mango, coffee, and coconut. Flavouring ingredients such as a syrup or powder determines the flavour and usually the colour of the bubble tea, while other ingredients such as tea, milk, and boba are the basis.
Tapioca pearls (boba) are the most common ingredient, although there are other ways to make the chewy spheres found in bubble tea. The pearls vary in color according to the ingredients mixed in with the tapioca. Most pearls are black from brown sugar.
Jelly comes in different shapes: small cubes, stars, or rectangular strips, and flavours such as coconut jelly, konjac, lychee, grass jelly, mango, coffee, and green tea. Azuki bean or mung bean paste, typical toppings for Taiwanese shaved ice desserts, give bubble tea an added subtle flavour as well as texture. Aloe, egg pudding (custard), and sago also can be found in many bubble tea shops. Popping boba, or spheres that have fruit juices or syrups inside them, are another popular bubble tea topping. Flavours include mango, strawberry, coconut, kiwi, and honey melon.
Some shops offer milk or cheese foam on top of the drink, giving the drink a consistency similar to that of whipped cream, and a saltier flavour profile. One shop described the effect of the cheese foam as "neutraliz[ing] the bitterness of the tea...and as you drink it you taste the returning sweetness of the tea."
Bubble tea shops often give customers the option of choosing the amount of ice or sugar in their drink. Ice levels are usually specified ordinally (e.g., no ice, less ice, normal ice, more ice), and sugar levels in quarterly intervals (e.g., 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%).
In Southeast Asia, bubble tea is usually packaged in a plastic takeaway cup, sealed with plastic or a rounded cap. New entrants into the market have attempted to distinguish their products by packaging it in bottles and other shapes. Some have used sealed plastic bags. Nevertheless, the plastic takeaway cup with a sealed cap is still the most common packaging method.
The tea can be made in batches during the day or the night before. Brewing different types of teas take different amounts of time and temperature. For instance, green tea requires brewing at a lower temperature, typically between 176–185 °F (80–85 °C) with a brewing time of 8–10 minutes to extract its optimal flavour. In contrast, black tea needs to be made with hotter water, usually around 203–212 °F (95–100 °C) with a brewing of around 15–20 minutes to bring out its sweetness. A tea warmer dispenser allows the tea to remain heated for up to eight hours.
Pearls (boba) are made from tapioca starch. Most bubble tea stores buy packaged tapioca pearls in an uncooked stage. When the boba is uncooked and in the package, it is uncolored and hard. The boba does not turn chewy and dark until they are cooked and sugar is added to bring out its taste. Uncooked tapioca pearls in their package can be stored for around 9 to 12 months. Once cooked, they can be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator. Despite this, most bubble tea stores will not sell their boba after 24 hours because it will start to harden and lose its chewiness.
The traditional preparation method is to mix the ingredients (sugar, powders, and other flavourings) together using a bubble tea shaker cup, by hand. However, many present-day bubble tea shops use a bubble tea shaker machine. This eliminates the need for humans to shake the bubble tea by hand. It also reduces staffing needs as multiple cups of bubble tea may be prepared by a single barista.
Milk and sugar have been added to tea in Taiwan since the Dutch colonization of Taiwan from 1624–1662.
Before the invention of bubble tea, a similar tea beverage was created in Taiwan called bubble foam tea (Chinese: 泡沫紅茶; pinyin: Pàomò hóngchá). This drink was made by mixing tea with fructose syrup and then shaking it with ice cubes in a shaker. The vigorous shaking created a fine foam, giving the drink its signature texture. Unlike modern pearl milk tea, bubble foam tea did not initially contain tapioca balls.
There are two competing stories for the discovery of bubble tea. One is associated with the Chun Shui Tang tea room in Taichung. Its founder, Liu Han-Chieh, began serving Chinese tea cold after he observed coffee was served cold in Japan while on a visit in the 1980s. The new style of serving tea propelled his business and multiple chains serving this tea were established. The company's product development manager, Lin Hsiu Hui, said she created the first bubble tea in 1988 when she poured tapioca balls into her tea during a staff meeting and encouraged others to drink it. The beverage was well received at the meeting, leading to its inclusion on the menu. It ultimately became the franchise's top-selling product.
Another claim for the invention of bubble tea comes from the Hanlin Tea Room (Chinese: 翰林茶館; pinyin: Hànlín cháguǎn) in Tainan. It claims that bubble tea was invented in 1986 when teahouse owner Tu Tsong-he was inspired by white tapioca balls he saw in the local market of Yā-mǔ-liáo (Chinese: 鴨母寮). He later made tea using these traditional Taiwanese snacks. This resulted in what is known as "pearl tea."
In the 1990s, bubble tea spread across East and Southeast Asia with its ever-growing popularity. In regions like Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, Vietnam, and Singapore, the bubble tea trend expanded rapidly among young people. In some popular shops, people would line up for more than thirty minutes to get a drink. In recent years, the popularity of bubble tea has gone beyond the beverage itself, with boba lovers inventing various bubble tea flavoured-foods, including ice cream, pizza, toast, sushi, and ramen.
In Taiwan, bubble tea has become not just a beverage, but an enduring icon of the culture and food history for the nation. In 2020, the date April 30 was officially declared as National Bubble Tea Day in Taiwan. That same year, the image of bubble tea was proposed as an alternative cover design for Taiwan's passport. According to Al Jazeera, bubble tea has become synonymous with Taiwan and is an important symbol of Taiwanese identity both domestically and internationally. Bubble tea is used to represent Taiwan in the context of the Milk Tea Alliance. 50 Lan is a bubble tea chain founded in Tainan.
Hong Kong is famous for its traditional Hong Kong–style milk tea, which is made with brewed black tea and evaporated milk. While milk tea has long become integrated into people's daily life, the expansion of Taiwanese bubble tea chains, including Tiger Sugar, Youiccha, and Xing Fu Tang, into Hong Kong created a new wave for "boba tea."
Since the idea of adding tapioca pearls into milk tea was introduced into China in the 1990s, bubble tea has increased in popularity. In 2020 it was estimated that the consumption of bubble tea was 5 times that of coffee in recent years. According to data from QianZhen Industry Research Institute, the value of the tea-related beverage market in China reached 53.7 billion Renminbi (about US$7.63 billion) in 2018. In 2019, annual sales from bubble tea shops reached as high as CN¥ 140.5 billion (roughly US$20 billion). While bubble tea chains from Taiwan (e.g., Gong Cha and Coco) are still popular, more local brands, like Yi Dian Dian, Nayuki, Hey Tea, etc., are now dominating the market.
In China, young people's growing obsession with bubble tea shaped their way of social interaction. Buying someone a cup of bubble tea has become a new way of informally thanking someone. It is also a favoured topic among friends and on social media.
Bubble tea first entered Japan by the late 1990s, but it failed to leave a lasting impression on the public markets. It was not until the 2010s when the bubble tea trend finally swept Japan. Shops from Taiwan, Korea, and China, as well as local brands, began to pop up in cities, and bubble tea has remained one of the hottest trends since then. Bubble tea has become so commonplace among teenagers that teenage girls in Japan invented slang for it: tapiru (タピる). The word is short for drinking tapioca tea in Japanese, and it won first place in a survey of "Japanese slang for middle school girls" in 2018. A bubble tea theme park was open for a limited time in 2019 in Harajuku, Tokyo.
Known locally in Chinese as 泡泡茶 (pinyin: pào pào chá), bubble tea is loved by many in Singapore. The drink was sold in Singapore as early as 1992 and became phenomenally popular among young people in 2001. This soon ended because of the intense competition and price wars among shops. As a result, most bubble tea shops closed and bubble tea lost its popularity by 2003. When Taiwanese chains like Koi and Gong Cha came to Singapore in 2007 and 2009, the beverage experienced only short resurgences in popularity. In 2018, the interest in bubble tea rose again at an unprecedented speed in Singapore, as new brands like The Alley and Tiger Sugar entered the market; social media also played an important role in driving this renaissance of bubble tea.
Taiwanese immigrants introduced bubble tea to the United States in the 1990s, initially in California through regions including Los Angeles County. Some of the first stand-alone bubble tea shops can be traced to a food court in Arcadia, in Southern California, and Fantasia Coffee & Tea in Cupertino, in Northern California. Chains like Tapioca Express, Quickly, Lollicup, and Happy Lemon emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, bringing the Taiwanese bubble tea trend to the US. Within the Asian American community, bubble tea is commonly known under its colloquial term "boba."
As the beverage gained popularity in the US, it gradually became more than a drink, but a cultural identity for Asian Americans. This phenomenon was referred to as “boba life” by Chinese-American brothers Andrew and David Fung in their music video, “Bobalife,” released in 2013. Boba symbolizes a subculture that Asian Americans as social minorities could define themselves as, and “boba life” is a reflection of their desire for both cultural and political recognition. It is also used disparagingly in the term boba liberal, a term that derides mainstream Asian-American liberalism. Other regions with large concentrations of bubble tea restaurants in the United States are the Northeast and Southwest. This is reflected in the coffeehouse-style teahouse chains that originate from the regions, such as Boba Tea Company from Albuquerque, New Mexico, No. 1 Boba Tea in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Kung Fu Tea from New York City. Albuquerque and Las Vegas have a large concentrations of boba tea restaurants, as the drink is popular especially among the Hispano, Navajo, Pueblo, and other Native American, Hispanic and Latino American communities in the Southwest.
A massive shipping and supply chain crisis on the U.S. West coast, coupled with the obstruction of the Suez Canal in March 2021, caused a shortage of tapioca pearls for bubble tea shops in the U.S. and Canada. Most of the tapioca consumed in the U.S. is imported from Asia, since the critical ingredient, tapioca starch, is mostly grown in Asia.
TikTok trends and the Korean Wave also fueled the popularity of bubble tea in the United States.
Taiwanese milk tea was introduced to Vietnam in the early 2000s, but it took a few years for this drink to become popular with young people. Roadside stalls and carts rarely served milk tea, and the milk tea trend gradually cooled down in the late 2000s. Many shops had to liquidate or close, while others struggled to survive. Bubble tea also gained controversy because of information about tea of unknown origin, tapioca pearls allegedly being made from polymer plastics, etc.
By 2012, Taiwanese brands arrived in Vietnam, still the same old milk tea but served in a completely new style: milk tea with toppings, developing a chain model, and a space designed as well as any famous coffee shop. Also, the halo of Taiwanese milk tea gradually returned, especially around the end of 2016, to the beginning of 2017. According to a survey by Lozi, in 2017, the Vietnamese milk tea market witnessed an explosion with 100 large and small brands coexisting and over 1,500 points of sale, including major brands from Taiwan such as Ding Tea, Gong Cha, BoBaPop. This survey also shows that milk tea is becoming a popular drink in Vietnam when 53% of people are confirmed to drink milk tea at least once a week.
From the consumer perspective, milk tea is characterized by its sweet, creamy taste, suitable for many customers, not only students, but also children and office workers. In addition, milk tea is constantly "transforming" to meet all customer needs, from cheese cream tea, fruit tea to low-fat tea. Another important point that makes milk tea popular is the service style. Instead of small shops and school gate carts like in the past, the milk tea is designed into a spacious space, with fixed seats, and cool air conditioning.
Milk tea is not only a daily drink, but it has also become a "fever drink" loved in many countries, including South Korea. In the capital Seoul alone, there are 4 famous milk tea shops, which are popular places for entertainment, dating, and meeting of Korean youth every weekend, which are Gong Cha, Cofioca, Amasvin, and Happy Lemon.
In Korea, there are many different large and small milk tea shops, famous brands or just small shops with a drink counter and a table. Although pearl milk tea originated in Taiwan, it took certain changes in Korea. Koreans are very concerned about keeping in shape, every meal they have to check exactly how many calories they take in, so that they can do appropriate exercises to burn off excess fat. Therefore, when entering restaurants or bakeries in Korea, we will see the calorie index recorded very carefully as a way to protect the health of consumers. For example, at Gong Cha milk tea shops there, customers can choose the sweetness of their milk tea by choosing the sugar level (0%, 30%, 50%, 70%, and 100%) and similarly choose ice to add personal favourite flavour to their milk tea.
Individual bubble tea shops began to appear in Australia in the 1990s, along with other regional drinks like Eis Cendol. Chains of stores were established as early as 2002, when the Bubble Cup franchise opened its first store in Melbourne. Although originally associated with the rapid growth of immigration from Asia and the vast tertiary student cohort from Asia, in Melbourne and Sydney bubble tea has become popular across many communities.
The first bubble tea shop in Mauritius opened in late 2012, and since then there have been bubble tea shops in most shopping malls on the island. Bubble tea shops have become a popular place for teenagers to hang out.
In 2020, the Unicode Consortium released the bubble tea emoji (U+1F9CB 🧋 BUBBLE TEA) as part of its version 13.0 update.
On 29 January 2023, Google celebrated Bubble Tea with a doodle.
In July 2019, Singapore's Mount Alvernia Hospital warned against the high sugar content of bubble tea since the drink had become extremely popular in Singapore. While it acknowledged the benefits of drinking green tea and black tea in reducing risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and cancer, respectively, the hospital cautions that the addition of other ingredients like non-dairy creamer and toppings in the tea could raise the fat and sugar content of the tea and increase the risk of chronic diseases. Non-dairy creamer is a milk substitute that contains trans fat in the form of hydrogenated palm oil. The hospital warned that this oil has been strongly correlated with an increased risk of heart disease and stroke.
The other concern about bubble tea is its high calorie content, partially attributed to the high-carbohydrate tapioca pearls (Chinese: 珍珠; pinyin: zhēn zhū), which can make up to half the calorie-count in a 500 ml (18 imp fl oz; 17 US fl oz) serving of bubble tea.