Boba
Tea Takes the World by Storm
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Lin Hsin-ching/photos by Chuang Kung-ju/tr. by Scott Williams
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On June 11, Germany’s several hundred
McDonald’s McCafés began selling Taiwan’s much loved “boba,” an iced tea garnished with milk and tapioca “pearls.” The drink has been
catching on around the world, as increasing media exposure has turned it
into Taiwan’s most recognized beverage.
In
fact, boba shops have been popping up all over the planet in recent years, in
cities ranging from Sidney and Montreal to Paris, London, Berlin, and Istanbul.
Rough estimates suggest that Europe already has several thousand boba shops of
its own.
How
is it that the vast majority of these shops are being opened by foreigners
trained in Taiwan? The short answer is Jacky Wang, chairman of Taiwan’s Possmei
Corporation.
A
middle-aged man named Chan McTi sips a cool beverage amidst a cloud of colorful bubbles,
practically dancing for joy as he imbibes each mouthful.
The
scene is part of a McCafé ad airing on German TV this summer, introducing the
company’s newest beverage—Taiwanese-style boba—to consumers.
Germany’s
McCafés deliver the drink in much the same way Taiwanese shops do: consumers
choose a black, green, or milk tea as their base, then add whatever garnish they like—cubes of passionfruit-flavored
gelatin, or something even more exotic. This
mixing and matching yields up to 250 flavor combinations for €1.99 (about
NT$83) per serving, about 2.5 times the typical price in Taiwan.
Looking far afield
“Germany
has taken to bubble tea more strongly than the rest of Europe,” says Jacky
Wang, chairman of boba supplier Possmei Corporation. “German consumers used to
order meals at McDonald’s with a bubble tea or boba from another restaurant
already in hand. Sensing an opportunity, McDonald’s dove into the market.”
Wang’s company not only supplies boba ingredients to over 80% of Germany’s more
than 1,000 boba shops, it guided the establishment of two of the country’s
largest boba chains, BoboQ and Tea One, which together have more than 100
European outlets.
Unlike
most Taiwanese tea-beverage
businesses, Wang’s company has chosen to bypass the “fertile ground”
of the Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan markets in favor of Western markets new to
boba. Europe, for example, is his primary market. But Possmei’s ambitions
stretch well beyond Europe, and the company now has customers on four
continents.
Why
has Wang ignored nearby markets in favor of more distant ones? “We’re a new
brand with limited capital,” he explains. “Attempting to break into such
established markets could wipe us out.”
An easy decision
Born
in 1963, Wang’s only degree is in electronics from a vocational high school. He
completed his military service just as the boba craze was taking hold.
Recognizing a good business opportunity, he gave up electronics and opened his
own shop selling tea and snacks.
Soon
after, he married the daughter of the owner of Trojan Corporation, a Taiwanese
supplier of beverage ingredients, and
took over development of the company’s overseas business. Before he knew it,
more than 20 years had gone by.
While
with Trojan, he saw many of his foreign clients encounter operational
difficulties that required expert advice. “But suppliers are by nature
basically passive,” says Wang. “I wasn’t really in a position to offer
recommendations. I couldn’t help them even when I wanted to.”
Feeling
that foreign markets had huge potential, he bought Trojan’s international sales
department, which he had built himself, from his father-in-law in 2009, and
turned it into Possmei. Wang immediately decided that Possmei would not
compete with Trojan in the domestic market nor attempt to develop the mainland
Chinese market.
“All
anybody sees is the 1.3-billion-person Chinese market,” he explains. “But there
are 7 billion people on the planet. If you subtract China’s 1.3 billion from
that 7 billion, you still have 5.7 billion. Doesn’t that offer more potential
than China?”
Face-to-face sales
To
develop his customer base in Western
nations, Wang employs the most direct and powerful form of sales there is:
face-to-face communication.
He
attends 20 international food conventions a year, spending roughly NT$2 million
per show on airfare, lodging, and his booth at the convention. That
NT$40-million-per-year figure astonishes others in the industry, but Wang knows
that his approach—taking the time to visit your customers in their own nations,
communicate with them in their languages, and address cultural differences in
person—is the best way to convince them to try new food products.
As
many as 80% of Wang’s customers had their first taste of boba at one of his
convention booths. Those booths usually also provided
their first sight of the extra-wide straws used to drink boba, as well as of
the machines that measure out the fructose
syrup, shake the drinks, and seal the cups. In other words, all
the interesting devices Taiwan has invented to support the boba industry.
“I
watch foreigners steel themselves to take a taste, then feel an inexpressible
sense of relief when their faces relax into a smile,” says Wang, who laughs
that he’s Taiwan’s boba ambassador.
Having
spread the love of boba beyond Taiwan’s borders, Wang’s next step was to show
foreigners how to run a boba shop. He set up a program specially for customers
who were clueless about the boba
business, teaching them everything from the drink’s origins to how to prepare
“pearls,” test flavors, name shops, create brands, and design websites.
The Starbucks of boba
In
an effort to raise the boba industry’s barriers to
entry and upgrade its image, Wang purchased two office buildings
in New Taipei City’s Wugu District. He then spent several hundred million NT
dollars renovating and decorating them in a Zen style, creating the Bubble Milk
Tea Concept Hall and the Bubble Milk Tea International Training Center.
He
says that whereas Taiwanese see boba as nothing more than a streetside snack,
people in other nations view it as something different and special. Since the
necessary ingredients, equipment, and labor are also all much more expensive
abroad, foreign boba shops have to tweak
their business strategies. “The best first step is to raise the barriers to entry. Starbucks,
for example, holds itself to a high standard in order to justify the expense of
its coffee beverages.”
Bubbleology,
a London bubble tea shop, exploded into popularity last year. Company owner
Assad Khan, a former investment banker, is a graduate of Possmei’s program.
Introduced to bubble tea in New York’s Chinatown during a stint working in the
city, Khan quickly picked up a four-to-five-glass-per-week habit.
After
transferring back to London, Khan went in search of a local fix. When his
efforts failed to yield results, he realized there was huge potential for an authentic version of the
Taiwanese treat in the UK. He subsequently quit his highly paid investment
banking position and traveled to Taiwan. There, his efforts to learn how to
make the drink properly and find suppliers led him to Wang.
With
Possmei’s guidance, Khan opened his first Bubbleology in London’s Soho
district. The shop, with a color scheme based on black and an exterior that
looks like a fashionable coffee shop, has a very different feel from the
“streetside casual” of Taiwanese bubble tea stands. The drinks are more
expensive as well, starting at £2.95 (about NT$140), or about four times their
price in Taiwan.
Khan
now has Bubbleologies in London and Warsaw, selling over 500 servings of bubble
tea per day. The company is also preparing to open an outlet in Prague, and has
plans to move into the Middle East.
An honest
drink
Many
people are curious about how authentic
boba has remained in foreign markets. Have flavors and techniques been
adapted to local tastes?
Wang
says that whereas ethnic Chinese tend to enjoy milk teas made with black tea,
Europeans tend to be very fond of fruit teas. He also notes that tea beverages are prepared with
more sweetener in Southeast Asia to satisfy the local sweet tooth.
Similarly,
the most popular “pearls” abroad aren’t the tapioca-flour variety most
familiar to Taiwanese customers, but “popping boba,” which have a similar
appearance but a different texture.
Wang
says that “popping boba” are made of a translucent gelatin filled with any of
a variety of fruit-juice concentrates.
Though introduced in Taiwan a number of years ago, local consumers preferred
the firm, chewy texture
of the original “pearls,” and didn’t take to the “fakes.” Consumers abroad,
on the other hand, had no particular attachment to the old-style pearls and
loved the new ones.
“Foreign
consumers find the colorful ‘popping boba’ more attractive than the dark
traditional ‘pearls,’” says Wang. “Shop owners also tend to prefer ‘popping
boba’ because they are easy to prepare and have a longer shelf life.”
Boba
drinkers in the new European and Southeast Asian markets are largely young
people in the 15–25 age range. In an effort to better cater to their tastes,
shops have widely adopted a “salad bar” approach to selling the drink:
consumers order the tea of their choice, then add their “popping boba,”
konnyaku, nata de coco, flavored gelatin, and other “garnishes” themselves.
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Toxic cloud
But
in spite of all this seemingly smooth sailing, the industry did recently
experience a rough patch triggered by last year’s discovery of plasticizers in many
Taiwanese food products.
“We
too were victims,” says Wang, who estimates that the scandal cost him tens of
millions of NT dollars. He ruefully explains that because foreign consumers are
especially sensitive to food safety issues, the crisis was particularly
damaging to companies such as Possmei that sell exclusively to overseas
markets. Trust takes time to build, but can be destroyed in the blink of an
eye.
Unwilling
to let the so-called “Boba Scandal” destroy Possmei, Wang immediately ordered
20-some containers of goods awaiting shipment destroyed, got in touch with
customers to offer compensation, and air-freighted replacements. Once the
crisis was over, Wang spent millions more building a professional lab and
safety center to test products and eliminate any concerns about the safety of
his food exports.
Whether
owing to Wang’s upfront manner of dealing with the crisis or the international
media’s eager reporting, the crisis somehow managed to improve Taiwanese boba’s
international reputation. In fact, Possmei’s sales have grown exponentially
since the plasticizer scandal. This
year the company expects to generate revenues of over NT$1 billion, or roughly
three times last year’s figure.
The
couplet framing the entrance to Possmei’s headquarters reads, “Round as a
pearl, smooth as jade, flavored with milk / May we drink tea for another 5,000
years,” expressing Wang’s hopes for the future of his boba business. Having
already demonstrated boba’s tremendous opportunities, his next objective is to
make the drink as emblematic of Taiwan as sushi is of Japan or kimchi of Korea.
Panorama, August 2012
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