How Taiwanese Bubble Tea Has Taken Over the US

By Spe Chen and Jinshan Hong

March 31, 2023, 1:00 AM EDT

How Taiwanese Bubble Tea Has Taken Over the US

By Spe Chen and Jinshan Hong

March 31, 2023, 1:00 AM EDT

A classic Asian drink has become one of the US’s fastest-growing refreshments — creating a global food export stranglehold for Taiwan, its place of origin.

Bubble tea, also known as boba, is named for the chewy, rubbery tapioca balls that give the sweet beverage its unique mouthfeel, commonly known among boba addicts as “QQ.”

Its popularity has surged around the world in the last two years, particularly in America — 2022 trade data shows that these pearls are now US’s biggest food import from Taiwan, a rare pandemic-era success at a time when consumers everywhere cut back on discretionary spending and food outlets struggled to stay afloat.

Note: Data excludes residual categories in the product description. See full methodology for more.

Sources: United States International Trade Commission, United Nations Comtrade database

Its leap into the mainstream has been fueled by the rise of influencers who sip the drink while on short-video platform TikTok. The global boom of Korea’s entertainment industry has also helped, with its pop idols and TV characters fans of the beverage.

“There’s a huge increase in demand,” said Kody Wang, deputy director of business development at Taipei-based CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice, a bubble tea chain that saw its store count in North America expand 77% between 2019 and 2022. “We now see more and more understanding towards Asian culture, partially boosted by the popularity of K-pop and Korean drama.”

In 2022, the US imported some 30.5 million kilograms of tapioca and substitutes prepared from starch — a trade category the Taiwanese government uses as an indicator for boba sales. Taiwanese sellers account for 69% of market share by value, according to US International Trade Commission data.

Source: United Nations Comtrade database

Taiwan’s tapioca product export value to the world rose 23% to over $100 million in 2021, roughly three times that of runner-up Thailand, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of the latest United Nations trade data.

The island’s dominance in the US market is still growing despite its boba being 64% more expensive than those from Thailand on average.

“You can have boba tea ice cream. If you go to Costco in California, they have boba tea,” said Yong Chen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine and author of Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America. “It’s really everywhere now. People have embraced it and it is going mainstream.”

Bubbling Up

Bubble tea was invented in Taiwan in the 1980s and has been in the US for decades, sold largely in smaller stores catering to the Asian community. Analysis firm Future Market Insights estimates that the $640 million US bubble tea market in 2023 will reach $2.2 billion in 10 years.

Between 2019 and 2022, seven US city clusters — most with large and growing Asian populations — reported a more-than-60% jump in their number of bubble tea shops, according to online review platform Yelp Inc. The Chicago area surged the most, followed by Philadelphia, Yelp said.

The space for bubble tea’s expansion in the world’s largest economy far outweighs that of small Taiwan – One leading bubble tea chain, Sharetea, run by Taipei’s Lian Fa International Dining Business Corporation, already has more outlets in the US than in Taiwan.

Kung Fu Tea, a brand founded in Queens, New York, has over 350 locations and aims for $240 million in sales in 2023, including franchisees. It’s the largest bubble tea chain in the US, according to Yelp data.

Celebrity Influence

Some brands have hired internationally-popular Korean stars as ambassadors, with Park Seo-jun, an actor of the global Netflix hit Itaewon Class, shilling for Taiwanese brand Gong Cha.

Asian private equity firm Unison Capital acquired Gong Cha’s South Korean unit in 2014 and took over its global operations several years later. It sold the franchise operator to Boston-based TA Associates for around 350 billion won ($270 million) in 2019 — nearly five times its investment, Korean media reported.

Bubble tea, milk tea with tapioca pearls, on white background — Taiwan’s bubble tea has become a popular drink internationally. Edy Gunawan/Getty Images

On TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, videos about bubble tea get hundreds of thousands of likes. Some influencers challenge themselves to play games like drinking milk teas filled almost to the brim with pearls.

Lauren Godwin, a Los Angeles-based influencer who has over 22 million followers on TikTok, made a 33-second video of herself drinking an oversized bubble tea last year that got nearly one million likes.

TikTok’s explosion in popularity during Covid, when more people turned to social media, in turn contributed to the boom in boba, said Kashish Juneja, who owns bubble tea shop Aura in San Francisco.

“It’s a matter of discovery and I think TikTok itself being a discovery-based platform just helped with that,” she said. “More people want to try it.”

Meeting Demand

Data from Google Trends indicates US interest in “bubble tea” or “boba tea” saw a big bounce in America in 2021, when Covid rules eased. The combined search reached a record in January, when Google created a doodle game to celebrate the three-year anniversary of boba getting its own emoji.

Factories in Taiwan, meanwhile, are cheering the explosion in interest and expanding their capacity to churn out even more boba, along with specialized additives, tea and juice flavors that go into the drinks and can be bought alongside the pearls as a package deal.

“Taiwan has a very complete set of raw ingredients, and you can only find all of them here,” said Chia-Sheng Chen, president of Shang Dao Food Co., a supplier of bubble tea ingredients established in 1979.

The pearls contain roughly 74% starch and 24% water, plus small amounts of caramel and other flavorings, according to Shang Dao.

The company will open a fully-automated boba factory in Taiwan in April to help meet demand. Operating hours will be 24/7, the production capacity will triple, and the number of workers will drop to as low as a third compared to other factories, Chen said.

“We hope the US market can be an incubator for bubble tea to spread to the world,” he said.

Methodology: Our analysis defines food imports with products listed under chapters 1-4, 7-13, and 15-24 in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding Systems (HS). To compare products at a similar granularity level, we exclude residual categories containing “n.e.c.” (not elsewhere classified) in their product description of 6-digit level HS codes provided by UN Comtrade API.

The HS code we use as an indicator for boba sales is 190300, the most detailed code level internationally comparable across the UN Comtrade database, the US International Trade Commission, and the Taiwan Customs site. We triangulated the same code across the three sources and saw that both the exporting and importing trends between the US and Taiwan are aligned. In addition, we interviewed manufacturers and exporters and confirmed that they use the same code for exporting boba products.

Photography: Noam Galai/Getty Images, Michael Dodge/Getty Images, Sean Gallup/Getty Images, Brandon Bell/Getty Images, Toru Hanai/Bloomberg

Edited by: Karen Leigh, Rachel Chang and Jane Pong

With assistance from: Adrian Leung and Jin Wu

How Taiwanese Bubble Tea Has Taken Over the US

How Taiwanese Bubble Tea Has Taken Over the US

Top 30 Foods Imported by the US From Taiwan

Top Importers of Tapioca Starch-Made Food by Value in 2021

Bubbling Up

Bubble Tea Fever in Major US Cities

Celebrity Influence

Meeting Demand

US Google Searches for “Bubble Tea” and “Boba Tea”