In May 2011, there was panic in Treasure Island across the Taiwan Strait.
After the arrest of Yushen Spices founder Lai Junjie, he left a playful remark in the court:
Good article, let’s copy it together!
Yushen Flavors, as the largest clouding agent company on the island, has secretly added DOP (general plasticizer) to its products for 30 years. Its side effects are 20 times that of "melamine".
Lai Junjie and his wife were arrested
On the day Baodao plasticizer was exposed, international giant Wal-Mart removed all imported beverages from its shelves; Dongguan, Guangdong removed 80% of its food products; Hong Kong, China even threw out a " among 200 citizens There are 99% reports of detecting the plasticizer ” .
In an instant, "DOP" became a term that changed the color of the world.
However, behind this shocking public incident, there is a clear main line hidden: the island's milk tea industry has completely collapsed, and the industry's commanding heights have shifted to the mainland .
In the prelude to this industry change, there are the shattering of the dreams of literary and artistic youths, the greedy competition of capital from all parties, the mission of new tea drinks, and the ultimate positioning of milk tea:
No matter whether it tastes good or not, it is a good one. Business...
1, The Wild Age of Grass
The first generation of domestic Internet celebrity milk tea is the " Pearl Milk Tea " that was born in Baodao in the 1980s.
Interestingly, there are two theories about the origin of pearl milk tea:
One is that the "Hanlin Tea House" in Tainan accidentally added a kind of white powder balls to the milk tea, which looks like boiled pearls. Named "Pearl Milk Tea".
Another one is that a clerk at Taichung "Chun Shui Tang" put pink balls in the milk tea. He poetically quoted Bai Juyi "Big beads and small beads falling on the jade plate", and then named it "pearl milk tea".
In order to compete for the title of "Grandmaster", the two stores did not hesitate to go to court and fought for 10 years.
In the end, the court couldn't bear the disturbance and chose to reconcile:
Qianlong didn't drink it when he went to Jiangnan, so it doesn't count as a patent.
While the two stores were competing for the "ancestor" title, pearl milk tea was blooming all over the southeastern coastal areas, and even the names became more and more wild.
There is a milk tea vendor who specializes in making the noodle balls bigger. He drew inspiration from the famous actor Yip Mei in the 1980s and named it " Boba Milk Tea ".
More wild merchants made the powder balls into the size of frog eggs and named them " frog bun mistress "...
Leisure Station, Kuai Ke Li , 50 Lan and other brands have emerged one after another.
Among them, Kuai Keli took the lead in entering the mainland and became the first authentic milk tea shop. Baodao became the number one milk tea player in the world.
The innovation of "milk tea + powdered rice balls" put Taiwanese milk tea on the throne at the turn of the century, but the disorderly expansion of pearl milk tea among the people also paved the way for its own destruction.
2. The "supply-side reform" of milk tea
In 2016, Hillary , who had a fierce battle with Teacher Jianguo, went to a Chinese milk tea shop to win votes. She ordered a cup of pearl milk tea and said:
I like this kind of milk and tea very much. combined products.
Hillary drinking milk tea (first from the right)
In fact, as early as the 1980s, pearl milk tea became an inferior product that " has neither milk nor tea".
In order to seize the market, merchants have made pearl milk tea easier and easier to copy. The ingredients of a cup of milk tea have been simplified to " creamer + coloring + flavor + tapioca flour + tap water ".
Among them, the most important ingredient is creamer, which has a strong milky flavor.
The key thing is that compared with fresh milk, creamer has abruptly increased the industry's gross profit margin to 70%, easily beating Haitian and Yili , and almost keeping pace with Wuliangye .
In essence, pearl milk tea is still a blend of "creamer + tea". The two will separate as long as they stand for a period of time. If you want to maintain the mixed state, you must add a food additive called " clouding agent " .
Clouding agent
However, clouding agents have the disadvantages of high cost, poor stability and short shelf life.
Soon, "Yushen Flavors", the largest clouding agent company on the island, was surprised to find that universal plasticizer (DOP) can replace clouding agents, which not only has excellent effects, but also lower costs.
Until 2011, the DOP that had been hidden for 30 years came to light. Milk tea was directly labeled as "rubber pearls", "additives" and other labels. The once famous pearl milk tea also became "something to deceive children."
What's even more bizarre is that the island's fertility rate continues to reach the lowest level in the world, breast cancer and other health problems have also found the culprit - milk tea .
The biggest “contribution” of Yushen Spices’ “long-term investment” is to promote the “supply-side reform” of the milk tea industry.
3, industry iteration
After 2011, pearl milk tea was suppressed in the plasticizer controversy , and was replaced by "new tea drinks" that quickly emerged from the industry.
There is an essential difference between "new tea drinks" and "pearl milk tea": there is both milk and tea .
The new tea drink has upgraded the "powder + water" brewing method to , a freshly brewed tea that changes every 44 hours. In the store, there is even a scene of manual peeling of grapes, and the cost has increased exponentially. The unit price of also broke through the 20 yuan mark overnight.
HiTea staff
In the early years, the media once secretly investigated the production of pearl milk tea: creamer 0.3 yuan, black tea 0.1 yuan, pearls 0.1 yuan, sugar 0.1 yuan, plus water, electricity and rent, the cost is only 1 yuan. About .
However, high prices still cannot prevent new tea drinks from becoming the darling of the younger generation. Stores represented by Heytea and Nayuki’s Tea are rapidly rising.
On the opening day of the Heytea Shanghai store, the customers who came in droves were divided into 6 long queues, and the waiting time was as long as 6 hours.
Tea Yan Yuese ’s first store in Wuhan even had an epic queue of 1 kilometer long. Queued for 8 hours to get a cup of milk tea .
What’s even more bizarre is that a cup of 20 yuan milk tea was sold to 500 yuan by scalpers .
The crowd in front of tea beauty
In 2021, Naixue's tea IPO was listed on the Hong Kong stock market, becoming the "first milk tea stock"; shortly afterwards, Heytea's valuation also reached 60 billion.
With the rise of new tea drinks, there is a kind of helplessness:
Drinking a cup of milk tea is more satisfying than eating a meal.
In fact, behind this helplessness is the wealth code for the rapid emergence of new tea drinks.
4, The movement that capital praises
Open the menu of new tea drinks, and you can see everything from strawberries to mangoes, from coconuts to bananas, from pearls to bread, just like a hodgepodge.
Take the six categories of Heytea: fruit tea, popsicles, milk tea, coffee, bread, and pure tea.
The five categories except pure tea are essentially "milk tea +" models.
milk tea + fruit, the banner of health has become a placebo for urban beauties;
milk tea + ice cream, bread, directly beat the ice cream and cake to death on the beach;
milk tea + rice, is known as "drinkable rice dumplings."
New tea drinks have turned milk tea into a "milk tea + everything" business.
There are two main advantages of this model:
1. Milk tea can be integrated with everything, giving the category of new tea drinks unlimited room to extend;
2. The base of all categories is milk tea, and the processing process can be standardized, as long as Having a stable supply chain enables rapid expansion.
In short, a new tea shop has the attributes of a milk tea shop, dessert shop, fruit shop, ice cream shop, and bakery.
One business simultaneously seizes 5 markets , which is enough to make anyone laugh from their dreams, so it becomes a place of competition for capital.
But milk tea, as an industry with open recipes, small taste differences, and almost zero threshold, is destined to be a "perfectly competitive market" with extremely involved .
Since the birth of new tea drinks, major brands have been trying to shake off their competitors by launching new products.
In the end, it triggered a large-scale "copying" phenomenon, leading to serious homogenization of the entire industry.
Without looking at the packaging, no one can tell the difference between Heytea and Nayuki products of the same type.
Under this situation, the industry can only seize the market through price wars. When it lacks funds, it will introduce external investment to continue to roll...
However, in this war with the theme of "rolling", not only its peers have fallen. , but more are innocent ordinary people.
5, The Great Divergence: Scythe and Breakout
In 2016, players of new tea drinks are in an embarrassing situation: is as fierce as a tiger in one operation, and loses two yuan and five dollars a day.
In fact, it is the iron law of the perfectly competitive market in the later stage: The profits of every enterprise tend to be infinitely 0.
Therefore, the entire industry has divided into two extremes in the head-to-head battle between and : one is the hunter faction, and the other is the breakout faction.
The so-called hunting, the prey is not peers, but terminal stores.
When selling milk tea cannot make money, a large number of brands have set their sights on the "franchise fee".
found celebrities to advertise, relying on its popularity to expand rapidly, attracting franchises across the country, but has become the "main business" of most brands.
And their profit model has also changed from relying on customer consumption to sucking blood from the downstream - charges huge franchise fees for one-stop transactions .
What's more, the franchisee's procurement is restricted to the internal system through agreements, raw materials are sold to them at prices higher than the market, and training is frequently charged. Even the materials for the decoration of the store must be purchased from the headquarters.
When a brand is crippled, business owners will change the brand and try it again until all the profit and water is squeezed out...
Compared with the chaos of franchising in the industry, the breakout faction ran another route.
Heytea and Naixue adopt a direct sales model to keep the unit price within the range of 20-40 yuan. The entire production process is carried out manually on site, focusing on high-end tea drinks with the spirit of craftsmanship.
Cha Yan Yuese, as a representative of mid-range tea drinks, also adopts a direct operation model, but the difference is that all stores are concentrated in Changsha. The advantage of this model of
is: blocks the living space of competitors, and customers can only choose their own product .
Today, Cha Yan Yuese has more than 300 stores in Changsha, and the core business district even has and five stores at one intersection.
while Mixue Bingcheng avoided the front-line white-collar group and opened stores in third- and fourth-tier cities. With its huge supply chain, it controlled the unit price per customer below 8 yuan, becoming the " milk tea industry's pinnacle " ".
At the same time, Mixue Bingcheng, which has acquired 15,000 stores through "direct sales + franchise", has also become the "number one competitor" for entrepreneurial and artistic young people.
When the smoke of price war and franchising chaos slowly dissipates, the high-end price band of new tea drinks has been firmly occupied by Heytea and Naixue, a large number of regional brands have emerged in the mid-range price, and the low-end price band has Mixue Bingcheng takes the lead.
In the unique competitive landscape of new tea drinks, there is only one ultimate proposition for all brands: How to become China's Starbucks ?
6, China’s Starbucks
When coffee brands tell stories to VCs, the most common words they say are:
If every Chinese drinks a cup of coffee...
But behind it is a problem that has been ignored: China It has been a big tea-drinking country since ancient times. The 500 billion tea market far exceeds the 80 billion coffee market.
The size of China's tea market
The reason why this issue has been ignored is because tea is a business with "big market and small brand", and no monopolistic brand has been born so far; while coffee is a "small market" Businesses with big brands, such as Starbucks and Nestlé, which have been deeply cultivated in China, and Luckin, which has smashed capitalism.
The reason why tea drinks are difficult to expand lies in the production and sales process.
Tea trees pay attention to topography, soil, and temperature; picking and processing rely on the experience of masters; even drinking tea requires you to "savour" it. If you can't taste it, it doesn't mean the tea is not good.
This lack of standards and the characteristics of being linked to metaphysics have seriously restricted the development of tea drinks. The essence of new tea drinks is to break limitations and realize the industrialization of tea drinks.
First of all, , the new tea drinking "milk + sugar" fusion dilutes the taste, grade and origin of tea, giving the industry a basis for industrialization.
Secondly, , the addictive combination of "sugar + fat + caffeine " in new tea drinks has greatly extended the life cycle of the product.
and finally , new tea drinks have eliminated the pain point of "consumption concentrated at noon and evening" in the catering industry, extending the consumption period to breakfast, afternoon tea, and midnight snacks, and can operate almost around the clock.
When the market factors are in place, what lies in front of the new tea brand is: Starbucks' advantages - a high degree of process and replicability.
In the early years, Cha Yan Yuese had an epic queue of 10,000 meters. The root cause was manual on-site production, which resulted in slow production efficiency and the inability to process.
Today, as suppliers have solved the problem of automating sugar and milk caps, manual on-site peeling has been replaced by machines, and production links have been replaced by upstream, brand owners need to think about another question:
Can it become China's Starbucks? All it takes is a cup. The production of milk tea is very similar to Starbucks.
When we look back at the development history of milk tea, we can see the wildness in the wild period, the thrills in the expansion period, the fierce battles in the iteration period, as well as the competition for capital, the sickle of franchises, and the breakthrough from the trough, but more importantly, it is an industry The mission in the context of the recovery of the national trend - to revive and expand Chinese tea drinks.
There is another model for new tea drinks to enter the "Starbucks of China".
At Starbucks, there are often nervous office workers wearing suits and leather shoes, drinking American food with expressionless faces while tapping the keyboard non-stop.
Coffee has become an industrial stimulant, and the entire environment is filled with anxiety.
But in a post-epidemic era where economic growth is slowing down and black swans are flying around, what young people really need is a spiritual placebo to heal the hesitation and anxiety deep in their hearts.
I suddenly thought of a saying that fits the current situation of leaving the country:
Life is so hard, why not have some candy.
