Bubble tea: the tapioca balls that a staff meeting made famous

In the 1980s, Liu Han-Chieh founded the Chun Shui Tang tea room in Taichung, Taiwan. He began serving Chinese tea cold after seeing Japanese iced coffee in Tokyo. The cold tea was popular, but the shop was still just a local tea house. Nothing about it suggested a global beverage revolution.

In 1988, product development manager Lin Hsiu Hui was at a staff meeting. She had a bowl of tapioca balls (fen yuan), a traditional Taiwanese dessert. On a whim, she poured them into her iced tea. The combination was unusual — chewy tapioca balls in a cold drink. She encouraged her colleagues to try it. They loved it.

The drink was added to the menu. It became Chun Shui Tang's top-selling product. The name 'bubble tea' came from the frothy bubbles that formed when the tea was shaken. The drink spread across Taiwan, then to Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. By the 1990s, it had reached the United States through Taiwanese immigrants.

By 2022, the bubble tea market was valued at $2.4 billion, projected to reach $4.3 billion by 2027. In China, bubble tea consumption was estimated at five times that of coffee. A spontaneous office experiment — a staff member pouring dessert into her drink — had created a worldwide industry. The drink that started as a joke became a cultural phenomenon.