Source丨Blue Shark Consumption ** Category Iteration** ****The development history of China's freshly made tea drinks is a textbook case of consumption upgrading. In the 1980s, brands represented by Quickly introduced pearl milk tea from Taiwan to the mainland. The products used tea powder and non-dairy creamer as main ingredients, forming a primitive form of "no tea, no milk," priced at around 5 yuan. This high-sugar, low-cost product satisfied the innate preference of young people for sweetness at the time, but lacked real tea aroma and nutritional value, with extremely low brand barriers, quickly falling into homogeneous competition. Starting in 2006, chain tea drink brands like CoCo Fresh Tea & Juice emerged, beginning to use real tea leaves to brew tea soup, paired with fresh milk or creamer, raising the price range to 10-20 yuan. Subsequently, tea drink brands began to "put effort" into tea leaf extraction processes and dairy product formula improvements, focusing on tea base quality and flavor differentiation, and subsequent product innovations largely followed this line of thinking. Around 2015, brands like Heytea and Naixue Tea burst onto the scene, popularizing the phenomenal cheese cap tea, and the freshly made tea drink industry entered a new stage of development. Since then, new tea drinks have frequently produced "blockbusters," and new tea drink brands have risen in succession. The reason cheese cap tea became popular, from a morphological perspective, is that it created a unique cheese cap covering the tea soup; but fundamentally, it used a high-quality tea leaf base and cleverly blended cream cheese with fresh milk, achieving a quality upgrade of "real milk and real tea," significantly differentiating it from traditional milk tea. A 90s-born Ms. Li, who has worked in Beijing for ten years, recalled: "The first time I tasted cheese cap tea, the salty and fragrant cap paired with the refreshing tea base felt like opening a new world. Back then, I would queue for one or two hours for a cup, and even willing to pay a high price for a proxy purchase." Subsequently, major tea drink brands began to develop their own characteristics in product differentiation. Source: Heytea Official Website Heytea and Naixue Tea successively launched fresh fruit tea products such as "Boss Yangmei" and "Full Cup Grapefruit," bringing the industry into the "real tea + fresh fruit" stage, greatly enriching the taste layers and nutritional value of tea drinks. Especially in 2018, the launch of Heytea's "Duo Rou Grape" (Juicy Grape), with its plump pulp and unique taste, became a signature product for the following years, prompting brands like Guming, Naixue, and Lelecha to follow suit. Other tea drink brands were also "unwilling to be outdone." That year, Shuyi Xiancao focused on grass jelly drinks, proposing the slogan "Half a cup is ingredients," not only making a category popular but also bringing the brand into a rapid development period, with over 1,000 stores opened that year. In the same year, 7Fen Tian focused on mango drinks, completed store upgrades, created a visual positioning of yellow + logo 7, and also popularized the mango pomelo sago trend. In fact, new tea drink brands began to form different product upgrade routes around 2019: Heytea and Chabaidao insisted on the "fresh fruit tea" positioning, while沪上阿姨 (Auntie Shanghai) also joined that year, transitioning from "grain milk tea" to the fresh fruit tea track, seizing the opportunity to enter the southern market. Chagee insisted on the light milk tea positioning, with "Bo Ya Jue Xian" as its flagship product, gradually becoming popular in the consumer market. During the development process, major new tea drink brands also continuously borrowed "blockbuster products" from peers, leading to a product competition pattern of "you have me, I have you." However, it is worth noting that major brands have deeply explored raw materials, formulas, and flavor innovations to find breakthroughs. For example, Heytea is committed to self-developing tea bases, having tried more than 40 types of tea leaves, while Chagee emphasizes original leaf fresh extraction, using Chinese-style brewing to differentiate from ordinary "milk tea flavor." Meanwhile, various fresh fruit and fresh milk elements have been tried one by one, becoming one of the biggest features of new tea drink differentiation. "The Great Shuffle" Looking at the rise of new tea drink brands, almost all started from a popular category and then extended into different development strategies: one continues the single blockbuster product strategy, while the other makes products more diversified. Blue Shark Consumption Chart In the early stages of development, the single blockbuster product strategy had huge advantages. For example, Shuyi Xiancao highly focused on the grass jelly category, enabling deep research and continuous optimization of products, forming a complete set of standardized processes from raw material selection to production techniques. In terms of operational management, staff only need to master the production processes of a few core products, reducing training costs and time, and improving cup output efficiency and quality consistency. In terms of supply chain efficiency, focusing on a single blockbuster product allows raw material procurement, warehousing and logistics, and store production to achieve economies of scale, reducing costs. Besides Shuyi Xiancao, Chagee also achieved extreme standardization in the light milk tea category—introducing highly automated tea-making equipment, where employees only need simple operations, and the machine can precisely complete key steps such as tea extraction and syrup addition, thereby minimizing the impact of human factors and ensuring the taste of each cup is consistent. However, the disadvantages of the single blockbuster product strategy are also obvious. For new tea drinks, consumers have a strong "novelty seeking" mentality. Once the freshness of a category fades, if the brand does not have continuous product innovation capabilities to retain them, they will not hesitate to "vote with their feet" and turn to the next hot spot. Brands with single and rigid product structures and slow innovation speed will be quickly abandoned by consumers. For example, Shuyi Xiancao, which once relied on the single product "grass jelly" to rapidly expand through franchise dividends in lower-tier markets, saw its single product structure become a fatal Achilles' heel as consumer tastes shifted to more refreshing and healthy categories like lemon tea and fresh milk tea. Narrow Door Restaurant Data shows that as of January 9, 2026, Shuyi Xiancao has 4,775 existing stores. In 2021, at its peak, Shuyi Xiancao had over 7,000 stores nationwide, ranking among the top 3 in the new tea drink industry, but now it has fallen out of the top five. When category heat fades, brands are quickly marginalized. Similarly, Mo Milk Yogurt also failed due to the "one trick, eat everywhere" rule. Mo Milk Yogurt was once popular with the concept of "yogurt + snacks," but the high cost of the yogurt base, relatively slow production speed, and limited flavor innovation space around yogurt itself collectively stifled its potential for long-term scale expansion. In the fresh fruit tea track, brands focusing on a single category also find it hard to sustain. For example, Linji, as the pioneer of hand-made lemon tea, was quickly diluted by countless imitators after 2023, falling into a quagmire of homogeneous competition. Chagee once successfully overtook competitors with its differentiated light milk tea products, high-end brand strategy, and "big single product + efficiency" strategy, but as consumers experience aesthetic fatigue, from Heytea, Mixue Ice City to Luckin Coffee, all have launched light milk tea products. Chagee, which is slow in launching new products, may fall into a passive position. According to Chagee's prospectus, from 2022 to 2024, Chagee launched 14, 22, and 15 new products respectively, and in 2025 it was even slower (only 8 new products). According to the "2025 China Beverage Industry Research Report," from 2022 to 2024, Heytea launched 60, 63, and 48 new products each year; Guming launched 55, 70, and 51; Chabaidao launched 43, 53, and 60; and Luckin launched 83, 63, and 77. The number of new products launched by these brands is almost three times that of Chagee. In contrast, fresh fruit tea brands like Heytea can bring freshness to consumers by exploring different fruits and trying different flavor combinations, which is also the greatest momentum for them to maintain their first-tier brand status. But at the same time, the diversified product route also has its own drawbacks. In fact, since Duo Rou Grape, it has been difficult for the fresh fruit tea category to produce "big blockbusters." In 2025, riding on the popularity of "The Litchi of Chang'an," litchi stood at the center of the fruit tea battle—various litchi-limited products were launched in succession, and many brands participated in co-branding. Even so, no phenomenal product like Duo Rou Grape emerged. According to a report by Hongcan Industry Research Institute, in 2024, new tea drink brands launched a total of 1,895 new products, with fruit tea accounting for 35.6%, ranking first. Innovation in fresh fruit tea has also shifted from common fruits to niche fruits. For example, in 2025, Amo Handmade's fresh green mango iced tea sold well, Jasmine Milk White launched a floral special blend of green mango and yellow peel iced tea, and Heytea used niche fruits with regional characteristics such as Yunnan sour papaya and Xishuangbanna Litsea cubeba in its new products. Even so, no blockbuster that lasted for years has emerged. In this regard, a new tea drink entrepreneur who has worked at well-known brands such as Heytea and Chabaidao revealed that many niche fruits are not actually expensive, and material costs are controllable; what costs more is educating the market to let consumers understand and accept these regional fruits. In addition to the difficulty of producing blockbusters, diversified products like fresh fruit tea also face a thorny issue—complex supply chains. Austin, Heytea's supply chain fruit and vegetable development procurement director, once pointed out: "Consumers' needs for drinking fruit and eating fruit are also fundamentally different." He said that fruit retail enterprises focus on fruit taste, making consumers feel delicious and sweet; but for new tea drink brands, drinking fruit must be flavor-oriented, not just sweet, but also sour, aromatic, and able to pair with other fruits. This means brands need to invest more resources in raw material quality control. Currently, Heytea's fruit management covers 30+ fruit categories, 80+ varieties, and 100+ domestic and international origins, and its raw material and supply chain management has entered deep waters. Going to the fields has become a common move for new tea drink giants—for example, Mixue Ice City's lemon planting bases in Sichuan and Chongqing have reduced its lemon procurement cost from 4 yuan per kilogram to 1 yuan; Chabaidao's tea leaf factory was officially put into operation in May last year, taking the first step in self-producing important raw materials; Guming has also built its own perfume lemon planting base in Xishuangbanna... However, as categories continue to innovate, the complexity of supply chain management is also rising, which is a huge challenge for new tea drink brands, potentially falling into an "endless war of supply chain management." Which is more advantageous, the single blockbuster product strategy or the diversification strategy? Time will tell.
**【Moving Toward the C-End】******The 11th China FMCG ConferenceTime: March 16-18, 2026Location: Chengdu, China**