Spend a lot of money to buy Internet celebrity bamboo tube milk tea, can you pour it directly into my mouth next time?

Bamboo probably didn't expect that there would be a day when there would be not enough.

From the bamboo-scented oolong developed in taste, to the bamboo tube milk tea that has swept through CBD business districts across the country, to the "cup in cup" bamboo basket milk tea that even the head brand has begun to try, bamboo is very busy this spring.

The focus on bamboo is linked to a niche brand in Suzhou, Brown Smoke Rain, which launched its first bamboo tube milk tea in April last year. By the spring of this year, the bamboo tube milk tea fever with the city label quickly became popular with its natural Internet celebrity characteristics, and the water test brand has also developed from an emerging "brand" that left after earning this wave to old milk tea such as Seven Points Sweet and CoCo, and even Hema has launched bamboo tube glutinous rice steamed ribs, just to catch a wave of trends.

Source: Public Dianping

"Always go to XXX for bamboo milk tea", thanked and declined. Poor taste, high price, bamboo tube may be reused and decorative need to be strengthened have become the reasons why young people began to get rid of bamboo tube milk tea.

However, the bamboo tube milk tea fever still allows brands to see huge business opportunities, after all, eating Qingtuan and holding a cup of bamboo milk tea on the Qingming Festival is really appropriate. As a result, bamboo basket milk tea has become popular. On March 31, Nai Xue's tea launched a new Longjing series, and you have the opportunity to get a bamboo basket cup holder when you buy it.

Weibo @Nai Xue's tea

When did the milk tea start to make enough tricks on the cup?

This seems to be closely related to the birth of new tea drinks. The new tea drinkers, represented by Heytea, Nai Xue's tea, etc., have become alchemists over the years, with an average of once a week, and the "seasonal limited" menu is getting longer and longer, turning small ingredients into porridge and local niche fruits bigger and stronger.

Perhaps it is difficult to recreate the creation trend in terms of taste and small ingredients, so milk tea people have set their sights on cup marketing. After all, "change the packaging to fire" has become an undeclared law in the heart of the industry. The bamboo tube cup is just one of the countless milk tea cups out of the circle over the years, before the U-shaped cup, fat bottle, luminous bottle... It's all glorious.

But chasing Internet red milk tea is really tiring.

Bamboo: This is a fate I never thought of

Whether the Internet celebrity is real red or fake red, Sanlitun knows.

As the center of the universe, Sanlitun will not be absent from every trend. Bamboo tube milk tea began to appear in Sanlitun, indicating that it was really red. However, compared with the "simple" bamboo tube milk tea in other places, Sanlitun's bamboo tube milk tea is enough to be regarded as a super plus version.

Last week, I specifically went to worship the brand "Nian Nian Nian", which was also making Internet red milk tea before, and found that the bamboo tube milk tea here is stuffed with all the current Internet celebrity elements.

Basic operations such as bamboo tube milk tea and Beijing stickers will naturally not be lacking, and the taste is also composed of the recently popular cream top, fruit cuts, and bases such as Da Hong Pao and avocado, and a cup is about 30 yuan. Unfortunately, "the sweetness and ice degree of tea cannot be chosen", and Sanlitun did not solve the common problem of poor taste of bamboo milk tea. However, following the idea of bamboo tubes, the store also launched matcha-flavored bamboo ice cream.

Source: Public Dianping

The whole store is mainly decorated with yellow and green, and the bamboo-like wall exudes the feeling of an original bamboo forest, which makes you feel healthier at a glance. Of course, such decoration alone is not enough, the store also very intimately put up the Internet red street sign that can be said to be more popular than bamboo milk tea "I'm waiting for you in Sanlitun", don't wait, the society is afraid to use 10 days to relieve the pain of hipsters and old mages at a time.

Such an elaborate and popular decoration does not make people wonder, is it selling milk tea or selling scenes? Perhaps the store has already given the answer, the sign in front of the counter "take a picture first, then taste" to reveal the original intention of the store, you can take a photo if you buy it or not, and you are the most fashionable young person at the moment if you buy a photo.

With the cosmic scroll king in the center of the universe, it is difficult for passers-by not to look twice. However, in the matter of bamboo milk tea fever, Sanlitun can not be regarded as an inventor. Bamboo tube milk tea was launched in April 2022 by Suzhou milk tea brand "Brown Smoke Rain". At the beginning of this year, bamboo milk tea with the Suzhou label began to quickly become popular on social media, and in Xiaohongshu, there are now more than 20,000 related notes.

Bamboo milk tea has even become a symbol of whether a city is noodles. In the popular entry #The world is drinking bamboo milk tea#, it is full of check-in photos from all over the country. Starting from Suzhou, from the first-tier cities in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, down to the new first-tier cities such as Hangzhou and Xiamen Nanchang, as well as many second-, third- and fourth-tier cities, bamboo milk tea began to frantically occupy CBD business districts around the world. In Nanluoguxiang, Beijing, there are five shops selling bamboo milk tea on one street.

More and more stores do not seem to have a substantial impact on the sales of each store, and young people are really chasing bamboo tube milk tea. At the Sanlitun store, after waiting in line for 10 minutes, I had to give up because the movie was about to open. According to Xiaobai, the founder of Brown Smoke, the daily sales of one of his stores are about 1,000 orders, and it will double on weekends and holidays.

In the investigation of Banshu Finance, it was also found that the daily turnover of a bamboo tube milk tea shop in Nanluoguxiang ranged from 120,000 to 450,000 yuan. Under the influence of the bamboo tube milk tea fever, some old milk tea brands have also begun to get a piece of the pie, recently, Seven Points Sweet launched Qingshan Baiyu oolong bamboo tube milk tea, CoCo can launch bamboo shadow cotton taro mud bamboo tube milk tea.

However, it is not only brands and stores that make a lot of money, but also bamboo tube factories upstream of the industrial chain. Mr. Zhong runs a bamboo factory in Xuancheng, Anhui Province, and his bamboo tube business has grown dozens of times in recent months. He mentioned that "there is a feeling of grabbing masks at the beginning of the epidemic", at the beginning the spot was not enough, but as long as it can be guaranteed to supply one day later, the price is good. According to the size, the wholesale price of bamboo tubes is between 2 yuan and more than 3 yuan, and the shipment volume of Zhong Xianwen factory is about five or six thousand a day.

But this bamboo tube milk tea fever came, and the next head was more rapid.

The first is that the taste is really not good. Although bamboo milk tea has a novel appearance, it is more like a semi-finished product. At present, some milk tea shops sell bamboo milk tea in bamboo tubes, but more of them are just bamboo tubes outside ordinary milk tea cups, as was the case in Sanlitun that I experienced.

Since many stores directly add cream tops and fruits to the milk tea that has already been prepared, the temperature, sweetness, etc. of the milk tea cannot be selected. "You can make a cup in 30 seconds, you can understand it as soon as you read it, you can learn it as soon as you can, there is no threshold", such a simple operation makes new tea brands such as Heytea untouchable, and the Heytea who continue to develop new varieties seem to be a big wrongdoer.

The second is the problem of the bamboo tube itself. On March 31, #Is bamboo milk tea originally a recycling tube# On Weibo hot search, some netizens found that there were other tags after the place name tag of bamboo milk tea was torn off, and some netizens saw an aunt cleaning the abandoned bamboo tube in the river. "Buy bamboo tubes used by others at a higher price, and strive to be the biggest wrongdoer," commented some netizens.

Weibo @ All-rounder

Although Xiaobai has publicly stated that he will never use secondary recycled bamboo tubes, "our treatment of bamboo tubes meets the standards of the Market Supervision Bureau and has a test report." "But this does not mean that this industry that is growing wildly will be so considerate to consumers, after all, bamboo tubes are really expensive." According to Xiaobai's estimates, the cost of bamboo tubes is 3-5 times higher than the paper cups used in general milk tea.

It is also the quality control of the bamboo tube itself is not easy to control, and the competition in the entire industry is too intense, so many brands have begun to find another way to make another milk tea related to bamboo - bamboo basket milk tea. Cui Biao, founder of the Shandong brand Shanzhu Tea, which has launched bamboo basket milk tea, pointed out that before the bamboo basket milk tea, bamboo tube milk tea was also considered, but because the repurchase rate of this category was difficult to guarantee, the product was finally presented in a bamboo basket.

Bamboo basket milk tea is the same as milk tea with bamboo tubes on the outside of ordinary milk tea cups, which is a cup-in-cup business. It's hard not to think of Starbucks, but the decorative effect of the bamboo basket seems to be stronger.

On the Little Red Book, netizens made 100 kinds of woven bamboo baskets to make storage baskets, charms, cup covers, etc., and even Nai Xue's tea official provided a lot of new ways to play.

Weibo @Nai Xue's tea

Such a bamboo basket cup sleeve, which is very suitable for spring, especially the Qingming Festival, has appeared and quickly became popular. Nai Xue's new tea well series became the top 1 store sales on the first day of its launch, and many stores had explosive orders. However, this may also be because Nai Xue's tea and ancient tea collide with the master, and the new products are produced by Fan Shenghua, the non-genetic inheritor of West Lake Longjing.

Around the end of last year, niche milk tea brands such as Shandong, Chengdu, Nanjing and Foshan all launched bamboo basket milk tea. The bamboo basket milk tea of "Yamazu Tea" has become a Top1 item in just 2 days; After the Chengdu brand "Chayu" launched bamboo basket milk tea, it sold more than 90,000 cups in 5 days after it was launched, and many stores sold out of stock.

But whether it is a bamboo tube or a bamboo basket, it is often much higher than the cost of an ordinary milk tea cup. Yi Xuanwei, the person in charge of Chayu fruit tea products, said that the bamboo basket cup sleeve is specially looking for a partner to produce traditional handicrafts to reopen the mold. It cannot be mechanized mass production, relying on manual compilation, so the cost will be much higher than that of conventional paper cups or injection molding cups, and there are also greater restrictions on output.

And when consumers are attracted by this Internet celebrity trend, they are actually paying for the value created. However, the high price does not mean good quality, "undelicious" has become the second label of bamboo milk tea, bamboo tube one second is still being photographed, the next second may go into the trash can.

History of milk tea cup transformation: Pour it directly into my mouth next time

Since when did milk tea cups have so many tricks?

The joy of drinking milk tea at the beginning is still very simple.

When milk tea spread from Taiwan to the mainland in the 90s of the last century, the cup was unpretentious. At that time, milk tea cups were very cheap, after all, milk tea was also cheap.

Three cups of cheap saccharin milk tea and soft blister cups at the school gate constitute many childhood memories of the 80s and 90s. At that time, the most high-end milk tea was the subway, and the 8-piece cup of first love was once a luxury in my junior high school.

Little Red Book @ Liuzhou middle-aged uncle

Later, new tea drinkers were born. China's milk tea industry has undergone earth-shaking changes, with richer categories and higher prices. At this time, it is obvious that a cheap milk tea cup is not worth the price of 30.

The soft blister cup has become a harder injection molding cup, and at the same time the rise of the in-mold paste process (previously mostly color printing technology, low color saturation, printing accuracy is not high, in-mold sticker technology mentions the appearance, precision, safety of the cup) Many tea shop cups on the LOGO, pattern, laser, fluorescence and other special effects, are achieved through the first generation of in-mold technology, such as CoCo can cooperate with the cosmetics brand DHC launched the "Meng Bomb Series" laser cup.

"Especially in recent years, the 'in-mold labeling' technology has been popularized in China, and many brands in the industry have begun to use in-mold labeling injection molding cups, which has become a new trend in the current tea industry. Brands such as Heytea, Naixue, Lele Tea, and Chabaido are all using 'in-mold labeling cups' on a large scale. Liu Wei, manager of Minggao packaging company who has been engaged in the milk tea packaging industry for many years, pointed out.

It was at this time that my cheap love of the subway began to fade. New tea drinkers began to show their skills in the milk tea "cup" session.

First change on the cup. The previous blister cups, injection molded cups, and later paper cups, environmental protection cups, etc. belong to the creation of milk tea in the cup, and the more out of the circle is the previously popular answer tea, which claims to be divination, write questions on the waist seal, and the answer will appear after opening the lid, creating a new social play for milk tea.

Little Red Book @ Meat-loving pig rabbit

Recently on the cusp of the storm is Bawang Chaji, the new season limited cup body is all Barbie powder, officially named "dopamine powder". Some netizens pointed out that this color copied Valentino powder, and even the pattern looked like Chanel's camellia, and pointed out that Bawang Chaji had also copied the style of luxury goods such as Gucci and Dior before. Whether the color has copyright or not is another matter, but these controversies have not affected the cooperation between Bawang Chaji and GQ with a "fan" and appeared on the hot search, causing more than 30 million onlookers, and the strategy has worked.

Little Red Book @Erica Durian said

Then there's the co-branding craze. There are too many joint names, and the IP is about to be overdrawn to "kidney loss". I don't know when it started, film and television dramas will be co-branded with milk tea as soon as they are new, Heytea co-branded "The Legend of Zhen Huan" when it was catching up with the national new crown, "I Ulanara must drink a big orange painting pear today", the joint product since October 24 after the release of the joint product, some Heytea offline stores have exploded orders, and even familiar errands buying business has appeared on second-hand platforms such as idle fish. In addition to "The Legend of Zhen Huan", according to financial statistics, in the first half of 2022 alone, there were more than 30 joint names, of which Heytea accounted for 13 cases, an average of two in January, involving cooperation with games, film and television, beauty and other fields. IP is tired, brands are busy, and consumers are dazzled. Finally, the cup evolved to the point where you couldn't see it was a cup. In order to highlight the product characteristics, some milk teas have been modified on the cup. For example, the fruit tea brand "Sweet Lala" upgraded the milk tea cup to a milk tea barrel in order to present large pieces of fruit, and sold 400,000 cups on the first day of the new year, and it was also at that time that it became popular to carry milk tea "tons and tons";

Little Red Book @ Aunt Autumn Pants

Also carried was Thai milk tea, but the container changed from a barrel to a cheaper plastic bag. When the editor recommended Chunlai to me, he promised that the straw would not leak when he plunged in, but later I took a milk tea bath directly because I didn't pay attention to it;

Little Red Book @ Fan Fan Love to Eater

When dirty tea is popular, in order to reflect the effect of hanging on the wall, Lujiao Alley also creates a product-exclusive cup-type fat cup;

Little Red Book @ White Three Bowls

Until today, bamboo is also considered like this. However, in comparison, the false coat of bamboo milk tea in cup seems to be just to become an Internet celebrity, after all, there is no change in taste or material. Young people think they are chasing trends, but they don't know that it is more like buying a blind box that cuts corners.

There are also some milk tea cups that have been converted for special scenes. For example, in order to cater to the opening of the World Cup in Qatar, Yihetang specially designed the "Football Cup" for its slightly drunk milk beer; Suge Fresh Fruit Tea also launched a glowing "bungee cup" for young people who like to party, selling a total of 6,000 cups in 10 hours.

Little Red Book @ Yihetang beating workers

and some cup-shaped modifications that turn out of the loop. Inspired by the classic "Zumalon perfume", Throbbing Roasted Immortal Grass launched a new autumn product "Perfume Tea" called "English Pear & Freesia", which sold out in two days; Happy sweet potatoes once introduced extra-long cups longer than girls' small arms... There are also soda bottles, wine bottles, vinegar bottles, bracelet cups, etc., and brands have tried every shape they can think of.

Little Red Book @ Sugar Sugar Nine Sweet

"Tea cups are not only containers, but also an important way for brands to 'communicate' with consumers, and innovative and high-quality and affordable beverage cups are the development trend of the future tea packaging market." Liu Wei pointed out. It is also in this process that the role of milk tea cups has gradually evolved from simple practicality to "Internet celebrities" with high appearance.

Yang Xilong, founder of Guangfangyuan, said that the appearance of the cup is an increase in the added value of the product, and some psychological hints are given from the appearance value or vision, resulting in an improvement of taste buds.

However, even if bamboo milk tea makes a hodgepodge of all the hottest "small ingredients" at the moment, it cannot solve the most basic problem of "difficult to drink".

Now I even think that brands are now more careful about developing packaging than improving the taste of milk tea, and throwing out milk tea and keeping packaging waste will not be worse because it is difficult to drink. However, spending 30 yuan to buy a bamboo tube, this kind of loss is estimated that normal people will only eat once.

Of course, looking back at the historical development process, the milk tea industry is also difficult to save up in terms of taste, from the ancient stage of vegetable fat powder, rubber pearls, to the era of high-quality milk tea with fresh milk fresh fruit and fresh milk cover, and now in the small material whole, popping beads, probiotics, drinking a cup of milk tea is like drinking a bowl of beauty porridge. The taste of milk tea needs to go to a new level, and brands should also move their little heads.

After that, I hope that the milk tea brand can add an option, do not package less charge, and then directly pour it into my mouth.

(The beginning of the article is Little Red Book: Fire Sheep)