BUSINESS CHINESE DAIRY USE
Hey Tea shops have popped up all over China, with a clean modern look and an online ordering service through WeChat. The shops offers more than 50 different flavours of cheese tea, along with bubble tea and a few hot drinks. The first HeyTea shop in Shanghai opened a few years ago with a 4-5 hour wait time to collect your order.
Chinese tea, with a cream twist Words by: Hunter McGregor
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ne of my favourite quotes is that the “Chinese consumers are not westernising but they are modernising”. This means that there are a number of unique Chinese trends that are happening here and many of them are changing consumer behaviours. The rise of cream cheese on top of tea drinks is a new and interesting market trend. This trend is credited to be started by a 21-year-old named Nie Yunchen. In 2012 he opened a milk tea shop in the small city of Jiangmen in Guangdong province near Hong Kong. He started selling milk teas topped with a salty layer of cream cheese. By 2020 Nie’s HeyTea has 695 stores in 67 cities around China and the private company has an estimated value of around $3.46 billion NZD (16 Billion RMB) as of the middle of last year. 26
Like anything in China, there are a number of other large cream cheese tea players as well so it is a very large and competitive industry. By the end of 2020, the number of new style tea consumers reached 340 million and this is growing. The market is predicted to reach 365 million people by the end of 2021. As luck would have it, one of HeyTea's 102 shops in Shanghai is near my home. I don’t normally drink HeyTea’s products but I did ‘go out for tea’ for the purpose of this article. First impressions of the shop is that it's modern, bright and has a great feel about it. The four people working behind the counter were busy, and as I was about to find out, they were flat out! The only way to order is via scanning a QR code to use their WeChat shop. (WeChat is the Chinese equivalent of Facebook messenger but with ecommerce functions). WeChat is a super app, which covers just about
“Cream cheese with that Sir?”
everything, messaging right through to news, shopping and payments. Scanning a QR code within the WeChat app to purchase something is very common now and is easy to use. To my surprise,
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | June 2021
