On a sunny Thursday afternoon, the Covent Garden branch of Gong cha is bustling. Staff work tirelessly behind the counter, preparing a variety of drinks for a steady stream of customers who order from an electronic pad. One customer leaves with a purple taro-flavored drink, another sips on milky tea with brown sugar “pearls,” and a third grabs a passion fruit-flavored beverage adorned with floating coconut jelly.
Scenes like this are increasingly common as bubble tea shops like Gong cha proliferate across the UK. Wisbech in Cambridgeshire has just welcomed its first shop, Just Poppin; Canterbury in Kent boasts six bubble tea outlets; and a new branch of American bubble tea brand CoCo recently drew crowds down Glasgow’s Bath Street.
High-street staples are also jumping on the bubble tea bandwagon. Costa Coffee, after experimenting with bubble tea last year, now offers three bubble tea frappés on its summer menu alongside its traditional iced teas. Supermarkets have added DIY bubble tea kits to their shelves, signaling that this intriguing drink is finally getting its moment in the spotlight.
The origins of bubble tea, also known as boba tea, are debated but generally trace back to 1980s Taiwan. The first version was a shaken iced tea with fruit flavoring, named for the froth on top. Eventually, someone added tapioca pearls—a starch from cassava roots popular in desserts—to the mix. These chewy balls, or “boba” (meaning “balls” in Cantonese), typically sink to the bottom of the drink.
Despite associations with school tapioca pudding, the combination of refreshing milky tea, sugar, and chewy pearls quickly gained popularity in Taiwan, leading to tens of thousands of boba outlets in the country today. China has hundreds of thousands, and the drink has created millionaires and even billionaires out of some chain founders.
“It took a while for it to reach the western world,” says Assad Khan, CEO of UK brand Bubbleology. After discovering the drink in New York, Khan opened his first shop in Soho, London, in 2011, near the capital’s Chinatown. Bubbleology now has 42 outlets, 33 in the UK, alongside other new independent names and retailers from Taiwan and China.
Paul Reynish, global CEO at Gong cha, attributes the growth to the relatively low barrier to entry for bubble tea shops. “You don’t need much to run a bubble tea shop, although that depends on your quality credentials,” he says. Gong cha, known for using high-quality “single garden” tea as a base, originated in Taiwan in 1996 and now has over 2,100 branches worldwide. In the UK, new branches are opening in Bristol, Norwich, and later this year, Belfast. “Most of the growth has come in the last five years,” Reynish notes. “It’s going gangbusters.”
As Britain continues to embrace bubble tea, it seems this once-niche drink has found a lasting place in the nation’s heart.
