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Starbucks bubble tea11/9/2023 ![]() ![]() It’s rare to see a boba business give credit to the origin of a drink, regardless of how special it may seem. While true heads know the best boba chains and their various specialties, most boba shops will offer a gazillion options and not announce if they started because they saw another business was drawing long lines for it. Once they hit a win, another boba shop will imitate and sell it as their own faster than you can say “ QQ.” Boba culture has long been an arms race to find the hot (or iced) new drink at any given moment: Shops experiment with new toppings and drinks at an incredible pace, expanding the boba canon quickly. Just as Starbucks convinced America to adopt faux-sophisticated Italian coffee culture, bobafication can open more eyes to the pure joy and whimsy of drinking dessert at three o’clock in the afternoon.īut for better or for worse, the culture around boba shops has always been about copying each other’s homework. It points to a development beyond the Frappuccino: Bobafication abandons the idea that a frothy sweet drink should double as a boost for “caffeine” or “productivity.” Gen Z TikTok trends are essentially forcing the chain to go to great lengths for customization. The salted cream cold foam is a doppelganger for the sleeper hit of boba shops, cheese tea. It’s not just brown sugar syrup that Starbucks has adopted, either. Most shops have a level of choice that makes early Starbucks orders look like child’s play: base drink, fruit purées, foams, ice levels, sugar levels, and, most important, textures. The boba shop is a place of constant innovation and endless customization, like if Willy Wonka expanded to the beverage market. ![]() The bobafication of American drink culture is, in my opinion, by far the best thing to happen to our nonalcoholic drink scene in decades. More cafés across America are finally learning the art of bobafication. It showed up at other bubble tea shops, at restaurants, and then finally, almost unbelievably, it showed up at Starbucks. The absolute must-try invention of Taiwanese boba shops was the brown sugar drink, and like any successful recipe, it got copied. ![]() All of a sudden, it could be seen stylishly dripping down milk everywhere- on social media, in freezer aisles, and most often, in plastic cups held primarily by youths. If I had to guess, I’d say it started with the brown sugar syrup. ![]()
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