How Much Money Does Boba Guys Make
They've Made Lots of Bubble Tea. Now They'll Make the Pearls Also.
The Boba Guys chain has opened a Bay Area factory to produce the tapioca pearls that define the popular beverage.
The partners behind Boba Guys, a chain of bubble-tea cafes, already made their own infusions and syrups to get with the tea leaves they imported from Cathay, Taiwan and Japan. A few years ago, they got to thinking, why not make the pleasingly chewy tapioca pearls from scratch, too?
It turned out that the industrial machinery used past factories in Taiwan, which produce well-nigh of the tapioca pearls for bubble tea, also known as boba, was expensive. And the two Boba founders, Andrew Chau and Bin Chen, didn't have a big enough need for the production to justify the investment.
But at present the company, which started as a Bay Area pop-up in 2011, has 12 locations all over the country and plans to add together three more than by the cease of 2018. This year , Mr. Chau and Mr. Chen finally opened their dream manufacturing plant, US Boba Visitor, in Hayward, Calif. The 18,000-square-foot tapioca-pearl plant, a former pasta factory, is a joint business venture with David Fan of Fanale Drinks, a chimera-tea supplier.
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The new, California-made pearls have been bobbing in cups of milk tea in Bay Area stores since Baronial, and earlier the end of the year they will be in all of Mr. Chau and Mr. Chen's shops, equally well as eight locations of Teaspoon, Mr. Fan's bubble-tea chain.
Learning the pearl-making technique has involved several months of trial and mistake considering the method is so guarded by companies in Taiwan. "It's a very delicate process and information technology takes a lot of patience," Mr. Fan said.
Here are the steps:
Mixing
The manufactory imports tapioca starch, a pulverisation made from the cassava plant root, from Thailand. Workers combine it in an industrial mixer with brown sugar syrup, water, potassium sorbate and guar gum, to produce a damp, caramel-colored powder.
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Beading
This powder, the base for the tapioca pearl, is transferred to a machine where a worker mists information technology lightly with water. The powder spins around, continuously moistened and scraped to encourage the formation of minor starter beads. Too much water, and the starch clumps. Likewise little, and the chaplet won't course.
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Tumbling
Some other machine rolls the beads effectually faster with more than water as a worker gradually adds more than of the mixed tapioca starch. The chaplet grow like cartoon snowballs racing downwards a hill.
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Sorting
When the pearls are large, they are carried along a conveyor belt to a filter. US Boba Visitor looks for pearls that are about 9.five to 10.5 millimeters wide. Smaller pearls are returned to the tumbler to abound. Larger pearls are broken down into powder to start the process once more .
Prototype
Mr. Fan says the visitor is still tweaking the technique for efficiency, and to achieve an ideal — and uniform — texture and size. It'due south also experimenting with new flavors for the American marketplace, like stake green matcha pearls fabricated with uji matcha from Japan.
Once at the chimera-tea shops, the pearls are cooked in boiling water and so steamed . If they're well made, Mr. Fan said, they are polish, spherical and evenly tender all the way through, simply not squishy. They also have to be exactly the correct size, so they can rush up a straw without getting stuck.
Mr. Chau estimates that the Boba Guys shops use most two 1000000 straws a year. He has been researching harbinger materials, sizes and shapes, in grooming for a ban on unmarried-use plastic straws that goes into consequence in San Francisco next July.
"In my office, I literally accept a museum of straws," Mr. Chau said, "I could write a history of straws."
Before the ban arrives, the company plans to switch from plastic to compostable straws made of newspaper and sugar cane for its California locations. That would be a challenge for any company, but for a bubble-tea shop, information technology also means recalibrating the size of the tapioca pearls.
"We're going a picayune smaller," Mr. Chau said.
In January, Mr. Chau, Mr. Chen and Mr. Fan volition present their American-made tapioca pearls at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. Though the United states Boba Company has merely a few employees, Mr. Chau says it will scale upwards as product increases — and he is counting on production increasing.
Epitome
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As he points out, bubble tea isn't a novelty. The drink, which was invented in the 1980s and get-go gained popularity in Taiwan, is internationally beloved, with many millions of drinkers worldwide, and an essential part of social life for many Americans.
Still, many are unfamiliar with the drink. So Mr. Chau says the new factory will eventually offer tours, with the goal of demystifying bubble tea.
Mr. Fan, who has been drinking bubble tea since he was about 10, said he hoped boba could ane mean solar day follow the route of pizza — an immigrant food that, over fourth dimension, became distinctly American.
"That's why we desire to make the whole procedure transparent," he said. "People are only afraid of things they don't know."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/dining/us-boba-company-bay-area.html
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