Home > Business > Industry

Chinese milk tea brands gaining ground in Korea with Jang Won-young endorsement

Published: 06 Feb. 2026, 05:00

CHO YONG-JUN
[email protected]

IVE's Jang Won-young drinks Chagee's milk tea in a livestream during her visit to Guangzhou, China in January [SCREEN CAPTURE]

IVE member Jang Won-young took a sip of an unfamiliar milk tea and was so surprised that she abruptly ended her livestream during a visit to China in January, sparking a frenzy among fans eager to identify the captivating brand.

That brand turned out to be Chagee, a Nasdaq-listed Chinese tea chain that had yet to enter the Korean market, but had already piqued consumer curiosity ahead of its planned launch in the first half of this year.

“Chagee is currently preparing to enter the Korean market, but we are still at the early stages of preparation,” the chain's Korean representatives told the Korea JoongAng Daily, without specifying their timeline for opening.

The entry came at a time when milk tea stands at the forefront of new beverage culture, as many young consumers embrace alternatives to coffee.

For many years, the only well-known milk tea franchise was Gong Cha, but Chinese brands like ChaPanda and Heytea have already begun to win the hearts of Koreans.

Visiting a ChaPanda branch in Mapo District in western Seoul and a HeyTea store in Myeong-dong in central Seoul on a weekday, there was a noticeable number of young customers either drinking milk tea or waiting for their takeaways.

“In Gong Cha, you don’t often see a drink like this with such a big emphasis on fruit,” a customer named Lee Soo-hyun said. Lee, who went for the mango pomelo sago drink, said she still drinks bubble tea from Gong Cha, but prefers ChaPanda more recently due to its unique offerings.

Milk tea landscape in Korea

The concept of milk tea — but more specifically bubble tea with tapioca pearls — is far from a new thing in Korea. Drinks that mix tea with milk and sometimes pearls first became mainstream following the entry of Gong Cha, a Taiwanese milk tea and bubble tea brand , into the Korean market in 2012. The brand introduced the concept of mix-and-match in milk tea drinks: first choosing the base tea, whether that be green tea, black tea or oolong tea; adding tapioca pearls, jellies or cheese foams; and finally, adjusting the ice and sugar levels to customer tastes.

The popularity of bubble tea, and more specifically the love of Gong Cha, even led to the Korean arm of the brand acquiring its parent company in Taiwan for a moment in 2017, before being bought in turn by the U.S.-based private equity firm TA Associates. The brand still holds a prominent position in Korea, with nearly 900 stores nationwide, almost half the number of Starbucks stores in the country, 2,114.

Milk tea then briefly changed in the 2010s when Taiwanese brands like The Alley and Tiger Sugar brought the short-lived brown sugar craze, where milk tea — or in some cases, milk without any tea — coated with sweet brown sugar captivated the tongues of young Koreans before dying down a few years later.

The milk tea landscape of today in Korea is somewhat mixed. Despite Gong Cha still being the undisputable No. 1 tea brand in Korea, the number of its stores in the country has remained stagnant over the past few years, never quite reaching the 1,000-branch milestone.

While Gong Cha releases new drinks and variations every month — including a weird tteokbokki (spicy rice cake) milk tea — and boasts that they have sold a total of 80 million cups of black milk tea since 2012, it’s still far short of the 100 million cups of grapefruit honey black tea sold by Starbucks in Korea over the last decade.

A Chagee store in Singapore [CHAGEE]

The second coming of tea franchises

But the recent Chinese milk tea brands that have entered the Korean market are not just mere knockoffs of Gong Cha. Far from it.

Chagee has successfully differentiated itself from the crowded Chinese market by opting for a more premium position. The brand uses whole leaf tea and fresh milk over tea and milk powders mixed with water. It also doesn’t offer tapioca pearls as an add-on, a decision that allows drinkers to focus on the taste of the tea and decide whether they like it or not on its own.

Chagee’s tea offerings are also more diverse than those typically offered by brands in Korea. Instead of the simple black, green, oolong and jasmine teas, the brand offers specific variations such as Tie Guan Yin Emerald, White Peach Oolong, Osmanthus Long Jing and Camellia Oolong, much like teas offered in high-end teahouses.

Customers hold up ChaPanda milk teas in Korea. [CHAPANDA]

ChaPanda, on the other hand, focuses more on its fresh fruit-based drinks, such as Jeju tangerine, mango pomelo sago, watermelon jelly tea, and shine musket tea. Notably, ChaPanda stores have fruits on its shelves to emphasize their usage of real fruits.

The company said it chose Korea as its first overseas expansion location because the country has a very mature beverage culture, pioneered by coffee chains like Starbucks, but still lacks a tea culture.

“The Korean milk tea industry is still in its early stages of growth and despite Taiwanese-style milk tea brands starting the endeavor, the market size is still limited,” a ChaPanda spokesperson said, adding that there was “basically zero awareness” of fruit teas.

“Some customers saw the fruits displayed next to our counters and asked if ChaPanda was a fruit shop.”

ChaPanda said the brand is planning to open a total of 100 stores in Korea by the end of this year, including stores outside Seoul.

A ChaPanda store in western Seoul displays fruits inside a transparent refrigerator display. [CHO YONG-JUN]

ChaPanda said it had a lot of customers returning to the brand after their first visit and emphasized that over 70 percent of its customers are Korean customers. Many Chinese milk tea shops often have Chinese students and tourists alike as its main customers.

Similarly, HeyTea also pitches the freshness of the tea as a selling point, offering more upmarket milk tea options. The brand is also known as the pioneer of milk tea with cream cheese foam as a topping.

Interestingly, the HeyTea branch in Myeong-dong, central Seoul, had as many Koreans as Chinese-speaking customers during a weekday visit, underscoring its popularity among both Koreans and foreign residents in the country.

The higher price often demanded by the Chinese milk tea brands, however, is still its weakest point.

“The HeyTea milk tea I chose does taste better than the Gong Cha I usually drink, but I’m not sure if it justifies the higher price,” said Lim Hyun-jun, after trying HeyTea’s tiramisu milk tea for the first time. The brand’s tiramisu milk tea costs 7,500 won ($5.18), almost 2,000 won more than the chocolate milk tea sold by Gongcha — though that doesn’t have the fancy tiramisu topping HeyTea does.