Social media has latched its greedy hands into many things, creating trends that craze the world for a while before moving on to the next thing. The users of apps like TikTok or Instagram crave the new and inventive. But trends rarely last long. Many trends, from dances to fashion to vocabulary, die within days or a handful of months after their brief stint of fame. However, there is one that began growing in popularity and has not stopped since: Boba. Boba, or Bubble tea as nicknamed by the media, is a drink that originated in Taiwan. Its popularity comes from the tapioca balls, warm and chewy, that sink to the bottom of creamy milk tea. The plastic cup is then sealed tightly with a plastic film, through which then the customer stabs a hole with a large straw that has one end sharpened. It’s perhaps that satisfaction that comes from the stabbing, or the mixture of chewy balls with tea that made it become as great a sensation as it currently is.
Milk tea started in Taiwan in the late 80s. While the specific origins are still debated, it gained popularity among street vendors rapidly. In hopes of cornering the market, many turned to experimenting with fruits, syrups, and other types of jellies similar to the tapioca balls. Soon enough, the Taiwanese-American communities in the United States began to make their own versions, as any immigrant does with the food from their home country. Stores appeared here and there, especially in California, and San Gabriel Valley quickly rose as the home of boba shops. The Asian-American communities quickly accepted and adopted the drink, and in no time there were shops on every corner. They rapidly became a staple of the community, and a common hangout space for teens and adults alike. One of whom went on to improve it even more. Her name is Stacey Kwong.
Given the amount of boba shops around her, it wasn’t uncommon for Kwong “to work at boba shops, hang out at boba shops, go on first dates at boba shops,” and so on. Boba shops were an important part of her life, in terms of socialization and connecting with the culture, and yet there was one small problem: tapioca balls aren’t the only topping that you can put in the drink. There are other things, such as Kwong’s favorites egg pudding and lychee jelly. In most shops, however, they always cost extra. “It was always 50 to 75 cents for every single topping and I was like, you know what? One day I’m going to open my own shop.”
And so, Milk+T was born. In December 2015, Kwong and her business partner Beyah Del Mondo opened the first-ever self-serving boba truck with unlimited toppings. No more paying extra for toppings. In their small, refitted food truck, the two would take on the streets of Los Angeles and amass lines of customers that went around the block. Upkeeping a food truck is a lot of work, though. “The truck was very hands on for [Beyah] and I. We would prep the truck, clean the truck, drive the truck, gas up the truck– everything from A to Z, it was us.” Trucks break down easily, sometimes simply not turning on. The issue is that the tapioca balls, the boba itself, is prepared beforehand. They are made with brown sugar, tapioca flour, water, and two long hours of effort and patience. Being a self-serving boba truck with unlimited toppings meant that they didn’t just prepare boba, but they prepared a lot, which in turn meant that if they couldn’t sell it due to a broken truck, they had to throw it away.
“The first couple of times that happened, we tried taking the boba home and eating it ourselves, but obviously that’s not healthy.”
After enough batches of boba were thrown away, an opportunity for a brick and mortar of their own presented itself. They sold the truck grateful for its use but also happy to not have to deal with it anymore and opened their shop in Los Angeles. Nowadays, Milk+T has three stores with 12-hour opening days. The first original one in Los Angeles, one in Chicago, and one in Beaverton. The hunt for a brick and mortar in Oregon had been Portland, as the city offered the ambience Kwong and Del Mondo were looking for when deciding the new location. However, they were offered a better opportunity in Beaverton, a thirty-odd minute drive from Portland, than they could’ve found in downtown Portland. Yet, despite the change to brick and mortar, and the expansion beyond L.A., the shop maintains its original small-business charm from the truck days.
Milk+T offers a variety of options. Some of their drinks remain close to the original Taiwanese drink –Assam black tea or Jasmine green tea, with powdered creamer, and tapioca balls– while others put a bit of a creative spin to the beloved drink. The most notorious is their Sip N’ Dip menu.
From a first glance, this section of the menu looks bizarre. Among the traditional boba drinks, Milk+T offers boba with ice cream on top. My first encounter with the shop was one of these bizarre combinations, the Double Shot, which is cold brew with condensed milk and coffee ice cream. While this specific bizarre combination doesn’t actually have tea, the other Sip N’ Dips do. While talking with Kwong, I had to ask about it. Never had I seen another boba shop put ice cream on their drinks, so initially I thought it must’ve been simply an Americanized version of the drink. Kwong explained that while not a traditional addition to the drink, it wasn’t the product of Americanization. Boba, despite being as popular as it is, is not as Americanized as it could be. “I would say if you’re in Portland, Beaverton, or even San Gabriel, they stick to traditional aspects pretty well.” Kwong explained, “However, if you go to, like, Ohio or Kentucky, they might put a more American spin on the traditional aspect of boba.”
The truth behind their Sip N’ Dip menu was, as Kwong put it, a happy coincidence. Along with the boba, the Milk+T truck also sold ice cream as a separate item.
“One day a customer saw the two items on our menu, and they were like ‘Well, can I put ice cream in the drink?’ and we were like, oh, yeah, sure, why not. So we started putting it inside, sold that for a little bit, customers started to like it. And then one day, someone orders a drink with ice cream. And bam, my business partner forgets to put the ice cream inside. The customer comes back to us and they’re like ‘Hey, there was supposed to be ice cream in here.’ And we’re like ‘Oh, I’m so sorry about that, we’ll remake the drink’ but we didn’t have time to remake the drink. There’s a line down the sidewalk. And she’s like ‘Let’s just put the scoop on top’ […]. We handed it to the customer, and they were like, mind blown. They started Instagramming it and Snapchatting it, showing all their friends, and we’re like ‘I think we just created something new’.”
Yet the inventions didn’t end there. In early March 2020, when COVID-19 hit the United States, many shops had to temporarily close, and many others never had the chance to reopen. After trial and error, Milk+T found a way for at-the-door orders. Since their food truck days, all of their drinks came in free glass cups that would receive a 10% discount if brought back in an effort to fight the waste of plastic. However, while they still sell the drinks in the glass cups, they won’t accept them back just yet in order to keep their employees safe. The self-serve aspect of the shop wasn’t an option anymore, either, and the quick decrease of customers due to the pandemic was also affecting their business. It soon turned from “how to make our store special” to “how to keep it alive”. And so they invented yet another trend, the boba kit.
The boba kit is a DIY kit for people to make boba at home. Many shops followed suit, creating their own kits, creating new revenue. Soon after due to popular demand, Milk+T began offering online classes taught by Kwong, Del Mondo, or another trained employee to accompany the kit. The classes were originally just a small thing, such as being hired for birthday parties, but soon escalated and they began teaching companies such as Google, Apple, YouTube, among many others. Other shops soon followed as well. Kwong and Del Mondo then co-authored a recipe book titled Boba (2020), that offers 50 easy-to-follow recipes for teas and toppings.
Milk+T had mastered the wave that the pandemic sent their way, adapting to it with innovation and hope. So the world seemed to throw another obstacle their way. In 2021, there was a country-wide boba shortage. For a few months, it was mostly speculative and mass-panic. Those who loved boba kept a close eye and spread the rumors to help their also-boba-loving friends. Even a year later, it was still hard to find any reliable information on the shortage. Every bit of information had been tainted by the media’s overblowing of the matter. When I asked, somewhat hesitant as I still didn’t know if it had been just a rumor or a real threat, Kwong explained that it had been a problem for many.
“The benefit of having a store in L.A. and one in Portland,” she said, “was that L.A. could kind of foresee things that were going to happen to Portland.” When L.A. was hit with the boba shortage, Kwong knew it was going to hit Portland no matter what. She immediately called her supplier and ordered 20 cases of boba. Her supplier had been confused, but delivered it anyways. Two weeks later, he called back asking to buy some of the cases back as their stock had run out. Milk+T’s unlimited toppings policy, the reason behind the shop existing in the first place, suffered once more. With the pandemic, their self-serving had to be turned into asking for how many scoops did the customer want, but with the shortage, they had to temporarily limit their unlimited toppings. Many shops like Milk+T had to outsource from manufacturers they didn’t usually source from, but in the end Kwong’s clever reaction allowed them to pass the shortage a bit more smoothly.
Milk+T has been a source of innovation since the very beginning. Asian foods, just like boba, have been quickly gaining popularity in the West Coast. Portland and the neighboring areas such as Beaverton have seen a rapid uptake of immigrant cuisine but especially Asian. For example, Kwong remarked about a well-known Japanese restaurant, Afuri, that opened its first ever U.S. location in Portland and then a second one in Beaverton. Korean restaurants have also been opening, as well as Indian places. Milk+T is only one of many shops that sells boba but their innovation has not only kept them afloat during stressful and uncertain times but helped them rise into what it is today. Social media trends don’t tend to last long, but boba has proven that it’s here to stay as the Asian-American communities grow, and with it will come a new age of innovation.
We would like to thank Stacey Kwong and the rest of Milk+T for meeting with us and making this story possible.
