Luckin Rolls Out Pearl Milk Tea Nationwide—Who Gave It the Courage?

Editor’s Note (CoffeeNet coffeeyo.com): On October 12, Luckin launched pearl milk tea across all 36,000 of its stores nationwide (starting at 9.9 yuan, 0 non-dairy creamer), and its non-coffee product line keeps expanding. Through standardized water-bath reheating of frozen pre-cooked powder balls, pearls have entered the “quick pickup” store model for the first time.

The “slowest” topping can also enter the coffee shop the “fastest”?

On October 12, Luckin simultaneously did one thing across all 36,000 of its stores nationwide: sell pearl milk tea.

Classic pearl milk tea and brown-sugar pearl milk tea, starting at 9.9 yuan, positioned as “0 non-dairy creamer, 0 coffee whitener.”

Feedback so far is concrete: some praise it all the way—”the milk is rich and fragrant, the pearls soft and chewy”—while many also complain that “there are too few pearls” and “the flavor is too bland.”

A milk tea with disputed taste is hardly a big deal in today’s drinks market.

But anyone who understands Luckin’s store model will realize that this pearl entering that system of “small store, quick pickup, two-person shift, fully automated equipment” is itself something more worth dissecting than “whether it tastes good.”

01■

A pearl “expedited” into being

In fact, as early as September, Luckin first chose to test this product on a small scale in campus stores. Students are the core audience for pearl milk tea—taste-sensitive and eager to share on social platforms—a natural test pool.

After launch, college students’ check-in notes fermented densely on social platforms, and many workers who couldn’t get any flooded Luckin’s official Weibo comment section, crying “us workhorses want to drink too” and “please consider the workhorses’ feelings.”

And Luckin, naturally “listening to advice,” rolled it out nationwide on October 12; the official wording carried a hint of urgency forced out by being urged: “expedited in one month, we’ve brought pearl milk tea out of campus.”

On the surface, this is a launch driven by user sentiment, but looking back at Luckin’s launch trajectory over recent years, it’s easy to see it is long past being the coffee-only brand in everyone’s impression—this “point of no return” has been laid for a full three years.

From “Light Jasmine” light milk tea’s “coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon” slogan in August 2024, to the successive launches of fruit tea, fruit-vegetable tea, matcha and ice milk, Luckin’s non-coffee product line has kept expanding.

In 2025, non-coffee items already accounted for about 40% of Luckin’s new products; many joke that Luckin is looking more and more like a milk-tea shop. So for ordinary consumers, a new pearl milk tea is just one more choice—hardly a surprise.

But anyone familiar with the tea-drinks industry knows that pearls are the universally acknowledged “troublemaker” among toppings.

The barrier to making traditional pearls is not low: raw powder balls must be boiled over high heat for 30 to 40 minutes, then simmered for another 10 to 20 minutes or so. Controlling heat, water volume, simmering duration and the secret method—any slight misstep and the texture collapses.

After cooking, management is equally demanding: holding temperature and storage time are strictly required; left too long, they easily harden, gelatinize and lose elasticity, keeping loss rates high.

This process is already strained in a milk-tea shop making a few hundred cups a day; in Luckin’s quick-pickup model that must complete an order in two minutes, it is almost unthinkable. Precisely for this reason, many coffee shops that emphasize efficiency and fast cup-through never touch complex toppings like pearls.

But Luckin’s “cooking pearls” this time is an entirely different method from traditional milk-tea shops.

There is no extra pearl pot in the store’s operating area; it uses only frozen, pre-cooked powder balls, and what the staff must do is a single standardized water-bath reheat: put the bagged balls into 95°C hot water, let them sit 3 minutes for the bag surface to heat through and the frozen core to begin softening, then use a silicone clip to flip the bag, and time 8 to 10 minutes according to the number of bags.

From entering the bath to finished product, the core heating time is controlled at 11 to 13 minutes—a completely different order of magnitude from the 30 to 40 minutes needed to cook raw pearls from scratch. After reheating, open the bag, attach a time label, consume within the set time limit, and discard if expired.

Simply put, Luckin broke a task originally dependent on time and experience into actions anyone can execute by the second. It not only sharply compresses on-site operation time but also reduces dependence on staff experience.

Of course, this does not mean there is no threshold. Reheated pearls still have a strict validity period and must be discarded if expired; stores must forecast and prep ingredients well, balancing sales volume and loss.

02■

Not copy-and-paste,

but using coffee-shop logic to accommodate more

The process difference of a single pearl also reflects the different underlying operating logics of coffee shops versus traditional milk-tea shops.

A traditional milk-tea shop is itself a workflow built around tea broth, cooking toppings and mixing milk tea; pearls, taro balls, pudding and grass jelly are standard configurations, and the back kitchen is naturally suited to the rhythm of long prepping and multi-batch topping cooking, with staff learning a series of procedures—simmering, changing ingredients, cutting and prepping—onboarding.

The store’s capacity design exists to handle the making of complex ingredients; cup-pacing, scheduling and prep plans all serve the needs of tea drinks.

Luckin’s native store model, by contrast, was built for coffee: small footprint, lean staff, pursuit of fast cup-through, focused on extraction and mixing of liquid ingredients, modular recipes, most drinks completable by machine with one tap, almost no long pre-prepping or material-watching steps.

This is also why in the past Luckin’s non-coffee products were mostly light milk tea and light fruit tea—drinks without complex freshly-cooked toppings.

Yet in recent years the consumption boundary between coffee and tea drinks has kept dissolving. Coffee drinking scenarios are mostly tied to early-commute and morning pick-me-ups; by afternoon and after-work hours, many don’t want caffeine but still want a flavored drink.

Pearl milk tea is a classic with extremely high national acceptance; it carries its own emotional value, a drink that needs no thinking and is hard to get wrong. For Luckin, it catches the extended demand of existing coffee users, turning “coffee-only” customers into consumers who can order at different times throughout the day, and activating the idle capacity of stores in the afternoon and evening.

In truth, Luckin has been looking for balance, but it is not turning stores into milk-tea shops; rather, it pushes complex procedures as far upstream as possible, leaving only the “lightest” step in the store.

Light milk tea uses tea-brewing equipment for the tea base; fruit tea uses high-quality juice paired with easy-to-store, easy-to-handle fruit; and for pearls, it optimizes “cooking” into “reheating.”

Moreover, the equipment side is being prepared in parallel—smart tea machines, dishwashers, ovens and other devices are already being tested in some stores.

Still, it is worth noting that this launch is not without challenges. Although the water-bath reheat is standardized, it demands high execution from staff and strict adherence to temperature and time; once operation goes off, pearl texture fluctuates. The loss pressure from validity-period control also tests stores’ order-forecasting ability.

Those “pearls a bit hard” comments on social media are exactly the problems inevitably encountered during the break-in phase of this new model.

In fact, looking at the entire tea-drinks market, Luckin’s pearls also offer the industry an interesting sample.

Whether a new product can work—tasting good is only the basic threshold; whether it can fit the store’s equipment, labor, cup-pacing and loss model is the key that decides whether it can land stably across tens of thousands of stores.

R&D has never been just heads-down flavor debugging; flavor, supply chain and store operating efficiency—none of the three can be missing.

Reprint Notice & Disclaimer

This article was compiled and edited by CoffeeNet coffeeyo.com, and is reprinted from NetEase (“Luckin Rolls Out Pearl Milk Tea Nationwide—Who Gave It the Courage?”). The copyright of the original text belongs to NetEase and the original author. Our reprint is for the purpose of sharing coffee-industry information only and does not represent the views of this site; all data and opinions are subject to the original. We thank the original author for their work and sharing.
Original article: NetEase — “Luckin Rolls Out Pearl Milk Tea Nationwide—Who Gave It the Courage?”
For any matters concerning content authorization, attribution, copyright or otherwise, please contact us promptly and we will verify and cooperate in handling it without delay; we also welcome coffee businesses and industry media to exchange and contribute articles with us.
CoffeeNet coffeeyo.com contact: Tel 400-0000-641 (+86-18288016826) ｜ Email 405854472@qq.com ｜ Address: Jinghong City, Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province

Related Reading

Industry News · More from this section

Sign In

Register

Reset Password