New-Style Tea Beverage Chain: Value-for-Money + Going Global

📌 Background

In 2026, China's new-style tea beverage industry transitioned from high-speed expansion to stock-depth cultivation: store density tended to saturate. According to estimates by the Hongcan Industry Research Institute, the national tea beverage market size in 2025 was approximately 187 billion yuan (a year-on-year increase of 6.4%), with 449,000 stores (a year-on-year increase of 3.5%), and tea beverage consumers increasing by 7.9% year-on-year. East China ranked first with a 35.6% store share (industry research caliber). The industry also entered the first year of compliance, where food safety, franchise management, and digital operations became hard thresholds, and the market pattern accelerated toward the industry leaders.

👤 Target Customers

Targeting the mass market for daily consumer fresh-made beverages, focusing primarily on high cost-performance essential consumption scenarios. Consumers pay via in-store purchases or delivery rider fulfillment, while franchisees pay franchise and material fees to the brand owner, constituting dual payment objects from the B-end and C-end.

💰 Revenue Streams

Gross profit from fresh-made tea sales in direct-run and franchise stores, where the price difference after deducting ingredient loss from single-cup pricing constitutes the basic profit pool; continuously outputting raw materials, packaging, and equipment to the scaled franchise network to collect supply chain service fees, realizing secondary profit retention of the supply chain; digital operation commissions contributed by store live-streaming coupon redemptions, food delivery platform order sharing, and private-domain mini-program repurchases. In addition, overseas store authorization fees and raw material exports become incremental overseas revenue sources.

🧮 Cost Structure

Core costs include centralized procurement and cold-chain distribution expenses for raw materials such as bulk tea, dairy products, and syrups; nationwide store rent and labor costs; and continuous digital investments in brand marketing, live-streaming traffic acquisition, and private-domain system construction.

🛡️ Moat

Direct procurement from origin regions, self-built warehousing, and centralized processing capabilities upstream of the supply chain have brought difficult-to-replicate cost control and quality control consistency. The standardized training and franchise management system for over ten thousand stores, coupled with digital inspections, strengthens franchise network stickiness. Strong core single-product brand mindset forms consumer habitual repurchases, and channel density builds a physical moat, making it difficult for newcomers to achieve location and fulfillment efficiency in the same price band.

🔑 Keys to Success

• Supply chain scale and fresh-made value-for-money
• Compliance and franchise management
• Going global and category cross-border expansion

⚠️ Risks

• Store opening density capping leads to further dilution of single-store customer traffic
• Loss of control in franchise management and low-price competition damage the overall profit margins of the brand and franchisees
• Raw material cost fluctuations weaken the stability of the pricing model centered on value-for-money

🏢 Cases

• Mixue Ice Cream & Tea
• Chagee, HeyTea, Guming

📊 SWOT Analysis