How many types of coffee trees are there? Behind a drink boom

HEYTEA added the Red Beet Beauty Bottle to its Super Plant Tea line, continuing a fast pace of new fruit-and-vegetable drinks. The launch landed on store staff as extra work. Back-of-house employees say they spend the whole shift at the sink, cutting board, and blender, washing, peeling, chopping, blanching, and juicing ingredients, with procedures growing more complex with each release.

Staff trace the pressure back to the first Hairy Fig Slimming Bottle, when the work was mostly washing vegetables and cutting apples and lemons. The Bitter Melon Heat-Clearing Slimming Bottle added seed removal and blanching. During the National Day holiday, some workers processed more than ten jin of produce a day, and blender jugs overheated until they smoked and broke down.

Heytea's "Super Plant Tea" family has welcomed a new member, the Red Beet Beauty Bottle, and the pace of new launches in the fruit-and-vegetable beverage track is drawing attention. Yet behind the frequent releases, the workload in store back kitchens keeps intensifying. From the original Hairy Fig Slimming Bottle to the Bitter Melon Heat-Clearing Slimming Bottle, and now the new red beet product, employees spend every day revolving around the sink, cutting board, and blender jug—washing vegetables, peeling, chopping, blanching, and juicing, with increasingly complicated procedures. The order surge during the National Day holiday has made workers complain even more bitterly, with some sighing that they have to process over ten jin of fruits and vegetables a day, and blender jugs even overheating to the point of smoking and breaking down. This article takes you inside the real working conditions of Heytea back-kitchen employees, and the little-known daily hardships behind the fruit-and-vegetable beverage boom.

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Recently, Heytea's "Super Plant Tea" series welcomed a new member—the Red Beet Beauty Bottle. As soon as it launched, it quickly won over consumers passionate about fruit-and-vegetable beverages, and many were also astonished that Heytea's pace of new releases in the fruit-and-vegetable track is almost unmatched.

However, the new product launch brings no joy at all to Heytea store employees. Since the "Super Plant Tea" series came out, staff in the back kitchen responsible for processing fruit and vegetable ingredients have complained that they are trapped in the prep area from opening to closing every day, circling around the sink, cutting board, and blender jug.

Employees said that when there was only the "Hairy Fig Slimming Bottle" at first, their work was nothing more than washing vegetables and cutting apples and lemons. Even when orders exploded and they hardly left the sink, washing apples basket after basket, the intensity was still manageable.

By the time the second new product, the "Heat-Clearing Slimming Bottle," launched, back-kitchen staff were already crying out that they could not handle it on the very first day of sales.

The drink's main ingredient, bitter melon, must go through multiple steps such as washing, splitting open, removing seeds, and blanching before it can be juiced, making the entire preparation process much more complicated than before. In addition, because fruits and vegetables yield limited juice, once orders pile up, back-kitchen workers become emotionless "juicing machines," so busy in the prep area that they cannot even find a moment to catch their breath.

During the National Day holiday that just passed, order volumes at Heytea stores across the country surged, and sales of the fruit-and-vegetable beverage series, as a new favorite among fans, naturally rose all the way. Many employees revealed that they had to process over ten jin of fruits and vegetables a day, with sighs like "can't stop washing," "can't finish cutting," and "bitter melon is not as bitter as my life" rising one after another.

The high-intensity ingredient preparation work has led some workers to say outright that they cannot take it, and some even left Heytea because of it, escaping completely from the "back-kitchen sea of suffering" of washing vegetables and cutting melons all day. Still, some steady and hardworking employees gradually adapted to the rhythm, treating the prep area like their own kitchen and honing "fast and fierce" knife skills through day after day of assembly-line work.

Yet when the fruit-and-vegetable series launched another new product, Heytea workers, facing red beets dug one by one out of the soil, only wanted to beg the brand to go easy on them.

It is said that preparing red beets is a level above bitter melon. Employees first need to scrub the mud off the red beets, wash the skins, then peel, chop, blanch, and only after that can they mix them with ingredients such as apples for juicing. Many back-kitchen staff posted on-site photos of themselves handling red beets, joking that they seemed to be at some kind of "crime scene," with bright red juice splashed everywhere.

What breaks workers down even more is the moment a blender jug suddenly explodes. Many employees reported that because the fruit-and-vegetable series sells well, they have to wash and process a large amount of fruits and vegetables every day, and the blender jugs fighting alongside them are basically in an overloaded state, occasionally "smoking" or "exploding" as they break down. Whenever such unlucky moments arrive, the juice and residue spraying out of the blender jug are enough to leave workers physically and mentally exhausted from cleaning up.

Although Heytea workers wish the brand would immediately remove the fruit-and-vegetable series from the menu, they also know in their hearts that such hot-selling products, comparable to money trees, will not disappear from the menu as they wish, and their script of "reborn as a kitchen worker at Heytea" is far from reaching its finale.

Image source: Xiaohongshu

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