What Are the Ingredients of This New Vegetable Tea Launch?
Chabaidao launched its Super Veggie series in 14 cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. One product, Detox Wheatgrass, blends wheatgrass with apple, pineapple, and Shine Muscat grapes plus jasmine snow buds tea. The brand stresses that no wheatgrass concentrate juice is added, and staff photos show large amounts of fresh green blades used in prep.
The launch follows Heytea's Super Plant Tea series from August, which pushed fruit and vegetable drinks into the mainstream and prompted rivals to respond. Online reaction compared the wheatgrass to cat grass and livestock feed, while some customers raised food safety concerns and noted the extra back-of-house workload. Consumers described the taste as refreshing, similar to how coffee after meal can feel light.
After Heytea launched its Super Plant Tea series, fruit and vegetable juice drinks quickly became popular, with major brands rushing to follow suit. Chabaidao recently launched its "Super Veggie" series in 14 cities including Beijing and Shanghai. Among them, "Detox Wheatgrass" sparked heated discussion online because its ingredient closely resembles cat grass and livestock feed. The drink combines wheatgrass with fresh fruits such as apple, pineapple, and Shine Muscat, and the brand specifically emphasizes that no concentrate juice is used. Consumers report that it tastes refreshing, but the workload for back-of-house staff has increased accordingly, and some customers have raised concerns about the food safety of the fruit and vegetable juices.
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Since Heytea launched its "Super Plant Tea" series in August this year, fruit and vegetable teas have quickly risen to become the new top trend in the milk tea industry, prompting competitors across the board to follow suit and launch their own distinctive fruit-and-vegetable drinks in hopes of attracting customers to try something new.
Recently, this wave has also swept through Chabaidao, which is unwilling to lag behind. Today, Chabaidao officially announced that it will launch its "Super Veggie" series in 14 cities including Beijing and Shanghai, featuring two products: one is the already familiar fruit-and-vegetable yogurt drink centered on kale; the other, a new product called "Detox Wheatgrass," left many netizens exclaiming in surprise.
According to the official mini-program page, this drink blends wheatgrass, apple, pineapple, Shine Muscat, and other fresh fruits, and adds seven-times-scented jasmine snow buds tea. In the description, the brand specifically emphasizes "no added wheatgrass concentrate juice," while employees have posted photos of back-of-house prep materials confirming that a large amount of fresh green grass blades is indeed used.
This left many netizens astonished, with comments such as: "No wonder it looked so familiar, this is what I feed my cat," "What a coincidence, my field is full of this, isn't it just wheat sprouts," and "This looks about the same as the grass I feed my guinea pig."
Some pointed out that the "wheatgrass" used in Chabaidao's new product is actually the common wheat sprout found in fields. This type of plant is rich in chlorophyll, vitamins, and other beneficial components, and has therefore long been one of the representative ingredients in raw food diets worldwide.
Besides being juiced for human consumption, wheatgrass is also often used as feed for animals such as cats, dogs, cattle, and sheep. After learning the true identity of wheatgrass, many customers couldn't help joking: "In the end, I'm still competing with sheep for grass," and "What's going on, am I really going to fight with my own cat over food??!!"
Interestingly, many cat owners who are troubled by being unable to grow cat grass, upon seeing the tender wheatgrass in Chabaidao's back-of-house, couldn't help but get ideas and began asking staff: "Can I order takeout and get some cat grass thrown in?" and "Where do you source your wheatgrass from? I'd like to buy some to feed my cat."
Although netizens jokingly say this cup of "cat grass juice" makes people "truly become beasts of burden," quite a few consumers still genuinely ordered it out of curiosity. The first batch of customers waited early at the counter, watching with their own eyes as staff blended and strained the prepared wheatgrass, apple, and other ingredients. After tasting it, they reported that the new drink has a refreshing taste and is not as hard to swallow as imagined.
However, although Chabaidao's new product won praise, the employees bustling around in the back of house were not happy. As more and more tea beverage brands enter the fruit-and-vegetable juice track, workers not only have to brew tea and prepare toppings, but also wash vegetables and cut fruit. They mock themselves that the prep room of a milk tea shop is looking more and more like a restaurant kitchen, "you could practically cook a meal right in the store."
In addition, some consumers admit that although they know from the daily lives shared by tea industry workers that vegetables are washed before processing, they still have concerns about these fresh fruits and vegetables, such as "whether there are pesticide residues" and "whether they carry insect eggs," leading them to question the food safety of the fruit and vegetable juices that tea brands are rolling out one after another.
Image source: Xiaohongshu
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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
