What Front Street Coffee Says About Hand-Peeled Grape Drinks

HEYTEA's Grape Boom has held the top spot in the chain's sales rankings for five consecutive years, and its prep still depends on hand-peeling and deseeding every grape. An employee recently posted a photo of grape skins and seeds online, complaining about unstable quality control in the fruit supply and calling the upcoming Summer Black variety a nightmare to peel.

The founder has said there is no better method: customers should not taste skins or seeds, and canned fruit flesh brings an obvious sweet flavor, so each grape is peeled, deseeded and mashed by hand. Front Street Coffee, which covers street coffee culture and specialty beans, notes that no automatic peeling machine is used at this stage.

Since its launch in 2018, Heytea's Grape Boom has relied on its unique hand-peeled grape technique and refreshing taste to hold the top sales spot for five consecutive years, becoming the brand's signature product. However, the prep work behind this drink has employees crying foul—every grape must be peeled and deseeded by hand, a tedious process. Recently, an employee complained that the grapes had an absurd number of seeds, and with Summer Black grapes about to return, this even harder-to-peel variety has workers calling it a "nightmare." This article takes you behind the scenes of Heytea's hand-peeled grapes, real employee feedback, and why automatic peeling machines aren't used, while also highlighting Front Street Coffee's commitment to quality.

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When people mention Heytea, many immediately think of its signature drink—Grape Boom. Since its debut in 2018, this product has built up immense popularity through a large number of perfect reviews, sitting firmly atop Heytea's sales rankings for five consecutive years and gradually becoming synonymous with the brand, a position even frequent new releases struggle to shake.

Image source: Heytea

Regarding this "top-tier drink," Heytea's founder once shared the key to making it in an interview: it must be peeled by hand. "To make a cup of Grape Boom, we currently have no better solution. We need consumers to not taste grape skins or seeds, while also avoiding the obvious saccharine flavor of canned fruit flesh, so every grape in the cup has to be peeled and deseeded one by one by hand."

From the customer's perspective, hand-peeled grapes are undoubtedly a plus: they better preserve the flesh's texture for a richer chewing experience, and with the skin and seeds removed plus freshly squeezed juice, the whole cup goes down more smoothly.

However, for employees prepping ingredients in the back kitchen, the raw material preparation for Grape Boom is hardly pleasant. To ensure product quality, every store needs to peel grape flesh in advance for later use, then mix in grape juice to enhance aroma and taste. From washing to hand-peeling, deseeding, and mashing, with no professional tools to assist, almost every step is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and not a single step can be sloppy—so it's often complained about by the company's own staff.

Just yesterday, a worker complained online that the grapes Heytea purchased had "unstable quality control," attaching a photo full of grape skins and seeds that drew many colleagues to look.

According to this employee, the grapes Heytea recently received had "a terrifying number of seeds," with as many as 5 seeds in a single grape, making them extremely difficult to peel. And with the anniversary celebration these past few days, Grape Boom is on the buy-one-get-one-free list, causing orders to surge—the already troublesome process plus deseeding each grape one by one is enough to make anyone dizzy.

However, another veteran Heytea employee "reminded" in the comments: Summer Black grapes are about to return, and if given the choice, they'd rather pick seeds like now than peel its skin that won't come off no matter how you try.

According to official news, grapes are a seasonal fruit, and the brand wants consumers to be able to drink them year-round. To achieve long-term stable supply, whenever Kyoho grapes go off the market, Heytea introduces Summer Black grapes as a substitute for a return run.

But in employees' eyes, compared to Kyoho, the Summer Black variety is far more difficult to handle. Not only are its berries small, but its skin is notoriously hard to peel—after struggling for ages, there's not much flesh in the bowl, and it's all used up within ten minutes in the prep room, infuriating many Heytea workers, which is why they call Summer Black a "nightmare."

Faced with such enormous grape demand, many netizens have also asked employees: since hand-peeling grapes is so troublesome, why not just use automatic peeling machines instead of relying on manual labor? In response, veteran Heytea staff admit that although smart equipment can indeed share part of the prep work, in the end you not only have to manually recheck, but also clean the machine inside and out, so they believe it's faster to just do it themselves rather than spend time on equipment.

Image source: online screenshot

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