What does french coffee culture say about drink toppings?

Chayan Yuese, known as Tea Yan Yue Se, has quietly replaced the toppings on many of its milk tea drinks with its own puffed snacks, including crispy balls, cheese sticks, corn kernels, and small cookies. Longtime fans say the snacks clash with the drinks in taste and look, and have asked the brand to stop the practice.

The swap appears tied to the company's retail push: its snack e-commerce sales already exceed 100 million yuan a year. Staff said a new internal rule replaces toppings on most drinks with puffed food except where a matching snack already existed. In french coffee culture, by contrast, the milk to coffee ratio and simple pairings are what carry a drink, not added snacks that go soggy.

Tea Yan Yue Se has always been loved by consumers for its milk tea and peripheral snacks, but recently many customers have noticed that the small toppings on top of drinks have been quietly replaced with the brand's own puffed snacks, such as crispy balls, cheese sticks, corn kernels, and more. This change has sparked strong dissatisfaction among longtime fans, who feel that puffed snacks do not pair well with milk tea in terms of taste, look abrupt, and have even called on the brand to stop this practice. Although Tea Yan Yue Se's snack business is growing rapidly, with annual e-commerce sales already exceeding 100 million yuan, stuffing snacks into milk tea reflects the brand's anxiety to promote its retail products. This article takes you through the ins and outs of the incident and the real feedback from fans.

▲

Click to follow | Daily specialty coffee culture magazine Coffee Workshop

When it comes to Tea Yan Yue Se, the first thing that may come to mind is its milk tea, but its snack products also have a large number of loyal fans. Many Tea Yan fans have already gotten used to picking up a few packs of snacks along with their milk tea to take home.

However, recently, many customers have noticed that Tea Yan Yue Se quietly removed the original toppings from its milk tea and replaced them with various snacks of its own. For example, two crispy balls were placed on Sheng Sheng Oolong, two cheese sticks were inserted beside Man Yue Lan Shan, the topping on Tao Hua Wu became corn kernels, Gui Hua Nong was topped with a triangular corn chip, and the pistachio crumbles on Ren Jian Yan Huo were replaced with two round small cookies... For a time, the snacks everyone was familiar with seemed to have "run" into the milk tea.

At first, some thought it was just an operational mistake, but after asking the staff, they learned that the company had recently issued a new rule: except for categories that already had the same type of snack, the toppings on most drinks would be replaced with this kind of puffed food.

Many regular customers said that although they usually also like to buy Tea Yan Yue Se's small-packaged snacks, they are, after all, puffed foods. Eaten directly, they are indeed crispy, but once sprinkled on the cream top of a drink, not only do they look unappealing, but the taste also does not harmonize with the milk tea, and after getting soggy, they are even less tasty.

As for this "creative" topping switch, longtime fans familiar with Tea Yan Yue Se can roughly guess that the brand did this to promote its snack products, letting customers "try" them while drinking milk tea, so that if they like them, they will naturally place an order.

But as devoted fans of Tea Yan's milk tea, everyone feels they clearly came for the drinks, and some even placed orders because they liked the toppings. They were already familiar with the appearance and taste of the drinks, yet now, without any warning, the recipe has been changed, and the originally rich-textured toppings have become abrupt puffed snacks. The two do not go together at all. A large number of fans could not help but post complaints after seeing this, and called on the official brand to "remove them quickly" and "take your snacks and get out of milk tea toppings."

It is understood that Tea Yan Yue Se has launched a quite rich variety of snacks, including bread cubes, French fries, fruit and vegetable crisps, biscuits, rice crackers, pecans, and more, with most single packs priced at 2.5 yuan or 5 yuan, focusing on high cost performance, and it is also the new tea drink brand with the most new snack categories.

Some reports point out that currently the revenue ratio of Tea Yan Yue Se's freshly made tea drinks to retail products is 7:3, among which the snack segment is in a rapid upward phase. Lijin Database shows that Tea Yan's snacks surpassed the 100 million yuan mark in e-commerce channel sales in the past year (July 2023 to June 2024), and last August it also opened its first snack lifestyle grocery store. It can be seen that the snack sector has become an important part of Tea Yan Yue Se's operations.

From its far-leading high sales and good reputation, it is not hard to see that Tea Yan Yue Se's snack business has already accumulated a certain user base, but the "little trick" of forcibly replacing milk tea toppings with snacks shows that the brand is eager to use this to expand sales, and also indirectly reflects that running the snack business is not as easy as imagined.

Image source: online screenshot

Disclaimer: Some images in this article are from the internet. For some content on the website, such as images, we will respect the original copyright and indicate the source, but due to the large quantity, a few images and texts may not have been credited in time. Please forgive us. If the original author has any dispute, they may contact the website for handling. Once verified, we will correct it immediately. Compiled and edited by "Coffee Workshop." Please indicate the source when reposting. If there is infringement, please inform us for deletion. Thank you~!

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.