Why Does the Triple Thick Matcha Topping Wear Staff Out?
HEYTEA's Triple Thick Matcha combines a thick matcha cheese milk cap, matcha jelly, and thick matcha sticky rice cake, and customers nicknamed it a matcha family bucket. Store employees say the sticky rice cake is the hardest part: they stand at the induction cooker for minutes, stirring matcha powder, mochi flour, milk, and condensed milk without stopping, and a moment of neglect burns the pot.
Some workers have asked the brand to drop the drink from the menu, and some customers find the rice cake filling with a gluey texture. The product mixes thick matcha, a drink category adjacent to matcha coffee, with a labor-heavy topping, so the debate runs on two sides at once: staff workload at peak hours and how the dessert-like texture lands with buyers.
Heytea's "Triple Thick Matcha" has been jokingly called a "matcha family bucket" because it combines thick matcha cheese milk cap, matcha jelly, and thick matcha sticky rice cake, attracting a large number of matcha lovers to try it. However, this hot-selling drink has become a nightmare for employees at the store level. The thick matcha sticky rice cake seems to require only mixing matcha powder, mochi flour, milk, and condensed milk into a sticky paste, but in reality it is extremely arm-tiring to make, and if you are not careful, it can burn at the bottom and smoke, ruining the entire pot of toppings. During peak sales, employees stir until they can no longer lift their arms, and some even hope the brand will remove it from the menu. At the same time, some consumers are not buying it either, complaining that the sticky rice cake is filling and the texture is gluey. This article examines both the employee and customer sides to break down why this drink—"hard for staff to cook, hard for customers to eat"—remains so controversial.
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Not long ago, Heytea launched a matcha drink called "Triple Thick Matcha." Because it includes toppings such as thick matcha cheese milk cap, matcha jelly, and thick matcha sticky rice cake, netizens joked that it was a "matcha family bucket," and many matcha fans rushed to order and check in.
But Heytea store workers immediately feel weighed down when they see this hit product, and some even directly call on the brand to remove Triple Thick Matcha from the menu. The reason is not complicated—the essential milk tea topping in this drink, thick matcha sticky rice cake, is simply too exhausting to make.
From the process for making thick matcha sticky rice cake that employees posted, outsiders might think it is merely pouring matcha powder, mochi flour, milk, and condensed milk into a pot, stirring, and waiting for it to thicken before taking it out.
But employees say that although the steps look simple, they are actually very hard on the arms. During the few minutes it takes to make thick matcha sticky rice cake, staff must stay by the induction cooker the whole time, constantly stirring the ingredients in the pot so they fully combine, turning the thin liquid into a sticky mochi.
Besides not being able to stop stirring, employees also mention that when making thick matcha sticky rice cake, if the heat is a little too high, or if they lose focus for a moment just before turning off the stove, the pot may burn and smoke, the mochi can stick all over the bottom, and an entire painstakingly made pot of topping is ruined.
For this reason, thick matcha sticky rice cake is, in the minds of workers, a topping that is "time-consuming, labor-intensive, and people-draining." The prep process is not only troublesome, but one slip can cause disaster, forcing them to dump the burnt ingredients, scrub the blackened pot bottom clean, and start over from scratch.
If Triple Thick Matcha is selling especially well, employees in the prep room feel like they have spent the whole day doing bicep curls at the gym, and by the end of their shift they cannot even lift their arms. "Stirring all day on the weekend, I want to die," "Stirring makes me want to die, my arms are ruined," "So hard to stir, exhausted to death"—complaints like these keep piling up.
They admit that most of the popular drinks on Heytea's current menu are cumbersome to make, and with some stores short-staffed, back-of-house workers often have to prepare various milk tea toppings while also washing vegetables and cutting fruit, leaving almost no time to breathe all day. If a store gets slammed with orders, under the constant urging of system notification sounds, staff wish they could grow three heads and six arms to double their efficiency.
However, this matcha topping that makes employees spend so much energy and effort and is made purely by hand is actually not very popular with consumers. Some customers who have tried Triple Thick Matcha say, "I really don't like sticky rice cake things, and they fill you up," and "I hate it when milk tea has a blob of gluey stuff in it."
From this perspective, some netizens suggest that Heytea might as well follow public opinion and remove this thick matcha sticky rice cake—"hard for staff to cook, hard for customers to eat"—from the menu. That way, employees would not have to stand by the pot every day, praying it will not burn while stirring nonstop; and when consumers receive the drink, they would not have to worry about what to do with this not-very-tasty matcha mochi.
Image source: Xiaohongshu
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