MILK TEA CRAZE IN THE PHILIPPINES

It was only in February this year that I discovered a liking for milk teas. I didn’t know until I saw a long
queue of people at Coco Fresh Tea and Juice during a travel fair at SMX MOA that a craze for milk teas,
especially among millennials, has been going on in the country in recent years.

When asked what people were lining up for at Coco’s (I initially thought it was Coco Martin’s restaurant,
hahaha), my sis-in-law Leah said it was selling one of the best tasting milk teas in town. When I went back
to Coco’s a few days after to satisfy my curiosity, that was the start of my addiction to milk teas despite
following a rigid low carbohydrate-intermittent fasting-keto diet. (To avoid the sugars and still maintain a
healthy diet, I order milk tea with zero sugar. In some milk tea houses, however, the lowest amount of
sugar they could add is 30%.)

My daughters have been milk tea lovers for some time, but until I took a particular liking to it, they never
talked about it at home.

But that is history. Now, ordering milk teas has become a family thing. We take delight in trying the milk
teas in town, just like having a bucket list and ticking off those that we’ve already had, comparing one
from the other.

For one reason or another, milk tea is addicting, the reason why so many milk tea houses have sprouted
up in Metro Manila. In some parts of the country, though, all that I’ve seen so far was Chatime
(purported to be the largest tea house franchise in the world). I believe, though, that milk tea drinking
originated from the United Kingdom. In my younger years, I would read in Barbara Cartland’s romantic
pocketbooks about kings and queens, or royal people drinking their tea with milk. I thought then that it
must taste awful. Now I know better.

Most of the milk teas—also known as Pearl tea, Boba tea, or Bubble tea—that Filipinos are raving about
today originated in Taiwan, slowly gaining popularity in that country in the late 1990s. Had I known about
milk teas before, I would have tasted all the milk teas available in the countries I’ve been to, if there’s any.
That would have been an interesting story in my blog.

Listed as among the bestselling milk teas in Metro Manila are Macao Imperial Tea (350 stores worldwide),
Gong Cha, Coco Tea and Juice (3,000 stores worldwide), Yi Fang Tea (Taiwan’s most popular fruit tea),
Serenitea, Infini Tea (my favorite because it’s closer to home), Tiger Sugar Milk Tea, and Dakasi. The rest
I have yet to taste. While writing this, I’m having my second milk tea for the day. Burp.