The tea drink business lives on hit products. One hit can carry a whole summer: Overbearing Sea Buckthorn, Duck Shit Fragrance Treasure Tea, Longjing Milk Tea — names that are fun to say, and a first sip that has to be remembered, or the customer goes elsewhere next time. The logic of a hit product is completely different from making a regular product: a regular product seeks steadiness and the aroma can be gentle; a hit product seeks "landing on the first sip", and the aroma has to have a point of memory, ideally one nobody else has. Nayuki opened its first store in Shenzhen in November 2015 with a dual-category model of "tea drinks plus soft European bread", listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2021 as the "first new-style tea drink stock", and by 2024 covered more than 120 cities worldwide with over 1,800 stores, having also developed its own automatic tea-making equipment for its stores. Its three segments are freshly made tea drinks, Nayuki Tea House, and RTD bottled tea moving onto convenience store shelves.
This hit-product business makes concrete demands upstream. First, speed — from idea to shelf there are often only a few weeks. Second, "never smelled before": something made from common aroma types cannot become a hit. Third, once volume takes off it has to be supplied — from one store to a thousand is only one summer in between. What we supply to Nayuki is the natural aroma materials for the freshly made tea drink and RTD bottled tea lines. The first two requirements rest on what we have accumulated: many varieties, so there is something nobody else has smelled; a complete set of processes, so a sample can be produced within weeks. The third rests on capacity and scheduling — we have bases and capacity in Guangxi, so increasing an order is not adding equipment, it is adding shifts.
Both sides live on new products. Nayuki launches dozens of new products a year, and three months without anything new means being forgotten; it is the same with us — new varieties and new processes every year, because holding onto the same three old items does not hold. Being pushed along by "new" is genuinely tiring: new products mean sampling, trial and error, failure, and the success rate is barely thirty percent. But not doing it is not an option: consumers in this trade love the new and tire of the old — pushed by the market, and willing ourselves. When Nayuki's people come to develop, they never ask "what do you have"; they ask "what new things have you made lately". Someone who asks that is treating the other side as a partner, not as a supplier.
The cooperation began with a fruit tea: the client's R&D said the aroma was not three-dimensional, that it drank flat. We made several versions, and the real hurdle was not the aroma itself but two aromas fighting — the fruit was too aggressive and covered the tea, so all that remained afterwards was sweetness and fruit, with no tea. What the client wanted was "fruit and tea both there", and both had to be present. Press the fruit down hard and the product loses its selling point; leave it alone and the tea is gone. Later we changed our thinking: instead of letting both come out at once, let them come out in sequence — fruit first, tea following. Using molecular distillation to cut by boiling range, the two groups of components were handled separately, and controlled release adjusted the release rhythm, so the fruit came out first and the tea filled in behind. After the change, one cup gave two stages: fruit as fruit, tea as tea.
Talking about technology is clearest by the layers of a fruit tea. The bottom layer is tea — the tea aroma has to hold up and still come out in ice and in sugar water, which rests on supercritical fluid extraction, low temperature throughout with no solvent entering the process, keeping the most delicate part of the tea leaf; plus Living-Fragrance physical extraction, moving the plant's original aroma structure across intact by physical means, so the tea tastes "right". The middle layer is fruit — the fruit aroma has to be real and able to burst out, which rests on dynamic multi-stage counter-current extraction pulling the actives out cleanly with short time under heat, so the fruit is not artificial; plus aroma concentration enriching the key components, so little is added and it is still smelled. The top layer is cheese foam and sugar — this layer easily turns cloying and has to be cut by aroma, which rests on putting the middle fractions together well so that sweetness does not press the aroma down. With all three layers present, a cup has depth; miss any one and it drinks flat.
On supply, Nayuki's store count grows by hundreds and thousands, so our stocking follows the store count rather than waiting for a shortage to replenish — once a hit takes off, the replenishment window is only a few weeks; seasonal launches are small in volume and tight in time, so we run small-batch quick response, counted in weeks from sampling to supply. On service we go one step further: what we give the client is not just a drum of material but several aroma options to choose from — three versions of the same taste, each with its own emphasis, so R&D can compare on the spot; before a launch we go into stores together for real testing, standing behind the counter to watch how the partners work and how customers react to the first sip. When the client's R&D people come to the plant to work on an aroma, they stay two or three days and decide on the spot.
For the years ahead, what the two sides need to do together is clear: make the "two-stage release" on the fruit tea line more precise, raise the shelf-life stability of the RTD bottled tea, and find a few more varieties nobody has smelled before. Keeping up with the pace of new products is what counts — Nayuki has opened over a thousand stores on that pace, and we have spent thirty years on it.
This article was published on 2026-09-14, and last updated on 2026-09-21. The article will be continuously updated.
