The Double 11 Shopping Festival is enthusiastically unfolding. The major hand-shaken drink and coffee brands in Taiwan have aimed at business opportunities and launched limited-time big discounts in November. You could use free coupons to buy one get one free or join the lottery event for limited-edition sneakers. Let’s toast and celebrate with tea and coffee!
Taipei, Taiwan (Merxwire) – With the slowdown of the epidemic and the government’s policy of invigorating consumption, for celebrating Double Eleven, the major hand-shaken drink and coffee brands in Taiwan this year have aimed at business opportunities and want to seize the consumer market, launching limited-time promotions in November. The brand “CoCo” offers free coupons for the second cup, “COMEBUY” holds a lottery event for limited-edition sneakers with drinking new tea, and “TEA TOP” would give you free tea museum tickets when you buy two cups of tea.
Double 11 started from the “Taobao Mall Promotion Day” held by Alibaba Group on November 11, 2009. This event encouraged single people to buy a gift for themselves and believe that they will find a relationship after this day. Now Double 11 has become one of the most important shopping festivals of the year, which has also caused a consumer boom in the global retail industry.
In Taiwan, the competitive hand-shake drink brand also launched various promotions to attract customers. The origin of hand-shaken drink was probably in the 1940s, starting with a cup of hand-shaking iced tea. After the invention of “bubble tea”, it became popular in the 1980s. The global bubble tea market has reached 4.3 billion U.S. dollars last year, and in the United States, April 30 is even designated as the “National Bubble Tea Day”. In recent years, every brand of the hand-shaken drink has continuously created new products to satisfy the tastes that Taiwanese like and maintain freshness. From bubble tea to brown sugar pearl milk; from tropical fruit tea to mature black tea, there is a wave of beverage craze. Some brands use fresh local ingredients in Taiwan, and some focus on black tea milk foam that women love, and even chocolate milk foam. Aiming at the spending power of the white-collar class, they opened stores in the business district. Some of them began to sell French desserts to match the tea and even designed the port of store space as a baking classroom to make market segmentation, at the same time grabbing the market share of the beverage market.
In Taiwan, according to statistics from the Ministry of Finance, the turnover of Taiwan’s beverage stores has grown rapidly by nearly three times in the past 10 years, from NT$19.78 billion to NT$58.09 billion (USD$71.15~208.96 million). The number of beverage stores had soared by 80% and it had increased from 11,273 to 20,281 in ten years. In Taiwan, an average of 1.02 billion cups of hand-shaken drinks can be sold every year, and an average of 43.3 cups of hand-shaken drinks are drunk by one person in a year.
But drinking too many hand-shaken drinks has become another health issue. According to statistics of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, nearly 50% of adults over 18 are overweight. With the rapid growth of hand-shaken drink, the high sugar has made Taiwan become an obesity kingdom. Sugar can be thought a fatal health defect of hand-shaken drink. Studies have shown that too much sugar can cause obesity, metabolic syndrome, tooth decay, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and other diseases. Eating too much sugar also affects intelligence and memory, and has certain related effects on children’s learning status and dementia problems in the elderly. For women, sugar can affect the regeneration of collagen and make your skin become old and dry. It also obstructs the brain’s joyful functions and greatly reduces brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is responsible for reducing anxiety, fear, and stress. We will become more anxious and nervous, and the incidence of depression and bipolar disorder will increase.
There are some tips for drinking a hand-shaken drink while maintaining health. Nutritionists suggest reducing the amount of sugar, sugar-free is best; do not add pearls, coconut jelly, and other ingredients and it could reduce the intake of calories and sugar; choose less ice or without ice, because the ice will inhibit the sweetness and make us drink high-sugar drinks unconsciously. It would affect digestion and cause respiratory allergies. Finally, please try to choose prototype foods, such as sugar-free papaya milk, milk black tea, or fresh fruit tea. Believe that it can satisfy the appetite and reduce the burden on the body.
If you want to experience the unique hand-shaken tea drink culture from Taiwan, you can find them in some major cities around the world such as New York, Tokyo, or Vancouver, especially in Chinatown. But while enjoying the delicious drinks, don’t forget the tips mentioned above and don’t drink too much, so that you could maintain your health at the same time.