ANAHEIM, Calif.— FS Drinks launches Simple Boba, its innovative clean label RTD ready-to-drink boba beverage product line at the Natural Products Expo West industry trade show, featuring no high-fructose corn syrup, artificial sweeteners, artificial flavors, artificial colors, or artificial preservatives but plenty of “happy, bouncy, chewy” crystal boba.
Despite boba’s burgeoning mainstream popularity over the past two decades with the ongoing proliferation of brick-and-mortar boba, bubble, and pearl tea shops across the country, RTD CPG consumer packaged good offerings have yet to capture as much consumer attention as their original on-premise MTO made-to-order originals.
Key has been the continuing challenge to make tapioca boba—the most important ingredient of a “boba” beverage—palatable in RTD formulations and CPG formats. While the beloved balls are delightfully chewy for many consumers when made and served fresh, they quickly become hard and powdery within hours of refrigeration, or crumbly and mushy from sitting in liquid over time.
Both inevitabilities with the notoriously fickle ingredient have persisted in CPG boba beverage products on the market, whether they’re RTD cans or DIY do-it-yourself “instant” kits. Consumers have been underwhelmed by such offerings, with such offerings—outside of Amazon—largely limited to retail availability in specialty “Asian” grocers for offline consumer purchase.
FS Drinks solves this problem with its unique crystal boba and patent-pending production process. They spent the past year developing their crystal boba that has a compellingly similar texture to tapioca boba, but made from the konjac plant often regarded as a healthy low-calorie superfood alternative to the calorie-dense tapioca powder used to make tapioca boba.
While konjac-based crystal boba has been used by existing RTD boba beverage incumbents—sometimes mixed with tapioca powder to misleadingly label such crystal boba as “tapioca boba”—their versions are typified by the wide use of artificial ingredients, and their production processes still render such boba crumbly and mushy, disappointing consumer purchasers.
In contrast, consumers hail FS Drinks RTD boba beverages as delivering the genuinely chewy texture expected from the purchase of a boba beverage, while distributors and retailers find the up to 160 days of refrigerated shelf-life suitable for their business models.
With the vast majority of CPG boba products being a laundry list of artificial ingredients and preservatives that modern consumers increasingly shy away from, FS Drinks boba beverages are clean label in addition to being naturally 0% fat, dairy-free, gluten-free, and vegan.
“We refuse to ingest cheap, unhealthy non-dairy creamers in our boba drinks, and some of us are lactose-intolerant or will only drink plant-based milk substitutes,” chimed Ben Tsen and Kai Pan, co-founders of FS Drinks, “so we opted to launch boba teas and juices that our customers can mix in whatever milk they prefer, if any at all.”
“I’m a health and natural food nut who is very careful about what I put into my body”, added Tsen. “I’m not,” Pan laughed, “but I often drink just boba tea without milk because, if I don’t, I’ll end up looking more like boba than I already do.”
According to FS Drinks, their products are the only CPG boba products on the market with a genuinely chewy boba experience, that are truly RTD, and meet clean label ingredient standards to cater to increasingly sophisticated modern Millennial and Gen Z consumers.
Simple Boba is currently available in Assam Black Tea, Hojicha Green Tea, and Mango Juice flavors, each with generous amounts of their self-developed crystal boba. Each bottle has a suggested retail price of $4.99, and is distinctive for its fresh, clear, and transparent packaging.
“Yeah, we wanted our customers to see exactly what they get, not hide our product inside an opaque aluminum can,” notes Pan. “Our crystal boba is the most expensive ingredient in each drink’s simple list of quality ingredients,” added Gourav Sharma, COO of FS Drinks, “but why waste money on a boba drink with bad boba?”
With its launch and trade sampling at Expo West, Simple Boba by FS Drinks is currently available through direct distribution or distributors including UNFI and Pod Foods. The company is meeting with KeHE at the show.
About FS Drinks
FS Drinks is the new US-native sister company to FSTea and FSJuice, the leading RTD chilled milk tea and second largest NFC fresh juice brands in China, sold in over 11,000 doors across the market including Aldi, Hema, 7-11, Family Market, and Lawson, that counts basketball star Jeremy Lin among its investors. It has entered the American market with the release of Simple Boba, its unique clean label RTD line of bottled boba beverage products, made locally in the USA. As a Delaware corporation, it’s headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with operations based in Los Angeles, CA.
For More Information:
https://fsdrinks.com