Twrl Milk Tea

by TWRL LLC

Review: Twrl M!lk Tea

Posted: Jul 30, 2021 at 10:49 AM (Last Updated: Jul 30, 2021 at 11:51 AM)
Twrl M!lk Tea

Covers Products: Hojicha Roasted Green Tea Premium Nitro-Infused Tea with Milk, Original Black Premium Nitro-Infused Tea with Milk, Supreme Jasmine Premium Nitro-Infused Tea with Milk

Twrl M!lk Tea is a plant-based milk tea that is made with premium ingredients and nitro-infused. The product line features three flavors, including Original Black, Hojicha Roasted Green Tea and Supreme Jasmine. 

Packaged in 7.5 ounce slim cans, each drink has 45-50 calories per 7.5 ounce can and all are sweetened with agave syrup (6-7 grams of added sugars). The plant-based milk they’ve chosen is pea milk, which is one of the less common dairy alternatives used in beverages.

From a taste perspective, all three products provide a very smooth and easy-to-drink blend of plant-based milk and premium tea. The pea milk has an earthy and lightly sweet flavor and does a great job of complementing the tea. The added nitro is light in comparison to what we’ve seen in some of the cold brew coffee drinks out there but it does help add some body to the product.

For most palates, we think that the difference in flavor between the three products will seem quite subtle. Original Black, which is the only one that’s made exclusively with black tea, has a more tannic flavor than the others and the most pronounced sweetness (although it doesn’t have any more sugar). Hojicha Roasted has some slight grassy notes but the roasted flavor rounds it out quickly. Finally, Supreme Jasmine, which is made with pu’er tea leaves, is both grassy and smokey before finishing up slightly bitter.

When it comes to the branding, Twrl has a modern and vibrant look. The top-third of each can has color swirls that are unique to each SKU, with the bottom edge of this section ending in an arrow shape that points towards the Twrl logo.  

The Twrl logo is something that we have mixed feelings about. Twrl as a name is fine -- it’s compact, relatively intuitive and memorable -- but its visual execution, which features an exclamation mark sitting on top of the “w” and another exclamation mark used for the “i” in “milk tea,” feels slightly distracting and perhaps dated.

Below the logo you’ll find the core label copy that is used to describe each flavor. The text is neatly stacked with a hierarchy of flavor name, “premium,” and “nitro-infused tea with milk.” The only mention of this product using plant-based milk  comes in the form of a round badge that sits near the top right of the Twrl logo and the exclamation mark in the logo.  

To that end, we think that the branding should be more overt in how it communicates the plant-based formulation. “Tea with milk” is probably going to be one of the first things the consumer focuses on and we think that “plant-based” should be somewhere near to this label copy. It could also go into the Twrl logo above “milk tea” if they really want to get ahead of things.

While we think that improving the plant-based messaging will help,  in its current form Twrl is a worthy and well executed product. The drinks are enjoyable, the branding is fun, and it feels like it’s innovative but not so much that it will need education to get consumers to buy in. And it definitely feels like the type of product that we could see consumers drinking on a regular basis


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