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Welcome back to Yumbo Wai.

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I'm Kinara, and with me is Her very cool mom. And today we are talking about one of our family's most favorite things. It also happens to be one of the most popular drinks in the world right now. A drink that is sweet, chewy, customizable, photogenic, etc. etc. etc.

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Boba!

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Boba, also known as bubble tea.

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We got the true history, which is way more interesting than you'd think.

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We've got the reason it's called two different names depending on where you live. A deep dive into all the wild toppings you can get now.

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Before we get into it, let's hear from a few kids who have shared their favorite boba orders.

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My name is Leica, and my favorite flavor of boba is strawberry. My favorite flavor of boba is so my favorite type of boba is crispy boba. And the flavoring I like with it is either watermelon or strawberry. My favorite boba order is honey boba. Brown sugar boba strawberry boba. Strawberry strawberry popping boba.

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My name is Azuri, I'm eight years old, and I'm from Chicago. I have two questions. Where in the world was boba first made? And did any kind of royalty drink boba that made everyone want to try it? And my favorite type of boba is mango because when you eat it, it kind of pops in your mouth. And I think it tastes really good because it gives you that kind of tropical feeling, and it reminds me of my hometown, and I think it's just really good, and it gives me a lot of you know feeling.

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Hi, I'm David, I'm 10 years old, and I have two questions about boba. My first question is how is the boba made? And my second question is how is the boba? Do you blend it? Do you brew it? Or what do you do with it? I like fruity flavors of boba because it's like blending something sweet with something savory or whatever flavor you like.

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Kinara, what's your go-to boba order?

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Well, you know, I usually get like something fruity. Like I'll usually get like sparkling lemonade and I'll put like heart jelly and mango popping boba. You're a topic. Sometimes strawberry. Yeah. I wish I could just get like a cup of just toppings.

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I know we're both toppings girls. Alright, before we get into the history, let's just make sure everyone is on the same page. Kinara, can you describe boba to someone who has never had it before?

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Okay. So imagine like a cold, sweet, sometimes creamy drink. Might be milky, might be tea-based, and at the bottom of the cup there are these little marble-sized chewy balls made of tapioca. You sip everything up to an extra wide straw, and when you get a boba pearl, it's this very chewy, slightly sweet surprise. And you can customize it any way you want. You can change the toppings, if it's milk or if it's fruit based, and about everything else.

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Most drinks are just liquid, but boba is different because you chew it. It's part drink, part snack, and your brain actually loves that mix of textures. Well, not everybody's brain. Some people do not like boba because it's too many textures, but we love it. So the pearls are made from tapioca starch, which comes from the cassava root, a plant originally from South America. Wait, the pearls are South American? The cassava root is. So cassava originated in South America and spread to Africa and Asia through colonial trade routes, including Portuguese trade. By the time it ended up in Taiwan, it had been transformed into tapioca, which Taiwanese people were already eating as a dessert. So boba is genuinely a global food even before it became a global drink.

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Yeah. Every time I we get the boba, I always ask if I can just get boba or another topping like popping boba on the side.

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It's surprisingly hard to convince a boba place to just give us toppings. We need to order just buckets of popping boba next time.

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Yeah. But can you tell me why the pearls are chewy? I'm so curious.

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It's actually because of how starch behaves when you cook it. Tapioca is almost pure starch, and when starch gets heated in water, it absorbs the water and becomes soft and stretchy, kind of gelatinous. It's the same reason gummy bears are chewy. The starch molecules get all tangled up and create that bouncy texture.

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Does that mean I can put gummy bears in my drink?

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I'm not sure it would have the same effect, but I guess everything is worth trying once. Here's why fresh boba matters. When the pearls cool down and sit around too long, the starch starts to reharden. It's called retrogradation. The pearls go from perfectly chewy to hard and rubbery. That's why the recipe, uh, if you see recipes, it says to eat them fresh.

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Yeah, I know. Like I always want to save my boba because I can't finish it. And then like I put it in the fridge and it gets all hard and disgusting.

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It's the one food drink you shouldn't savor. You gotta just have it fresh. Make it all up. Yeah.

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But okay, time for a history lesson. A non-boring history lesson. Boba, as we know it, was invented in Taiwan in the 1980s. But there's actually a dispute about exactly who invented it. And it's a pretty fun story. Bubble tea wasn't invented out of nowhere. Taiwan already loved the tea, and people were already eating chewy tapioca desserts. Someone eventually thought, what if we put the two together?

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A dispute. Ooh, sounds like there was drama. Can't wait to hear about it.

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Yeah. There were two tea shops in Taiwan that both claim to have invented bubble tea. And they even went to court for it for over ten years, which I think is kind of dramatic for Boba.

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A ten-year lawsuit over a drink? Although a very popular drink, so I kind of understand. Yeah.

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The two shops are Chun Shu Tung, that's in Tui Cheng, and Hanlon Tea Room in Tainan. The lawsuit kicked off in 2009, and a court finally ruled in 2019 that since bubble tea was never patented, nobody owns it. Anyone can make it.

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Tell us more about the two stories. Okay.

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Chin Sui Tung story. The founder had visited Japan in the early 1980s and noticed people were drinking coffee cold. That's silly. He thought, why not do that with tea? Cold milk tea became popular. Then one day in 1988, a product development manager was in a meeting, got bored, and decided to dump her tabioka dessert into her iced tea just to see what happened. Everyone loved it. The combination became the menu's top-selling item almost immediately.

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There are slight variations of this story that we read. Some say that the own the founder asked his employees to test out new ways to market the drink, so we don't know exactly the story, but it's some version of this. So uh it sounds like she invented it by accident. Some of the best inventions start as accidents, I guess. The Honlin Tea Room has a different story. Their owner saw white tapioca balls at a local market and thought they looked like pearls. He started mixing them into milk tea, experimenting until they got the right size and chewiness. He also realized customers needed a wider straw to sip up the pearls, so he worked with a plastic factory to create the boba straw. Hanlin Chi Room also says they helped popularize the wider boba straw, which is highly necessary.

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Yes. Whatever the true origin, by the late 1980s, bubble tea was everywhere in Taiwan. Kids would stop at tea stands outside their schools every single day.

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And do you know how it got to the rest of the world? This was interesting to learn about. Taiwan's economy was booming in the 1980s and 90s, and people were traveling and emigrating more, and the drink traveled with them. Hong Kong and mainland China caught on in the early nineties. Japan in the late nineties. Vietnam even saw a huge bubble tea explosion in the 2000s. And with each country, the drink evolved a little. New flavors, new toppings, local twists, which we'll talk about a little bit later. So when did it come to the US? The first boba shops in the US actually came to California in the mid to late 1990s, brought by Taiwanese immigrants. Some of the earliest boba shops in the US appeared in a food court in Arcadia in Southern California, and a place called Fantasia Coffee and Tea in Cupertino, which is right near us in Northern California.

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Yeah.

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For a while it stayed mostly within Taiwanese American communities in California. Then in the 2000s it started spreading. And then social media happened.

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And it became the viral, delicious, chewy treat that everyone knows about.

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Social media kind of turned Boba into a phenomenon, although it was already a phenomenon in in Taiwan and other countries in Asia. But it was a drink that photographs beautifully with lots of color and those satisfying pearls at the bottom. It was kind of made for social media. By the 2010s, Boba had gone from a niche drink to a mainstream American obsession.

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Okay. I have a real question. Why do some people call it boba and some people call it bubble tea? Which one is the right one?

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Both are right. We've kind of been using them interchangeably even up until now. Bubble tea came first from Taiwan. The bubbles referred to the frothy foam on top of the drink when you shake it. Nothing to do with the pearls at all, actually.

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Hmm.

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That's interesting.

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Um but the original boba bubbles were just foam. The handshaking technique created a bubbly froth on top. The tapioca balls are added, which were also round like bubbles. So bubble ended up meaning two different things at the same time, which is very confusing and somehow very on brand for this trip. But where did boba come from?

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One popular explanation is that boba was originally a Taiwanese slang term associated with the larger black tapioca pearls.

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So then boba came to the US because the Taiwanese communities in California used the word. And since boba arrived in the US through California, the West Coast started calling it boba. The East Coast, which got the drink a little later through different channels, mostly stuck it with bubble tea. And today, West Coast says boba, east coast says bubble tea, and everywhere else in the world mostly says bubble tea or pearl milk tea.

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So once boba left Taiwan, every country put their own spin on it. Should we do a quick world tour? Let's go. Hong Kong. Hong Kong style milk tea is legendary. It's made with a super strong black tea blended with condensed milk, my favorite, strained through a cloth that looks like a silk stocking. They literally call it pantyhose tea. And I realize in saying this that you are probably not familiar with stockings or pantyhose. This kind of tea is incredibly smooth and rich. And you add boba pearls and you've got something really delicious.

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In Japan, they were obsessed with matcha boba and fruit teas. Young people even popularized the word tapiru, a slang verb meaning to go get bubble tea. It was in the Japanese Buzzword Awards in 2018 and 2019. So, like you like that Hong Kong version, but I'm going for Japan.

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The matcha, the fruit tea? Yeah. I'll take all of it actually. Vietnam went wild for milk tea in the 2000s. Vietnam became one of the biggest bubble tea markets in Southeast Asia.

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South Korea. Seoul is famous for incredibly creative boba shops. You'll find drinks with cheese film on top. Yes, savory cheese film. Dad loves savory cheese film. Brown sugar, tiger stripe patterns, and toppings like red bean, aloe vera, and popping boba that bursts in your mouth.

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And China. This might blow your mind. There is a Chinese bubble tea chain called Mishui that has more locations than McDonald's worldwide. Over 45,000 stores. That is crazy. More than McDonald's. More than McDonald's. Although I don't know what kind of standard that is, but most people in the US have never heard of it, but it's absolutely massive in Asia.

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Mmm. And now boba is everywhere. In the US alone, there are thousands of boba shops, and that number has been growing almost every single year.

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Alright, so we need to talk about toppings because boba is not just pearls anymore. The topping situation has gotten very creative. In a good way. In an amazing way.

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So first, the classics. The original and most popular topping is the black tapioca pearl. Chewy, slightly sweet, made from tapioca starch, mixed with brown sugar or caramel, which gives them that dark color. I like the caramel one better.

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Yeah, me too. Then there are white or clear tapioca pearls, sometimes called crystal boba, I think. These are actually closer to the original version used at Honlin Tea House. They're slightly less sweet and a little more delicate. Then there's popping boba, and this is where it gets really cool. Popping boba are these little juice-filled spheres that burst in your mouth. They're made using a science technique called spherification, where a liquid gets wrapped in a thin gel shell. Chefs at fancy restaurants use the same technique. I want to try to make these.

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Yeah. So they come in fruit flavors, mango, strawberry, or lychee, and they're especially popular in fruit teas.

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Alright, cheese foam. We need to explain cheese foam because it sounds alarming. It is alarming. It's kind of delicious, actually.

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It's a layer of salted, slightly creamy foam made from cream cheese and whipped cream that sits on top of the drink. It's not savory like actual cheese. It's more like a salty sweet cloud. You drink through it and the foam mixes with every sip. It's delicious.

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I think. To eat their own. It apparently originated in Taiwan and blew up in China and South Korea, and now it's everywhere.

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Other toppings. Grass jelly, which is made from a plant and has a mild, slightly bitter herbal flavor. Not made of grass though. It's cut into little cubes or strips. Aloe vera, yes, the same plant you put on stunbirds. It tastes nothing like sunfree. It's fresh and lightly sweet.

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How do you know that it doesn't taste like sunfreed?

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Because I've tasted sunfree before. Interesting.

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Fascinating. Another episode for another time.

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Red bean. A sweet, soft bean paste that's huge in East Asian desserts.

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I love red bean.

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Yeah. Taro is another chopping. Taro is a root vegetable. It's naturally a light purple color with a slightly sweet, nutty flavor. Taro boba is one of the most popular flavor, and it makes your drink this beautiful lavender color. I love taro so much. Some people think it tastes like vanilla cookies. It does. And then there's creme brulee boba, which is exactly what it sounds like. A caramelized sugar crust on top of a milk tea.

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My favorite topping, which is sadly hard to find, is drinkable mochi. It's like a liquidy mochi that has the best texture and can actually be slurped through a straw. It's so good. I highly recommend you try it if you see it anywhere.

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Boba might be one of the first foods everyone gets to fully customize. Not just the flavor, but the toppings, the sugar level, and the ice level. It's like designing your own drink from scratch.

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There's apparently a boba place in LA where you can just get a cup and then there's a toppings bar and you just put whatever toppings you want in a cup and they charge you by weight. And I would just get a cup full of toppings. No liquid. Exactly. We need to go. We need to take a road trip to this place. LA isn't that far. It's not that far.

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How long?

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To do a boba crawl. Find all the good boba places. Here's the thing about boba that makes it different from most drinks. It's not just a drink. It became a cultural symbol, especially for Asian Americans. Yeah. What do you mean? When Taiwanese immigrants came to California in the 90s, boba came with them. For many Asian American students and young adults, boba shops became spaces that felt especially welcoming and familiar. The boba shop became what people call a third space. Not home, not school or work, but a place to just hang out, feel comfortable, and be yourself. Like how people use coffee shops? Exactly like that. And actually near us, there's a new chai place that opened in Berkeley that I kind of feel like it has become a hangout spot uh for South Asians, which is kind of cool. Which place do I know? Eliche.

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Oh yeah, I went there. It was really good. Really good. It's close to Cal, so yeah.

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Um, so yeah, kind of like coffee shops, but this is it was specifically for Asian American students and young adults who didn't always feel like they belonged everywhere else. And because boba shops were casual, affordable, and social, getting boba became almost like a cultural ritual.

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And honestly, that's still true for a lot of kids today. The boba shop is the after-school spot, like how older generations went to diners or got sodas at the drugstore counter.

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That's older generation than me. Thank you very much. I don't think so. Um, yeah, so it's quite the hangout spot of this generation. It went from being a niche Taiwanese import in Taiwanese American communities to a symbol of Asian American identity to a mainstream American obsession. By 2024, Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks both added boba-style drinks to their menus. You can get boba at the mall. You can really get it in a lot of places. Doesn't that bother some people? It's a complicated conversation. Some Asian Americans feel proud that Boba has reached the mainstream. Others feel like something that was specifically theirs got taken and stripped of its meaning. There's an actor named Sim Liu who who plays Shang-Chi in Marvel. He actually called out a Canadian company on Dragon's Den show, which is like a Canadian version of Shark Tank, because they were making bubble tea and selling it as a product, but they didn't acknowledge that bubble tea is Taiwanese. He said bubble tea has Taiwanese roots, and that should be acknowledged at a minimum. And that moment uh went viral, if you want to look it up. It was really interesting.

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I feel like Bobo carries a lot more history than I realized.

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Most food does when you look closely enough, and that's kind of why we have this podcast. Mm-hmm.

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Okay. On that note, let's go to jokes.

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Your favorite section. All right. I'm all ears.

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Your least favorite.

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All ears.

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Okay, joke time.

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You make your own sound effects now.

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Yeah. Okay. Why did the boba go to school?

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To learn history.

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To become a smart tea. Great. Why did the tapioca pearl fail the race?

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Because it was too squishy.

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Because it kept rolling away.

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Wouldn't that make you go faster?

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No, because you can't control where you go.

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Okay, good point.

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What brand of chewing gum is made of bubble tea? Mm-mm. I don't know. Can't even guess. And hubba boba. What is that? You know hubba bubble.

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Oh, I don't know that. You don't know that. It's a new new gum.

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No, it's really good. Why are these jokes amazing?

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Because you are saying them.

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Because they're terribly funny.

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Well, like T? Yeah. Okay. What dinosaur loves Boa the most? A stegosaurus. A T-Rex. Yes, obviously a T-Rex.

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Last one. What do you say to your best friend?

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I love you.

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You're my best T.

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Yes, I'm gonna say that for sure. We're best friends. Kenara, you're my best T. No. I'm your Doctor T. No. Nice try. I'm your smart T. Yes, you are my smart T. Uh all right, let's do some rapid fire boba facts. You ready?

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Okay. There are nearly thousands of boba shops in the U.S. And as of 2025, that number has been growing every year.

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The state with the most boba shops is California by a lot. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego are the biggest hubs. But the states with the most boba shops relative to population, Washington and Nevada, top that list. I think Vegas has a lot of boba shops.

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The global bubble tea market is worth about three billion dollars and growing. That's a lot of tapioca.

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In Taiwan, some folks celebrate April 30th as National Bubble Tea Day. In 2021, a global shipping shortage caused a tapioca pearl shortage in the U.S. Boba shops ran out of pearls and people were genuinely devastated. It made international news. That's how much people love their boba. This is my favorite part about boba. Well, one of many things, but most boba shops let you control the sugar level and ice level of your drink. You can literally order 0% sugar, 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%. Boba can have as like as much sugar as like two sodas. So this is a it's a treat for sure.

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But if I get 0%, then I can get as much as I want. That's a discussion for a later date. So what have we learned today, bestie? That jokes can ruin a whole podcast, and that boba has a whole history from Taiwan in the 1980s to a 10-year lawsuit. It's a California, to everywhere. And it carries real cultural meaning, especially for Asian communities around the world.

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We learned that the word boba and the word bubble tea mean the same thing, but come from different histories, and which one you say may depend on where you grew up.

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And that the tapioca pearl started as a plant in South America, traveled through Africa and Asia, and became a dessert in Taiwan, and then became one of the most popular drinking ingredients of the world.

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That it's a there's a boba chain bigger than McDonald's that most Americans have never heard of.

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And that you can top your bubble with everything from chewy pearls to popping juice spheres to cheese foam to creme brulee. The only limit is your imagination and maybe your stomach. So here's your challenge. Next time you order boba, try a topping you've never had before. Every cup has a story. Keep exploring, keep tasting, and keep asking. Yum, but why? Thanks for listening.