August 03, 2004
Boba-Mania
NPR is doing daily segments on immigrant entrepreneurs this week and decided to examine the phenomenon of "bubble tea", or boba, in yesterday's segment. If you don't live in proximity to an Asian community, you probably don't know about the fad: "boba" (which means "nipple" in Chinese) are these chewy, black, gelatinous tapioca balls that some enterprising person in Taiwan saw fit to put into flavored iced beverages (mostly sweetened tea). To consume them, you have to suck 'em up from your drink using a fat, wide straw. Crazy, I know -- it's the drink that eats like a meal (albeit, a meal of wet gummy bears).
The novelty for me lasted about a month. Afterwards, I started ordering the drinks sans balls. The little suckers are actually heavy and filling. Given the fact that boba is now on the downward trend over the past few years, you gotta wonder if NPR just simply dug up a story that never ran from their archives.
True Story: a good friend of mine who runs his own food packaging business was approached by the primary manufacturer of 'boba' in Taiwan to become the sole U.S. distributor of this stuff six, seven years back. At the time, he thought the notion was complete ludicrous: You put these bulbous, dark creatures into a cold drink? You suck 'em up through multi-pastel colored fat straws? You also gotta import these crazy fat straws from Taiwan (cuz they're not made in the U.S.)? No freaking way!
Now that boba tea stands have become ubiquitous across Asian American communities and have saturated the west coast landscape, he's been forever kicking himself.
(Brought to my attention by Juan Tornoe of Hispanic Trending)
Posted by thomas at August 3, 2004 06:45 PM | TrackBack