Heytea Takes a 5.1% Stake in Peach Tea Brand Wakimomo

This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on October 17, 2021.

On October 16, 2021, Heytea added a new external investment, becoming a shareholder in Shanghai Gongtaojia Catering Management Co., Ltd., the operator of the brand Wakimomo, with a 5.1% stake.

FoodBud noted that this was Heytea's first investment in the tea-drink category after its investments in Seesaw and YePlant.

Why Wakimomo

Earlier, when Heytea founder Nie Yunchen denied on WeChat Moments that Heytea had invested in Lelecha, the exchange still suggested that Heytea was looking at potential tea-drink targets. After reviewing Lelecha's operating situation, Heytea appeared to decide that the target was not attractive enough.

Wakimomo focuses on peach-flavored tea drinks. Founder Lin Mingjuan saw a gap in the market: peach-flavored beverages in convenience stores often sold out first, and leading tea brands such as Heytea and Lelecha had launched peach products, but no tea-drink brand had made peach its core proposition.

Lin, a post-1990s entrepreneur, comes from a family that has operated in the tea business for generations. After graduation, using her family's supply-chain base and her own product instincts, she launched the tea brand Pucha in 2015, which gained traction on flavor.

Brand Development

Wakimomo began in 2019. To support brand development, it incorporated Japanese cultural elements, using peach, daruma, and pine needles as brand motifs. Starting in September 2019, it opened four stores in Kunming, Yunnan, with strong operating results. In July 2020, the brand formally opened franchising.

The brand's positioning combines peach drinks and Japanese-style snacks. Its product story emphasizes white peach pulp made into jam, Hokkaido milk, and hand-prepared premium teas. To strengthen product differentiation and make the drinking experience more distinctive, Lin developed the brand's signature Japanese-style mochi milk tea.

Wakimomo grew quickly by combining peach-flavored tea drinks with mochi. Lin said the team had reviewed industry data and found that peach-flavored products sold well across coffee, yogurt, soda, beer, and tea, but that no tea-drink brand had deeply developed the vertical peach category.

Store Economics and Positioning

According to the article, Wakimomo's Shanghai Hongyi store opened on June 15, 2020. Its ramp-up period was only half a month. The 12-square-meter shop achieved first-month sales efficiency of RMB 25,000 per ping, with a repeat-purchase rate of 30%.

Compared with many new-style tea brands, Wakimomo had a relatively low average ticket, reaching the RMB 10-15 price band. Its brand design used lively cartoon-style imagery aimed at younger consumers. In product design, compared with Pucha's quality-led positioning, Wakimomo added more playfulness to create stronger word-of-mouth and sharing potential.

According to Narrow Door Restaurant Eye data cited by FoodBud, Wakimomo had 311 existing stores and another 67 stores preparing to open.

Note: equity, store-count, and operating figures are historical as of the article's October 17, 2021 publication context.