This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on January 16, 2022.
FoodBud reviewed employee self-reports from parts of Luckin Coffee, Nayuki Tea and Heytea stores. The contrast is clear: Luckin’s store management is lighter because it uses fully automatic coffee machines, while new-style tea drinks still depend on heavier in-store preparation and have more room for digital improvement.
Manner Coffee, positioned as a specialty-coffee player within the mass-market segment Luckin serves, uses semi-automatic machines and therefore relies on a larger base of baristas for store operation and expansion. Even after raising significant capital, its store expansion remained relatively slow. In 2021, Manner invested in Wenjidou (温季豆) coffee machines, likely to improve store-level efficiency through equipment upgrades.
Employee accounts describe a tightly monitored, highly standardized system:
Heytea’s store work is divided into three lines:
Student part-time staff usually handle K or S line work, while B line work, which requires recipe memorization, is usually handled by full-time staff.
Employees described frequent recipe changes. One example given for illustration, not as an actual recipe, was a cheese strawberry drink with different sugar amounts by temperature and ice level: 16cc for normal ice, 12cc for extra ice, 21cc for less ice and 18cc for hot drinks. That is only sugar; staff also need to remember ice, tea, fruit pulp, cheese foam and temperature variables across multiple products.
Recipes reportedly change 1-2 times per week, with weekly exams. A score of 90 is passing; those who fail may need to copy recipes 5-10 times. Employees also said they often have to memorize corporate-culture language, and that Wednesday is recipe-exam day.
Back-room prep work can mean peeling grapes, picking strawberries and cutting mangoes, peaches, waxberries and other fruit. One employee said their first day was spent peeling grapes over ice, leaving their hands red and nearly numb. Shifts were described as 6 or 8 hours, with a half-hour meal break; one worker said they could peel grapes for almost an entire day.
Employees also noted strict hygiene: even adding ice requires handwashing, and picking up something from the floor requires immediate handwashing. One employee said they lost 20 jin in two months at Heytea and dreamed about finishing cups at night.
Nayuki employee accounts showed a broader tea-plus-bakery operating model:
Coffee and new-style tea drinks differ in product structure, store management and supply chain composition. That explains why highly standardized coffee processes, such as those used by Luckin and Starbucks, are hard to transfer directly into new-style tea drinks. Consumers have not necessarily accepted those efforts, mainly because the product itself does not work as well.
In a Luckin or Starbucks store, it is difficult to imagine employees cutting fruit or peeling grapes. Luckin’s store employee experience is close to an assembly line: staff mainly memorize button sequences for different SKUs. The lighter the store operation, the easier it is to maximize efficiency, which supports rapid expansion. As robotic arms and related technologies mature, Luckin-style stores may adopt them to reduce labor and improve coffee output efficiency.
For new-style tea chains, the core in-store tasks are fruit cutting, tea brewing and mixing, and cup finishing.
On fruit preparation, Nayuki’s investment direction suggests cooperation with companies such as Tianye, with fruit cut in advance and delivered cold-chain to stores. This could reduce the heavy back-kitchen burden, though brands still need to test whether factory-cut fruit can match the taste of grapes peeled fresh in store. The likely path is mixed: some fruit processed in store, some in factories.
Tea brewing and mixing also have room for standardization. Tea chains blend different tea leaves to stabilize taste across stores and reduce the impact of different harvest years. Blending can be handled with tea factories, while in-store brewing is still mainly manual. Once brewing becomes standardized enough, digital equipment and systems can automate more of the process, leaving staff to handle key steps at set times. Nayuki had disclosed plans to use digital tea-brewing equipment and expected full rollout across stores that year.
Heytea employee accounts described constantly changing store recipes, creating a heavy memorization burden. In extreme cases, recipes were said to change three times in one day. The reason was that Heytea had a department collecting front-line consumer feedback on new products, then adjusting recipes based on market response.
Veteran employees may handle this, but stores rely heavily on part-time workers and new staff, which raises management difficulty.
New-style tea brands are still experimenting through product launches, but constant novelty is not a long-term model by itself. The business model still needs classic products with high repeat purchase to drive revenue and stable gross margin.
Using new products to stimulate sales is a mixed path: launches can open the market, while classic products retain active users. Heytea’s price cuts on several pure tea and pure fruit tea products suggest that once repeat purchase rises on certain items, targeted price cuts can lock in existing users and attract new ones. This may also reflect cost optimization at store and supply-chain level.
Heytea may also be exploring more modular and customized products. In a customization model, the company would continuously collect each customer’s product preferences through its mini program and stores, then recommend preferred products when the customer returns. If customization locks in taste preference, switching costs rise because a customer may not get the same familiar flavor elsewhere.
After experimenting with bakery, Heytea appears to have made a strategic trade-off. It retained some bakery products but did not make them a core push. It may instead strengthen ice cream and related products, which could pressure brands such as Haagen-Dazs.
Nayuki found issues with store exhaust systems and shifted from standard stores toward Pro stores, while still keeping bakery products and extending from bakery into snack-style retail products.
Nayuki previously communicated externally that it planned to open 5 new central factories over the following 3 years to support bakery supply for Pro stores. One central factory could support 200-300 Pro stores, and the second factory had already started construction in the East China market.
At Nayuki stores, snack-style products such as chips and nougat had already started appearing. Display cabinets and tabletops no longer showed only tea leaves and bakery products; snacks were placed in important positions.
Whether retail products can lift store sales still needed to be observed in Nayuki’s future financial reports.
Note: investment references and forward-looking rollout, factory and store-support figures are historical statements from the January 16, 2022 source article.