Chagee's Founder on the 'Three Teas' Strategy Behind 6,200+ Stores

This is an English adaptation of a FoodBud historical article originally published on December 17, 2024.

In this first-person talk, Chagee (霸王茶姬) founder Zhang Junjie lays out the thinking behind a chain that grew past 6,200 stores and a single product (Boya Juexian) heading toward RMB 10 billion in annual sales. (Adapted from the founder's own account; operator lens.)

The thesis: tea as "a cup of water"

Zhang frames tea drinks not as a faddish category but as "a cup of water 8 billion people drink" — applying the logic of modern coffee to tea. As espresso-plus-milk became coffee's global common denominator, he wants freshly made tea to become tea's: standardized, industrialized, and everyday. From that "one" thinking flow "one" strategy, innovation and organization.

The "three teas" — three benchmarks

• Like Starbucks: make tea an everyday, freshly made in-store experience. Industrialization spans upstream raw materials, midstream commodity trading and downstream automated delivery — a new hire can scan and produce a drink on day one in ~8 seconds with under 0.2% variance.
• Like Nestlé: extend to home/office via a small automatic tea-brewing machine and capsules (imagined at ~RMB 199–299 for the device plus a few-yuan capsule).
• Like Coca-Cola: a ready-to-drink tea that is tasty, healthy and functional.

Positioning: "absolutely good, relatively cheap"

Pricing first: Chagee benchmarks the US Starbucks daily-consumption price point — "high quality, fair price." To address health skepticism it publishes recipes and per-cup nutrition (calories, protein, caffeine) and uses an A/B/C/D grade (its products all A/B) — which only works because everything is standardized. Olympic-champion endorsements (Zheng Qinwen, Liu Xiang) push a health "consensus."

Single-point breakthrough and digitized stores

The 2021 decision to "punch through one point" produced Boya Juexian (tea, milk, syrup; ambient-shippable), nearing RMB 10 billion in 2024 sales — built on upstream industrialization, midstream commodity trade and downstream automation. On retail, Zhang stresses two "doors": mind-share (first choice for afternoon tea) and deep distribution (covering 70%+ of China's malls, expanding to CBDs, schools, transit, scenic spots, then home/office and convenience stores). Stores run on an IoT system where people, goods, production and money are "all online": store managers carry no sales target — 95%+ of orders come from back-office (56% membership, 40% delivery), leaving stores to manage 5% of sales plus last-mile delivery and customer experience. Management uses piece-rate pay (RMB 1 per scan), customer-satisfaction-only assessment, and a Haidilao-style mentor/equity model.

Scale battle and organization

Chagee's 2022 explosion ("300 stores in a month") rested on a 2021 model-market build, then a distributed-decision system of ~30 wholly-owned provincial subsidiaries (each with GM/HR functions) closing the front-line decision loop. The vision: Chagee in 100 countries, 15 billion cups a year, 300,000 partners. Forward targets are the founder's stated ambitions and are historical (Dec 2024).