On September 25, 2026, the well-known Chinese new-style tea brand HEYTEA officially opened its first Thailand store on the ground floor of CentralWorld shopping mall in the heart of Bangkok. The opening day coincided with heavy rainfall in the Thai capital, but that did nothing to dampen local consumers' enthusiasm: many customers began queuing in the rain as early as 5 a.m., with the line stretching more than 300 metres at its longest, and some customers waited over three hours just to get a cup of HEYTEA. The scene spread rapidly across social media and local news outlets, becoming one of the most emblematic images of Chinese consumer brands' recent push into Southeast Asia.

The Bangkok store is no ordinary outlet — it is HEYTEA's first overseas "Lab 2.0" concept store and the brand's first location in the entire ASEAN region. The store integrates three functional zones: a tea lab, a bake lab and a gelato lab, offering a far broader product range than a standard outlet. Even more notably, HEYTEA chose the Bangkok flagship for the global debut of its new "cloud tea" format, teaAir, alongside several limited-edition items developed specifically for the Thai market, including "teaAir Rock Oolong Jackfruit," a "Thai Milk Tea Croissant Egg Tart" and a "Lime Thai Milk Tea Gelato," all blending local Thai flavours. In terms of spatial design, the store draws heavily on traditional elements of Thailand's floating markets, using curved timber joinery and boat-shaped counters in an attempt to achieve localisation in both product and space simultaneously.

Because demand on opening day far outstripped supply, scalping activity sprang up on Bangkok's streets: resellers bought drinks priced at only a few dozen baht and resold them for 650 to 750 baht (roughly 130-150 yuan), several times the original price. In response, HEYTEA's customer service team said the brand firmly opposes queue-scalping and resale practices, and urged consumers who encounter such behaviour to report it to the store or customer service to protect normal purchasing order and consumer rights. The fact that scalping emerged immediately on opening day underscores the high level of attention and perceived scarcity HEYTEA's brand has built up among young Thai consumers.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) also welcomed HEYTEA's first Thailand store via its official social media accounts, calling the brand "the pioneer of Chinese new-style tea" and promoting the store as a fresh must-visit spot in Bangkok, suggesting visitors add it to their itineraries. It is relatively rare for an official tourism body to actively endorse and drive traffic to a foreign chain's store in this way, and the move reflects Thai tourism authorities' desire to leverage Chinese consumer-culture buzz to enrich Bangkok's visitor experience and attract tourists from all countries, including China.

HEYTEA was founded in Guangdong and is one of the representative players in China's new-style tea industry, long built around a product philosophy of "real tea, real milk, real fruit, real sugar," distinguishing it from the powder-mix milk tea products common overseas. HEYTEA's international expansion began in Singapore in 2018, making it one of the earliest Chinese new-tea brands to go global. Since then, HEYTEA has gradually expanded into the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Malaysia, the United States, South Korea and Japan — eight overseas countries in total — plus Hong Kong and Macau, covering roughly 28 overseas cities. According to recent reports, HEYTEA's overseas store count has surpassed 100, having grown more than sixfold over the past year; in the US market alone, store numbers have rapidly expanded from just two to more than 30, making it one of the fastest-growing new-tea brands by store count in that market. HEYTEA is also considered the only Chinese new-tea brand to have built a systematic overseas supply chain to date, having set up warehousing and distribution centres on the US east and west coasts, in the UK, Malaysia, and in Sydney and Melbourne, Australia, to secure stable ingredient supplies for its overseas outlets.

The enthusiastic opening of HEYTEA's first Thailand store is emblematic of a broader wave in recent years in which Chinese new-tea brands, and Chinese consumer brands more generally, have collectively pushed into Southeast Asia. Against a backdrop of intensifying competition and slowing growth in China's domestic tea market, rival brands such as Mixue Bingcheng and Chagee have likewise accelerated store openings in Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries in recent years, creating a landscape of multiple brands competing head-to-head in the same markets. Analysts note that after years of exploration, the overseas strategy of Chinese new-tea brands has shifted from the early phase of crude, quantity-driven expansion toward a more refined stage emphasising brand positioning, localised product development and upgraded consumer experience — and HEYTEA's simultaneous rollout of locally exclusive flavours and a high-concept flagship format in Bangkok reflects exactly this trend.

In terms of operational detail, HEYTEA has also adopted differentiated localisation strategies across its various overseas markets. For instance, to address lactose intolerance and caffeine sensitivity among some consumers in Europe and the US, HEYTEA clearly labels on its menus whether a product contains milk and what its caffeine content is; its R&D team also adjusts recipes and production processes according to local water quality and ingredient availability, rather than simply replicating the standardised model used in domestic stores. This approach of pairing "localised products" with "standardised brand experience" is regarded within the industry as one of the key factors enabling HEYTEA to gain a lasting foothold in overseas markets with significant cultural differences.

From a broader perspective, the successful opening of HEYTEA's first Thailand store coincided with China's National Day and Mid-Autumn "Golden Week" drawing near, a window in which Thai tourism authorities are working hard to attract Chinese visitors' spending. The queuing frenzy triggered by a Chinese consumer brand in Thailand echoes the deepening engagement between China and Thailand in tourism, trade and other fields, and has been viewed by numerous local media outlets as a vivid footnote to the ongoing deepening of people-to-people cultural exchange and business cooperation between the two countries. English-language outlet the Bangkok Post went so far as to run a headline describing HEYTEA as "setting out to become the Apple of tea," likening the queuing and consumer fervour at its store to the scenes seen at Apple product launches.

Looking ahead, now that its Bangkok flagship has gained a firm footing, whether HEYTEA will accelerate the rollout of its "Lab" concept stores to other Thai cities and other ASEAN countries to further expand its Southeast Asian market share will be a point the industry continues to watch closely. Either way, the consumer frenzy sparked by this Bangkok opening already offers a fresh, worthwhile case study of Chinese brands' push into Southeast Asia, letting outside observers glimpse, through a single long queue for a cup of milk tea, the increasingly close reality of people-to-people consumer-culture exchange between China and Thailand.