From brewing tea around the fire to iced tea, who has made a fortune from this cup of tea?

Recently, young people have come up with new ways to play with tea culture. The popularity of brewing tea around the stove has just passed, and iced tea around the stove has become a new popular way of playing. The first wave of businesses have started to franchise business or sell courses. From brewing tea to iced tea, can the business of ritual sense last long?

Speaking of ancient tea culture, one can get a glimpse of it from Dream of the Red Chamber, including Miaoyu's "collecting snow from plum blossoms and brewing tea five years later" and "in summer, Daiyu served iced tea".

Nowadays, young people have also come up with new ways to play with tea culture. The fireside tea-making method, which quickly became popular in winter, uses a charcoal fire and a pot of hot tea to create a full "atmosphere" and also earn a steady flow of traffic. However, when the sound of fireside tea-making just dissipated, with early summer approaching, fireside iced tea became a new top-tier method overnight, and the smoky "fairy afternoon tea" appeared in many parts of the country.

The fireside iced tea, which became popular on the Internet in just one week, seems to be another good business opportunity, but it is also very easy to go the old way of brewing tea around the fire. Once the novelty wears off, the popularity will drop sharply. Therefore, the first wave of merchants who rushed to seize the market have already started franchise business or sold courses before the traffic disappears.

01 From boiled tea to iced tea, young people always pay for the atmosphere

An old elm tea-making round table, with a Chinese dessert stand, a few desserts on an antique tray, a glass kettle and small teacups, and dry ice, the main character, in the smoke, it feels like heaven on earth.

If you have recently opened any of the major short video platforms or flipped through any of the social media software, you must have seen the 2.0 version of brewing tea around the stove, "Stovetop Iced Tea".

Looking back, not long ago, brewing tea around the stove for the first time broadened the new consumption scene of the new Chinese afternoon tea. With its antique Chinese style and romantic atmosphere full of fireworks, it successfully attracted countless young people to check in and quickly became a "net celebrity" project last winter. In the blink of an eye, early summer is approaching, and the form of brewing tea around the stove has changed. The stove has become an ice stove, the water in the oven has been replaced with ice cubes, and food-grade dry ice has been added. The orange lights have become antique fans, and the roasted sweet potatoes have become ice powder. It is also an ancient new Chinese style, but the main feature is a cool "fairy air".

Overnight, social discussion about iced tea around the fire has soared. On Douyin, "iced tea around the fire" has exceeded 5 million views, and on Xiaohongshu, many notes about iced tea around the fire have also emerged. According to data from Guoji Qiangua, the topic was launched on Xiaohongshu on April 2, and in less than a month, it has been estimated to have been read more than 419,500 times.

Many cities, including Beijing, Haikou, Guizhou, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Chongqing and Xi'an, have launched the "first iced tea around the fire" with slogans such as "Smoke and mist, it's like a dream", "Come to a table of iced tea around the fire, watch the clouds rise and fall; with a few plates of Jiangnan dim sum, enjoy the flowers blooming and falling", trying to attract the attention of young people again. The first wave of store visits and check-in videos or notes have also appeared, and there is no lack of praise for "Fairy Afternoon Tea".

"In comparison, I think iced tea is indeed better than the boiled tea I had before. My experience of boiling tea around the stove was not very good, because the taste of roasted oranges and roasted peanuts was not very good. Sitting in the yard in the cold wind in the winter, even with a stove and hot tea, was actually not as comfortable as I imagined." Tao Jing, who has checked in for boiled tea and iced tea around the stove, feels that drinking iced tea, eating ice jelly, and fresh-cut fruit in summer will be more palatable, and the atmosphere of dry ice will be more sufficient. "But to be honest, whether it is boiled tea or iced tea, you are paying for the atmosphere."

There are many notes about Weilu Bingcha on Xiaohongshu

Zinc Scale noted that the current price of a two-person iced tea set is between 69 yuan and 200 yuan, while the price of a four-person set is between 200 yuan and 400 yuan. The set includes iced teas such as fruit tea and scented tea, nut platters, fruit platters or dessert platters, and snacks. The first wave of teahouses or teahouses that launched the iced tea set were mostly those that had previously launched the tea set.

Compared with the previous price of brewing tea around the fire, the price in stores that focus on brewing tea around the fire is about 88 to 168 yuan per two people, while the price in restaurants that follow the trend and add categories can be as low as 25 yuan per two people.

So, how much does the basic equipment cost for ice tea? A netizen who runs a teahouse calculated on Xiaohongshu that, including various utensils and tea sets, snacks for a single table and dry ice, "a set costs about 480 yuan." Among them, the price of dry ice is about 8 to 10 yuan per kilogram on average (the price fluctuates depending on the purchase amount), and each serving of ice tea requires about 10 small pieces of dry ice (about 16mm).

As for the table for iced tea around the fire, Zinc Scale noticed that the price of a set of tables for iced tea around the fire on the market ranges from as low as 200 to 300 yuan to as high as 1,000 yuan. "In fact, the table requirements for iced tea around the fire are not as high as the grill for boiling tea. You don't need to bring a charcoal basin. You can just buy a glass basin and put it on the outdoor wooden table, put in dry ice and ice cubes, and the effect will be the same." A teahouse staff told Zinc Scale, "But most teahouses use the charcoal grilled table bought for boiling tea last winter. They boil tea around the fire in winter and iced tea around the fire in summer."

02 Franchise, sell courses, the business behind iced tea

Although it has become well-known on social media platforms, since the fireside iced tea has just been launched and has not yet fully heated up in various places, according to the sales data of fireside iced tea in various places on major local life platforms, it is not as popular as fireside boiled tea for the time being. However, the first wave of merchants who rushed to seize the market have not only made money from iced tea itself, but also started to do franchise business or sell courses before the traffic disappeared.

Among them, the founder of a teahouse chain in Wenzhou, Zhejiang, said that the way to make "ice tea around the stove" was first invented by his family, and it was originally named "spring-cooked ice tea". In her Xiaohongshu notes, many comments were asking "how to do it?" or "can I join in?" On April 3, the teahouse issued a public statement on Xiaohongshu, organized a professional training team, and invited people to join or learn nationwide. Less than 20 days later, the first franchise store was established in Shaoxing, Zhejiang.

When Zinc Scale consulted this teahouse about franchising, the other party said, "Our brand belongs to the 'new Chinese tea beverage' format. There are certain requirements for franchisee stores. They must meet the requirements of the brand. The design style is designed by our brand (including the creation of scenes). We will help franchisees with operation and management in the first three months (getting on track). In the first month of opening, there will be staff from the head office to operate the store, including one-to-one store product customization (product research and development based on local characteristics). Before opening, the franchisee owner can send 2-3 people to the head office to learn (a one-month on-site training) to ensure smooth service and production."

As for the franchise fee, "the franchise fee is 100,000 yuan. No additional fees will be charged for the trainees who come to the store, but they will pay for their own accommodation, meals and round-trip fare. If the opening requires the staff of the head office to stay in the store, the salary is fixed, calculated at 6,000 yuan per month (an average of 200 yuan per day), and paid by the franchise store. If the franchise store feels that it can undertake the opening, it can choose not to stay in the store." He also emphasized, "Under normal circumstances, we expect the payback period to be about 3 months."

In addition, the teahouse chain gave relevant advice, saying, "The renovation cost should still be based on the actual store area. It is recommended that the area should not be too large, no more than 100 square meters, preferably 70-80 square meters, and a small courtyard is preferred."

When Zinc Scale asked about the current situation of franchisees, the other party said, "The new Chinese afternoon tea model of our brand has high requirements for stores, and most of the interested parties are in the process of selecting locations."

The left is the franchise introduction, and the right is the course fee

In fact, in addition to opening up for franchising, many operators claiming to be new-style tea brands have begun to sell related courses. Zinc Scale has noticed that these operators mostly attract traffic by posting content such as "List of Tools for Making Ice Tea by the Fire" on major social media platforms, with the purpose of selling their new-style tea courses.

Among them, Zinc Scale consulted a new tea beverage R&D studio that claimed to be "mainly responsible for teahouse operations and new media, and has guided 50 students to open stores in 7 years". According to the course introduction of the R&D studio, the course content includes "new teahouse industry analysis, tool recognition, iced tea series operation, new teahouse store opening process and experience management", etc. The course is an offline course with a course cycle of 5 days, from 10 to 12 in the morning and from 2 to 5 in the afternoon, and the course fee is 4,980 yuan. The new teahouse entrepreneurship class course is 10 days and costs 6,980 yuan, excluding accommodation, etc.

The other party said, "Our student benefits include free shopping lists for fireside tea and fireside iced tea, supply channels for high-quality tea and utensils, and free reference drawings of new teahouse space decoration layout worth 980 yuan."

Therefore, although some users on Xiaohongshu have previously joked that "the boss earns 390 yuan with tears while sitting around the fire", the real tycoon may not be the tea seller, but the business behind the cup of tea. As early as when the fireside tea-making became popular, Zinc Scale also pointed out that selling tea leaves and tea sets, exporting models, selling designs, and creating private domain traffic... these are all possible ways to make money in the future.

03 The rise and fall are fast, so is it hard for a ritual business to last long?

In fact, with the rapid transition from brewing tea around the fire to drinking iced tea around the fire, it is not difficult to see that the business with a sense of ritual seems difficult to sustain.

According to the data, Guoji Qiangua data shows that in the past 90 days, the estimated total number of readings of notes related to brewing tea around the fire on Xiaohongshu has reached 10.3883 million, a year-on-year decrease of 80.67%, and the total number of note interactions has reached 617,800, a decrease of 76.85%.

This is of course related to its seasonal positioning, but the more important reason may be that the ritual business often falls into the mode of "getting high quickly and getting low quickly". After all, the rapid popularity of brewing tea around the stove is related to the punch-in culture of young people, but this also means that it is easy to punch in, but difficult to repurchase. Especially when this service product has low threshold, homogeneous content, uneven product content and other chaos, it makes many consumers regard this form as a "one-time experience product".

Therefore, the iced tea also faces the bottleneck of the fleeting freshness. At the same time, the harm of dry ice to the respiratory tract and the damage of cold-brewed tea to the stomach are also being widely questioned and discussed in traditional Chinese medicine and nutrition. Zinc Scale noticed that on major social media platforms, many teahouse or tea room managers said that they would not make iced tea around the fire. "Sometimes, the more beautiful something looks, the more likely it is to be a trap with an illusion."

Controversy about iced tea on Xiaohongshu

But this does not mean that reshaping the ritual of Chinese tea drinking is a bad thing. Compared with the tea culture praised in "Dream of Red Mansions", Miaoyu's tea ceremony is indispensable, including "living in Xuanmu Panxiang Temple, collecting snow from plum blossoms, and getting a jar of ghost face green flowers, but I couldn't bear to eat it, so I buried it in the ground, and it only bloomed this summer", and "personally holding a small tea tray with a crabapple flower carved lacquer and filled with gold cloud dragon offering longevity, and a Cheng kiln colorful small covered bell inside", and the water is "rainwater collected last year".

From ancient times to the present, tea culture seems to be inseparable from the sense of ritual. As Song Shilei, deputy director of the Tea Culture Research Center of Wuhan University, once said in an interview, "I think that every era needs a sense of ritual in life, and the sense of ritual is culture... I never look down on today's stove-cooking tea and drinking milk tea, I think this is today's culture."

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with pursuing a sense of ritual in life, but if you want to make money solely by relying on a sense of ritual, it may be doomed to fail in the long run.

Written by: Li Xuanqi, edited by: Gao Zhi

Source: Zinc Scale (ID: znkedu), focusing on original in-depth reports on technology and the new Internet economy