Heytea Opens First Bangkok Location with Cloud Tea Drink
Chinese tea brand heytea opened its first Southeast Asian location at CentralWorld Bangkok, debuting teaAir—a cloud-like tea texture innovation—alongside bakery and gelato offerings at prices from 90-195 baht.
Thailand's milk tea and fresh beverage market has become more vibrant with the official opening of heytea, a new-style tea brand from China, at CentralWorld mall. The location features heytea lab, an experimental space showcasing the brand's highest-level menu creations.
This Bangkok branch is the first heytea lab in Southeast Asia and the third globally outside China. Its distinguishing feature combines a tea lab, bake lab, and gelato lab under one roof, offering not just tea-based drinks but also bakery items and gelato, with an open kitchen where customers can watch the preparation process up close. Prices start from 90 to 195 baht.
Heytea, founded in 2012, is a key player in China's new-style tea movement, famous for pioneering cheese tea—blending cheese with quality tea, real milk, and fresh fruits. The brand treats tea not merely as a beverage but emphasizes ingredient selection, menu innovation, and in-store experience. Heytea lab, launched in 2016, serves as a dedicated space for testing and developing new menu concepts and has expanded to major cities including New York and Toronto, with Bangkok now becoming another hub for piloting fresh ideas.
The highlight of this launch is teaAir, the world's first tea cloud concept, debuting in Bangkok. The signature dish, teaAir – Rock Oolong Jackfruit, combines Rock Oolong tea with jackfruit, papaya, and coconut, transforming the tea into a light, fluffy cloud-like texture rather than a conventional beverage. Customers can scoop the cloud and eat it, drink the tea beneath, or mix both together for a complete sensory experience in a single glass.
Beyond new creations, heytea brings popular international items like Coconut Mango Boom while reimagining familiar Thai flavors through bake lab offerings like Thai Milk Tea Croissant and Egg Tart, plus Lime Thai Milk gelato from gelato lab. The brand extends Thai tea beyond traditional cups into pastries and gelato through play with flavor, texture, and temperature variations.
The store design draws inspiration from Thai floating markets, incorporating wooden boat elements and riverside aesthetics into heytea lab's open workspace. This approach reflects the brand's international expansion strategy: adapting the Chinese model to local context rather than replicating it wholesale.
Heytea's foreign expansion, part of its global growth, now includes over 120 locations outside mainland China across the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The brand opened its first international heytea lab at Times Square in New York in 2024, followed by the first Canadian location in Toronto before entering the Bangkok market.
