Heytea Is Letting Customers Invent Their Own Drinks — And Name Them

Heytea is handing over the lab coat. The tea chain known for turning cheese foam into a national obsession is now testing a feature that lets customers build drinks from scratch — and name whatever they create.

Currently in an internal beta, the DIY customization tool is available to just 1% of users in Shenzhen. Those lucky enough to get in follow a three-step flow: pick a category, configure the base, and load up on toppings.

The palette is generous. Five base categories — fresh fruit tea, tea special blends, milk tea, zero-caffeine, and cocoa. From there, everything is fair game: tea base, juice, fresh fruit, toppings, even the cloud-top foam. Sweetness and ice levels get their own sliders. Pricing adjusts dynamically based on what you throw in.

Once a drink is finalized, users receive a hand-drawn custom card — and the real genius kicks in: they get to name the drink themselves.

That naming field has essentially turned into an unpaid creative department. Early submissions spotted during the beta include "Bitter Than Monday Bitter Chocolate" (打工人的心声), "Ba-solutely Great" (a pun on the Chinese word for "comfortable"), and "Capital Has Made an Orange Out of Me" — a wordplay jab at corporate life that roughly translates to being squeezed dry. The names are half menu item, half diary entry, and that's exactly the point.

The strategic logic is clean. On one side, DIY drinks feed the Gen Z appetite for personalization and produce a new form of tea-shop social currency — a custom card you designed yourself is infinitely more shareable than a standard receipt. On the other, the feature doubles as an R&D pipeline: if users consistently mix up something brilliant, Heytea can spot it and bring it to the official menu. Zero-cost consumer testing dressed as creative play.

No word yet on a national rollout, but the demand is already loud. The beta is barely underway and fans outside Shenzhen are already petitioning for access. Turns out people don't just want someone else's signature recipe — they want their own.