Starting with a humble beverage shop, a Taiwanese-American boba tea entrepreneur has transformed his business into a multimillion-dollar packaging giant that is publicly listed on the NASDAQ.
On Wednesday last week, Alan Yu (俞宗明) shared his success story when hosting a delegation of members from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles (TECO LA), the Taiwanese- American Chamber of Commerce of Greater Los Angeles (TACCLA) and media representatives.
The meeting was held at Yu’s 4,645m2 facility in Chino, California, which serves as the principal executive and administrative headquarters for his companies Karat Packaging Inc and Lollicup USA Inc, as well as a manufacturing plant for select products.
Photo: CNA
Karat is a publicly listed company valued at approximately US$368 million.
However, Yu came from humble beginnings. His first foray into the food and beverage industry began in 2000, when he opened his first boba tea shop in San Gabriel, California, with his partner, Marvin Cheng (鄭光宏).
Soon, Lollicup USA Inc was founded, focusing initially on the establishment, franchising and licensing of boba tea stores throughout the US.
Yu said that he was the person who coined “boba tea,” the English term used to describe the internationally popular Taiwanese beverage.
Yu said that instead of using “pearls,” the term commonly used in Taiwan to describe the beverage’s tapioca balls, he settled on “boba,” an older Mandarin slang used to describe the voluptuous figure of a woman, to associate the snack with the supersizing of day-to-day items commonly practiced in the US.
The operation quickly went from a single venue to more than 60 stores in 2006.
To guarantee quality control at all of their stores, the company in 2004 expanded its focus to include the distribution of supplies for the entire boba tea industry in the US.
In 2014, the firm began distributing and manufacturing products under a new brand, Karat, because of growing demand for their packaging products in the country’s food service industry.
Karat was eventually incorporated in September 2018 as the holding company for Lollicup.
Asked about the key to his success, Yu said that it is always important to keep risk diversification in mind while growing a company.
Dedication, adaptability and perseverance in problem-solving also helped the company grow, he said.
Echoing Yu’s statement, Lollicup and Karat’s chief operation officer, Joanne Wang (王姿容), used examples of how the company has spread its focus over the past 20 years, all the while coming face-to-face with unforeseen obstacles such as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There are a lot of people out there in the business of boba tea products, but we have been able to achieve what others could not, such as decreasing packaging volume to lower logistics expenses, and selecting the right kind of plastic to minimize breakage during transport,” Wang said.
Liu Lun-cheng (劉倫正), who heads TECO LA’s Economic Division, told the meeting that Yu’s ability to transform a small beverage shop into a NASDAQ-listed company fully encompassed and represented the hardworking spirit of Taiwanese.
TACCLA president Lisa Liu (劉雅薇) said that it was an impressive feat for a Taiwanese-American company to penetrate the mainstream US market, gaining clients from popular food chains such as TGI Fridays.
Today, Lollicup reaches across six US states, with distribution centers, supply stores, manufacturing plants and warehouses in Hawaii, Washington, California, Texas, South Carolina and New Jersey.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
People walk past advertising for a Syensqo chip at the Semicon Taiwan exhibition in Taipei yesterday.
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
RSS