By: Cleo Newton           

Did you know that boba tea first came from Taiwan? The website Food&Wine says, desserts like tapioca pearls and shaved ice were pretty common in the 80’s, so was drinking milk tea. People decided to combine these things together to make boba tea. They put tapioca pearls at the bottom, added shaved ice, and finally filled the rest of the cup with milk tea.  

Over time, people who sold boba tea at the market created fruit boba by using fruit powders and syrups. After this, they created more and more different types of toppings such as egg pudding, grass jelly, red beans, and almond jelly.

Eventually, they also created popping boba. It’s exactly what it sounds like, it’s a type of boba that pops when bitten into. In the classic boba tea, they swapped out the milk for non-dairy creamer, because of this, boba tea is known for being very creamy and sweet.

Some other common boba tea flavors are taro, green tea, mango, and watermelon. This one isn’t a boba tea flavor, but did you know that there’s something called boba tea pizza? It’s just where they take the classic brown sugar tapioca pearls and put it on pizza. Boba pizza is only sold at Dominos in Taiwan, would you try it?

When Taiwanese immigrants came to the US in the early 90’s, so did boba tea. The shops they set up were a good source of money and kind of became a safe place for other Asian American immigrants. Boba tea became popular in the US. It seems like boba tea first appeared in Los Angeles, California.

According to hypebae, some of the most popular boba tea shops around the world are, Happy Lemon, Ten Ren, The Alley, YiFang, Chatime, Boba Guys, and Xing Fu Tang.

Visit these places to try boba if you haven’t already or if you want to drink good boba tea. Boba and Tea and Sencha are two places locally where you can also find boba. After reading this I hope that you learned a couple new things about how boba came to be.