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After launching an in-house tea brand called “Taoyuan Yuye” last year, TikTok owner ByteDance now plans to team up for a new food and beverage business, Tech Planet reported on Thursday.
The tech firm has recently set up a dedicated team for this purpose in Beijing, where it is based. According to company insiders, the food and beverage business is mainly targeted at “new style” tea beverages, although it will reportedly introduce other tea products in due course. These drinks are mainly to be sold internally, but the firm might offer them to the outside market one day.
ByteDance has released relevant recruitment information on its website, including positions for food and beverage R&D, as well as planning. In this regard, a director of Douyin told Tech Planet that the team mainly served for internal catering needs and employees.
However, in the job description of the post for “Food and Beverage Product Planning,” ByteDance explicitly required the candidates to be responsible for “sorting out the core selling points and product listing plans and their launch.” This suggests that the food and beverage business is not limited to internal supply and sales, and may enter the external market.
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In addition, “Taoyuan Yuye,” a ByteDance tea project that was previously reported, opened a “Taoyuan Yuye Flagship Store” within Douyin, the Chinese mainland version of TikTok. It has not launched any products yet. It is reported that the products sold are mainly teabags, and the varieties of teabags include Dahongpao Tea (Wuyi Mountain Rock Tea), Lapsang Sauchong Black Tea, green tea, jasmine tea and rose black tea.
In China, the tea market has always been a popular field for new consumption, and its output value has exceeded 100 billion yuan ($14.75 billion). According to data from the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, in 2020, China’s ready-to-drink tea market reached 113.6 billion yuan, up 6.87% year-on-year. By the end of 2019, the total number of beverage stores in China was about 427,000, and by the end of 2020, that was about 596,000. The proportion of “new tea” stores was the highest, reaching 65.5%, with about 378,000 stores.
