A middle-aged man named Chan McTi sips a cool beverage amidst a cloud of colorful bubbles, practically dancing for joy as he imbibes each mouthful.

The scene is part of a McCafé ad airing on German TV this summer, introducing the company’s newest beverage—Taiwanese-style boba—to consumers.

Germany’s McCafés deliver the drink in much the same way Taiwanese shops do: consumers choose a black, green, or milk tea as their base, then add whatever garnish they like—cubes of passion­fruit-flavored gelatin, or something even more exotic. This mixing and matching yields up to 250 flavor combinations for €1.99 (about NT$83) per serving, about 2.5 times the typical price in Taiwan.

Devices that help automate boba production, including machines to measure out fructose syrup and seal cups, are spreading around the world with the Taiwanese treat.

“Germany has taken to bubble tea more strongly than the rest of Europe,” says Jacky Wang, chairman of boba supplier Poss­mei Corporation. “German consumers used to order meals at McDonald’s with a bubble tea or boba from another restaurant already in hand. Sensing an opportunity, McDonald’s dove into the market.” Wang’s company not only supplies boba ingredients to over 80% of Germany’s more than 1,000 boba shops, it guided the establishment of two of the country’s largest boba chains, BoboQ and Tea One, which together have more than 100 European outlets.

Unlike most Taiwanese tea-beverage businesses, Wang’s company has chosen to bypass the “fertile ground” of the Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan markets in favor of Western markets new to boba. Europe, for example, is his primary market. But Poss­mei’s ambitions stretch well beyond Europe, and the company now has customers on four continents.

Why has Wang ignored nearby markets in favor of more distant ones? “We’re a new brand with limited capital,” he explains. “Attempting to break into such established markets could wipe us out.”

Customers planning to open a boba shop in Spain visit Possmei’s Taiwan headquarters to learn how to make the drink.

Born in 1963, Wang’s only degree is in electronics from a vocational high school. He completed his military service just as the boba craze was taking hold. Recognizing a good business opportunity, he gave up electronics and opened his own shop selling tea and snacks.

Soon after, he married the daughter of the owner of Trojan Corporation, a Taiwanese supplier of beverage ingredients, and took over development of the company’s overseas business. Before he knew it, more than 20 years had gone by.

While with Trojan, he saw many of his foreign clients encounter operational difficulties that required expert advice. “But suppliers are by nature basically passive,” says Wang. “I wasn’t really in a position to offer recommendations. I couldn’t help them even when I wanted to.”

Feeling that foreign markets had huge potential, he bought Trojan’s international sales department, which he had built himself, from his father-in-law in 2009, and turned it into Poss­mei. Wang immediately decided that Poss­mei would not compete with Trojan in the domestic market nor attempt to develop the mainland Chinese market.

“All anybody sees is the 1.3-billion-person Chinese market,” he explains. “But there are 7 billion people on the planet. If you subtract China’s 1.3 billion from that 7 billion, you still have 5.7 billion. Doesn’t that offer more potential than China?”

Wang spent hundreds of millions of NT dollars building Possmei’s Zen-inspired Bubble Milk Tea Concept Hall, a facility aimed at raising the industry’s barriers to entry and increasing its sophistication.

To develop his customer base in Western nations, Wang employs the most direct and powerful form of sales there is: face-to-face communication.

He attends 20 international food conventions a year, spending roughly NT$2 million per show on airfare, lodging, and his booth at the convention. That NT$40-million-per-year figure astonishes others in the industry, but Wang knows that his approach—taking the time to visit your customers in their own nations, communicate with them in their languages, and address cultural differences in person—is the best way to convince them to try new food products.

As many as 80% of Wang’s customers had their first taste of boba at one of his convention booths. Those booths usually also provided their first sight of the extra-wide straws used to drink boba, as well as of the machines that measure out the fructose syrup, shake the drinks, and seal the cups. In other words, all the interesting devices Taiwan has invented to support the boba industry.

“I watch foreigners steel themselves to take a taste, then feel an inexpressible sense of relief when their faces relax into a smile,” says Wang, who laughs that he’s Taiwan’s boba ambassador.

Having spread the love of boba beyond Taiwan’s borders, Wang’s next step was to show foreigners how to run a boba shop. He set up a program specially for customers who were clueless about the boba business, teaching them every­thing from the drink’s origins to how to prepare “pearls,” test flavors, name shops, create brands, and design websites.

Boba drinkers abroad enjoy the “salad bar” approach to buying boba: order your tea base, then “garnish” it yourself.

In an effort to raise the boba industry’s barriers to entry and upgrade its image, Wang purchased two office buildings in New Taipei City’s Wugu District. He then spent several hundred million NT dollars renovating and decorating them in a Zen style, creating the Bubble Milk Tea Concept Hall and the Bubble Milk Tea International Training Center.

He says that whereas Taiwanese see boba as nothing more than a streetside snack, people in other nations view it as something different and special. Since the necessary ingredients, equipment, and labor are also all much more expensive abroad, foreign boba shops have to tweak their business strategies. “The best first step is to raise the barriers to entry. Starbucks, for example, holds itself to a high standard in order to justify the expense of its coffee beverages.”

Bubbleology, a London bubble tea shop, exploded into popularity last year. Company owner Assad Khan, a former investment banker, is a graduate of Poss­mei’s program. Introduced to bubble tea in New York’s Chinatown during a stint working in the city, Khan quickly picked up a four-to-five-glass-per-week habit.

After transferring back to London, Khan went in search of a local fix. When his efforts failed to yield results, he realized there was huge potential for an authentic version of the Taiwanese treat in the UK. He subsequently quit his highly paid investment banking position and traveled to Taiwan. There, his efforts to learn how to make the drink properly and find suppliers led him to Wang.

With Possmei’s guidance, Khan opened his first Bubbleology in London’s Soho district. The shop, with a color scheme based on black and an exterior that looks like a fashionable coffee shop, has a very different feel from the “streetside casual” of Taiwanese bubble tea stands. The drinks are more expensive as well, starting at £2.95 (about NT$140), or about four times their price in Taiwan.

Khan now has Bubbleologies in London and Warsaw, selling over 500 servings of bubble tea per day. The company is also preparing to open an outlet in Prague, and has plans to move into the Middle East.

Possmei guided the establishment of BoboQ, the most popular boba chain in Berlin.

Many people are curious about how authentic boba has remained in foreign markets. Have flavors and techniques been adapted to local tastes?

Wang says that whereas ethnic Chinese tend to enjoy milk teas made with black tea, Europeans tend to be very fond of fruit teas. He also notes that tea beverages are prepared with more sweetener in Southeast Asia to satisfy the local sweet tooth.

Similarly, the most popular “pearls” abroad aren’t the tapioca-flour variety most familiar to Taiwanese customers, but “popping boba,” which have a similar appearance but a different texture.

Wang says that “popping boba” are made of a translucent gelatin filled with any of a variety of fruit-juice concentrates. Though introduced in Taiwan a number of years ago, local consumers preferred the firm, chewy texture of the original “pearls,” and didn’t take to the “fakes.” Consumers abroad, on the other hand, had no particular attachment to the old-style pearls and loved the new ones.

“Foreign consumers find the colorful ‘popping boba’ more attractive than the dark traditional ‘pearls,’” says Wang. “Shop owners also tend to prefer ‘popping boba’ because they are easy to prepare and have a longer shelf life.”

Boba drinkers in the new European and Southeast Asian markets are largely young people in the 15–25 age range. In an effort to better cater to their tastes, shops have widely adopted a “salad bar” approach to selling the drink: consumers order the tea of their choice, then add their “popping boba,” konnyaku, nata de coco, flavored gelatin, and other “garnishes” themselves.

Hoping to share in the burgeoning boba pie, McDonald’s added “bubble tea” to the menus of its McCafés in Germany this summer.

But in spite of all this seemingly smooth sailing, the industry did recently experience a rough patch triggered by last year’s discovery of plasticizers in many Taiwanese food products.

“We too were victims,” says Wang, who estimates that the scandal cost him tens of millions of NT dollars. He ruefully explains that because foreign consumers are especially sensitive to food safety issues, the crisis was particularly damaging to companies such as Poss­mei that sell exclusively to overseas markets. Trust takes time to build, but can be destroyed in the blink of an eye.

Unwilling to let the so-called “Boba Scandal” destroy Poss­mei, Wang immediately ordered 20-some containers of goods awaiting shipment destroyed, got in touch with customers to offer compensation, and air-freighted replacements. Once the crisis was over, Wang spent millions more building a professional lab and safety center to test products and eliminate any concerns about the safety of his food exports.

Whether owing to Wang’s upfront manner of dealing with the crisis or the international media’s eager reporting, the crisis somehow managed to improve Taiwanese boba’s international reputation. In fact, Poss­mei’s sales have grown exponentially since the plasticizer scandal. This year the company expects to generate revenues of over NT$1 billion, or roughly three times last year’s figure.

The couplet framing the entrance to Poss­mei’s headquarters reads, “Round as a pearl, smooth as jade, flavored with milk / May we drink tea for another 5,000 years,” expressing Wang’s hopes for the future of his boba business. Having already demonstrated boba’s tremendous opportunities, his next objective is to make the drink as emblematic of Taiwan as sushi is of Japan or kimchi of Korea.

Jacky Wang, chairman of Possmei Corporation and self-proclaimed “ambassador of boba,” is seeking to bring boba to the world.

Jacky Wang, chairman of Possmei Corporation and self-proclaimed “ambassador of boba,” is seeking to bring boba to the world.