Bubble Tea / Liu Han-Chieh & Lin Hsiu Hui

Tradition is the enemy of the next tradition.

There's a drink you can buy in every city on earth that was invented because someone was bored in a meeting.

Bubble tea. $3.5 billion global industry. And growing.

Here's what I didn't know until recently:

The man who started it was called a traitor by his own industry. His father refused to speak to him for three years.

Because he put ice in tea.

Liu Han-Chieh opened a teahouse in Taichung, Taiwan in 1983. Song Dynasty aesthetics. Oolong in tiny eggshell cups. Purple clay teapots. Serious traditional tea culture.

Then he visited Osaka. Walked into a coffee shop. Saw people drinking cold coffee shaken with ice.

His thought: why can you get cold coffee but not cold tea?

He flew home, bought a cocktail shaker, and started serving iced tea.

The traditional tea world called him a betrayer. Taiwanese tea ceremony took 25 minutes. Strict etiquette. Three sips from a mini cup. Liu collapsed the entire ritual into a shaken takeaway cup.

His father's response? Silence. For three years.

Liu kept going. Iced tea sold well. But it wasn't bubble tea yet.

That happened in 1988. His product manager, Lin Hsiu Hui, was in a dull staff meeting with a bowl of fen yuan — sweetened tapioca pudding — on the table.

Bored, she poured the tapioca into her iced Assam tea.

Everyone tasted it. Everyone loved it. Within months, it outsold everything on the menu. 35 years later, it still makes up 80-90% of sales.

Neither Liu nor Lin patented it. A court later ruled bubble tea can't be owned. That ruling is why it's everywhere — no licensing fees, no restrictions. A $3.5 billion industry anyone can enter.

When asked about the copycat chains — Gong Cha, Tiger Sugar, Chatime — Liu said: "They are our helpers, not our rivals. They educate the world about tea."

Lin Hsiu Hui? Still at the company. Still R&D Director. 35 years later.

Here's the thing:

Liu's father thought he was destroying 5,000 years of tradition.

But Liu didn't destroy tea culture. He created more tea drinkers than the traditional tea industry ever did.

The boba shops in every city on earth aren't the death of tradition. They're the next generation of it.

Sometimes the people who look like they're destroying the old way are the only ones keeping it alive.

What tradition in your industry is everyone protecting — that might need to be broken?