Kung Fu Tea Brand Guidelines: Queens 2010, the “3T” Method & National Bubble Tea Day

Three friends, a disappointing cup and a fourth partner from Taiwan.

Kung Fu Tea is a bubble tea chain from New York. English Wikipedia says it was founded on 30 April 2010 in Queens and is headquartered in New York City, and the company’s own history page tells the story behind that date. It says that in 2009 three entrepreneurs, whom it names only as Michael, Allen and Ray, were walking around Flushing after a trip to Taiwan, looking for the drink they had grown up with. The cup they bought, the company says, did not taste like the bubble tea they knew from Taiwan, but the long queue at the counter showed them there was demand.

The three needed someone who knew how to make the drink. The company says they called a friend, Sean, who was running his own bubble tea chain in Taiwan, and that he agreed to join after some days of thinking it over. Mashed, in a feature updated in August 2023, retells the same account: three friends back from a 2009 visit to Taiwan, a pitch to a fourth who ran a chain there, and “three became four.” The company now credits all four as founders, and both Mashed and the company’s own releases name one of them, Michael Wen, as co-founder.

The first Kung Fu Tea opened in Queens on 30 April 2010, the company says, after a period of recipe testing. Its account of the early years is frank about the difficulties: limited space, short cash and difficult landlords. The name comes from the martial art, and the company reads it as a discipline: it describes “Kung Fu” as the wish to keep improving, and gives its motto as “Fresh – Innovative – Fearless.”

The business grew through franchising. Mashed reports that by 2017 the chain had more than 120 stores in the United States, and that in that year it opened its first Australian shop, in Springvale, Victoria, citing the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal; by 2023 it described more than 300 franchises. English Wikipedia notes that the chain appeared in Nation’s Restaurant News’s Top 500 restaurant chains in 2021.

Tea leaves, temperature and time.

The company sums up its method as “3T” Kung Fu: choosing the tea leaves, brewing at the right temperature and steeping for the right time. It says it uses real tea leaves rather than powders, and in a December 2025 release it said it brews its tea every three hours and cooks its tapioca pearls in-house. Mashed describes a menu of classic milk teas — taro, green tea, Thai milk tea, honey oolong — with toppings that customers choose themselves, along with sugar and ice levels.

Around that core sit named ranges. Mashed lists punch teas made with lemonade, teas topped with a slightly salty “milk cap,” a slush range, yogurt drinks and seasonal drinks such as a purple yam latte. In 2020, it reports, the chain added a limited “Wow” range built on pearls cooked in brown sugar and not rinsed afterwards, and by 2022 it was selling canned green tea, its first ready-to-drink product, according to World Tea News as quoted by Mashed. The chain has also sold Dragon Pop, a bagged popcorn in flavours drawn from its drinks.

Much of Kung Fu Tea’s public face is made of partnerships. English Wikipedia lists tie-ins with Funimation for the anime Fruits Basket, with Nintendo, with Pokémon Go in May 2023 and Pikmin 4 in July 2023, with Spirit Halloween in October 2023 and with the clothing company Opening Ceremony. The company’s own news page continues the list with DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda 4 in March 2024, Barbie in November 2025, Pokémon again in December 2025 and Care Bears in March 2026. Each one brings themed drinks and, usually, a cup sleeve or sticker.

In 2018 the chain also paired with a food brand. English Wikipedia dates its partnership with the Taiwan-based TKK Fried Chicken to November 2018, and Mashed, citing The New York Times, says it brought TKK to the United States for the first time in shared dine-in restaurants; a second opened in Manhattan’s Flatiron District in 2020, according to QNS as cited by Mashed.

Design and documentation.

Bubble tea and tea-drink chains sell a drink that is made in front of the customer, so most of their public image is built around the cup. On their own websites, Taiwanese brands such as Chatime and Gong Cha lead with pictures of individual drinks and group them into named ranges and short lists: Gong Cha calls its top five drinks worldwide the “Famous Five,” and Chatime’s US website sorts its menu into ranges such as Signatures, Milk Tea Classics and Fruity.

Drink and staff names do much of the brand work. Chatime’s US website builds its copy on tea puns, calling its counter staff “T-Ristas,” while Gong Cha names drinks by their tea, fruit and toppings, from milk foam to “QQ” jelly. Store fronts and menu boards appear in the companies’ franchise pages and news posts, where a new store design or a first store in a new country is presented as an event.

Ordering apps and online shops are now part of the picture. In 2020 the Taipei Times reported that Chatime’s parent, La Kaffa International, had begun taking orders through an app with a software partner, and in 2026 Nation’s Restaurant News reported that Gong Cha was rolling out a “digital kitchen.” For a designer, these tools are part of the brand as much as the cup or the counter.

Behind the cups are corporate histories that are often more complicated than the store fronts suggest. Many chains grew through franchising, with regional partners running whole countries, and some have changed owners several times. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it now, and how it is sold — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A birthday that became a holiday.

Kung Fu Tea made its own anniversary into a date for the whole drink. The company says that on 30 April 2018, its eighth birthday, it founded National Bubble Tea Day; English Wikipedia and Mashed both record the same date.

The company calls itself America’s largest bubble tea brand, with more than 350 locations, and English Wikipedia repeats that description. Outside the United States it trades as KF Tea in Canada, the company says, and its locations pages also list Cambodia, Taiwan and Japan; Mashed notes branches in Phnom Penh and in Taiwan, where, it says, the brand hoped to take an American take on the drink back to where it began. In December 2025 the company said it had been named on Yelp’s list of Most Loved Brands for 2025.

Ordering has moved onto phones. In August 2022 Kung Fu Tea released a new app built with the developer Blue Label Labs; the company said it lets customers pick toppings, sugar and ice exactly as they would at the counter, order ahead and collect loyalty rewards. Its co-founder Michael Wen said then that the app was the first step in the company’s own digital change.

In June 2026 the company opened a second concept, Select by Kung Fu Tea, with two New York stores opening on 26 June: one in Manhattan’s Chinatown and one in Flushing’s New World Mall. The company describes Select as tea “as a ritual,” with milk teas built on named teas such as Da Hong Pao, Long Jing and Camellia Oolong, and an espresso menu alongside. It chose Flushing, it said, because that is where Kung Fu Tea started.

For a design guide, Kung Fu Tea shows how a franchise chain can hang a whole identity on one word: the martial-art name runs through the “3T” method, the “Fearless” motto, the master-and-discipline language of its story page and the steady run of character tie-ins. Compare it with Gong Cha and Chatime, two Taiwanese chains that expanded abroad in the same years. For this guide we use lantern red, milk tea, tapioca brown and ink with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kung Fu Tea’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.