Heytea Opened Its First Thailand Store Today. It Came as a Lab.

Heytea opened its first shop in Thailand today, on the first floor of CentralWorld, the mall on Ratchadamri Road. It is a Heytea Lab, the room the company uses to try new drinks: tea, bakery, and gelato counters, plus a station where you can smell the leaves before you order. The company said this is the first Lab in Southeast Asia. New York’s Times Square got one in 2025. Toronto’s Eaton Centre got one in February.

Nie Yunchen, the founder, opened a small shop in Jiangmen, Guangdong, in 2012, still called Royaltea. Cheese tea was the house drink: cold tea under a salted cream-cheese foam. The company renamed itself Heytea in 2016 after it could not register Royaltea and copycats piled up. It now says it runs about 4,000 shops, more than 120 of them outside mainland China, the first of those overseas shops in Singapore in 2018.

Bangkok already drinks a lot of milk tea. This Lab puts the company’s test kitchen in a mall people already walk through.

The shop is the first place to sell teaAir, a topping of brewed tea, coconut, milk fat, and air, and the first cup is Rock Oolong with jackfruit, papaya, and coconut. Time Out Bangkok says there is also a Thailand-only mango sticky rice drink, after the dessert.

The room takes cues from floating markets, boat-shaped wood on the outside and riverbank seating inside, timber against metal.

Cheng Hao, vice president of communications, told the Bangkok Post that CentralWorld sits in daily Bangkok life and on the tourist map, including Chinese visitors. He said Heytea wanted the same mall as Apple’s store there because the company believes it is to tea what Apple is to electronics.

The shop is open today. CentralWorld, first floor, Ratchadamri Road.