Spilling the tea: Boba shops run low on tapioca pearls as shortage hits Sacramento
A nationwide boba shortage has rippled into Sacramento’s bubble tea shops, threatening to deny them the tapioca pearls customers crave as summer nears.
Shipping delays and pileups at West and East Coast ports have left American distributors without enough tapioca balls or starch, which predominantly come from Taiwan and Thailand, respectively, to satisfy demand.
Natomas boba shop Tea 18 usually depends on Hayward-based distributor Fanale Drinks for its pearls, employee Geline Salvador said. The shop’s owners are scrambling trying to find additional tapioca balls from other sources as Fanale, a major distributor for shops across the United States, stretches supplies to serve its many clients.
In the meantime, Tea 18 staff have to conservatively determine how much tapioca to cook each day based on anticipated traffic. That usually means customers at the end of the day won’t get their drink of choice, Salvador said.
“We usually run out before we even close because we’re trying to limit wasting boba at night, so now we’re making less during the day,” Salvador said. “There’s a high chance at night we’ll run out before customers get a chance to get boba for their drinks.”
It’s not a matter of getting pearls to the West Coast so much as getting someone to unload them. Ports in Oakland, Los Angeles and Long Beach have been backed up for months due to COVID-19 safety measures and increased spending on physical goods during the pandemic.
Container ships carrying boba are currently floating in the ocean near those ports even as dock workers process record numbers of vessels. These issues are causing delays for other items such as microprocessors, but few are so both so wholly reliant on Asian goods and so public-facing as boba shops.
Pearls, a boba cafe in The UV shopping center, orders its tapioca balls raw from a domestic manufacturer. Though co-owner Hyung Lee declined to name his supplier, the San Francisco Chronicle recently called Hayward’s U.S. Boba Co. (sister company of Fanale Drinks) the only factory of its kind in America.
Yet even U.S. Boba Co. relies on Asian-made tapioca starch, which comes from cassava roots and is being held up at ports, to form the balls. With increased demand from other cafes, Pearls can only get about 20% of its normal raw boba shipments, Lee said. Flavored teas have also been delayed, as have Pearls’ custom cups.
Pearls has occasionally run out of bursting flavored boba but not yet the more popular chewy black balls, Lee said. The shop’s not allowing customers to get extra boba in their drinks anymore, however, and staff might nudge guests toward other toppings such as aloe or grass jelly.
“Boba’s our main seller ... almost everything that goes out has some type of boba,” Lee said. “Most people come in for the teas, but it’s kind of lame without something catchy. That’s a lot of the reason why boba took off. It’s hard to sell the tea just by itself.”
Bubble tea originated in Taiwan in the 1980s and became popular stateside over the last 15 years, particularly with Asian American teenagers and young adults. Often sold with fried bites like popcorn chicken, the drinks come in a range of fruity or traditional tea flavors and can be accompanied by many toppings, of which tapioca pearls are the most popular.
Experts estimate the shortage may last several more weeks if not months. With warm weather approaching and young customers getting out of school, the longer timeline could be disastrous for cafes.
Aimee’s Boba Cafe opened in south Sacramento in October and first started feeling the shortage’s effects about a month ago, cashier Katie Heu said. Running out of boba would be a huge financial loss, even with an extensive menu of slushies, milkshakes and Vietnamese coffee drinks, she said.
“(It would have) a really big impact. We would probably lose a lot of business,” Heu said. “Even with the other toppings, a lot of people are scared to try new toppings in case they don’t like it and they don’t want to waste their money.”