Heytea Reopens China Franchising, Screens Out Quick-Profit Seekers

Key facts

Heytea, one of China's best known bubble tea chains, reopened its franchise business model to new applicants on September 7, 2026, ending an 18-month pause that began in February 2025. The reopening runs through a company mini-program called the Heytea Business Partner Assistant, where prospective franchisees can submit an application for the first time since the brand froze new partner recruitment worldwide.

The application itself signals a different posture than the fast-growth franchise era of 2022 to 2024. Heytea's portal opens with an explicit risk disclaimer, warning applicants about market risk and urging them to invest cautiously before committing capital. It requires complete and truthful disclosure, reserves the right to reject any application that does not meet brand standards at any stage of review, and does not promise a timely response or eventual approval. A pre-screening questionnaire asks for a criminal record check alongside proposed funding and target region. Funding is sorted into four bands for mainland China applicants, from under 1 million yuan up to more than 3 million yuan, and into four dollar bands for the nine overseas markets on offer, from under 160,000 dollars to above 460,000 dollars, covering the UK, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, Canada, Australia, and an open ninth option.

What it means for the Gulf market

None of this changes anything for Gulf tea drinkers directly. Heytea has no stores in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or elsewhere in the region, and this reopening is a mainland Chinese franchise process with a handful of established overseas markets attached, not an expansion announcement for the Gulf. What is worth watching is the underlying franchise business model it represents. As bubble tea keeps arriving in Gulf malls and metro districts through brands and operators still working out how fast to grow, Heytea's own experience is a live case study in what happens when a fast-growing beverage brand outruns its own quality control through franchising, then has to rebuild the screening it skipped the first time.

Any operator building a multi-outlet tea or coffee concept in Riyadh, Dubai, or elsewhere in the region is running a smaller version of the same experiment, and the same tension between speed and consistency applies whether the brand behind the counter is Chinese, Gulf-founded, or international.

Background

Heytea opened its franchise program in November 2022 after a decade as a company-operated-only brand, and expanded quickly into hundreds of cities within about two years. By February 2025, the pace had become the problem. In an internal letter to partners, Heytea told its network that the industry's race for store count and price cuts had run its course, arguing that meaningless competition on price, revenue, and scale was wearing down consumer goodwill toward the category faster than any single brand could win it back. The company paused new applications entirely rather than keep signing franchisees into a model it judged was breaking down.

The pause landed inside a wider correction across China's bubble tea sector, where several major chains spent 2025 and into 2026 slowing domestic store growth and managing profitability pressure rather than chasing new locations. Other operators made similar moves around the same period: rival chain Naixue's Tea described its own franchise approach as rational and cautious rather than volume driven as early as September 2024, arguing that an applicant's maturity and management ability should matter more than an applicant's ability to pay a franchise fee. Heytea's newly reopened application, with its explicit risk warnings and multi-step screening, reads as the same argument formalized into a form: growth should follow proof of readiness, not the other way around.

Takeaway

Heytea suspending, then reopening, franchise applications with a visibly tighter filter is a small operational story with a bigger signal underneath it. China's bubble tea category is moving past the phase where opening stores fast was the whole strategy, toward one where screening out underprepared or purely profit-driven applicants is treated as part of protecting the brand itself. For any tea or coffee brand weighing its own expansion, in the Gulf or anywhere else, the lesson is not really about Heytea. It is that a franchise business model built for speed and one built for quality control tend to diverge over time, and the industry's biggest names are now choosing, in public, which one they want to be known for.