The Store Concept

Heytea opened its first U.S. Gelato Lab+ on Oct. 16 at 863 Broadway in Union Square, marking the brand's most ambitious domestic format play since its Times Square lab debut in February 2025. The Union Square unit is the fourth heytea lab-format store outside China — following Times Square, Toronto, and Bangkok — and layers eight made-in-store gelato and sorbet SKUs onto the brand's established new-style tea menu.

The Gelato Lab+ sits within heytea's "lab" tier, the chain's most elevated store format globally. Under the lab model, product categories — drinks, gelato, cakes, baked goods — are developed as discrete experimental modules. When a module reaches commercial readiness, it can graduate into a dedicated store concept. Gelato first appeared as a lab module at heytea's OCT Harbour store in Shenzhen in 2019, making the Union Square opening the culmination of roughly seven years of product refinement before the format hit U.S. soil.

Menu & Product Development

All eight gelato and sorbet flavors are produced daily in-store using fresh milk, real fruit, and ingredients drawn from heytea's existing tea portfolio. Seven core flavors anchor the permanent menu; one rotates as a limited edition. Standouts include Mango Coconut Sticky Rice Gelato — a translation of a signature tea drink — and Grape Basque Cheesecake Gelato, derived from the brand's Crisp Grape Boom beverage. A dairy-free Jasmine Yuzu Sorbet and a "Cement" Black Sesame Gelato round out the range. The made-in-store production model differentiates the unit from QSR and fast-casual beverage chains that typically rely on pre-manufactured dessert components, adding labor and complexity but also a demonstration-kitchen draw for guests.

The format's local-collaboration strategy is also built into the opening calendar. From Nov. 2 to 8, the unit will serve an "Everything Gelato" — cream cheese gelato folded with everything-bagel seasoning, served with a fresh bagel from Tompkins Square Bagels — limited to 30 covers per day. A concurrent artist partnership with New York-based illustrator Jon Burgerman (Oct. 26–30) produces limited-edition merch designed to extend the brand's social footprint. Both activations are consistent with specialty-beverage operators' LTO-driven traffic strategies that lean on local credibility to drive repeat daypart visits.

U.S. Footprint & Competitive Context

Heytea's U.S. presence has scaled to more than 45 stores across New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Houston, Seattle, and Boston. Globally, the chain operates more than 3,500 units in over 330 cities with 150 million registered members — a scale that gives it supply-chain and brand-equity leverage most domestic specialty-tea entrants cannot replicate. The Times Square lab, which moved more than 3,500 cups on its opening day, validated the U.S. appetite for the lab format before the brand extended it to a second New York address.

The Gelato Lab+ format arrives as the domestic specialty-beverage segment continues to draw high-frequency younger consumers willing to pay premium prices for made-to-order, ingredient-forward products. Adding a frozen-dessert daypart to a tea-drink menu is a defensible AUV play: gelato ticket sizes typically exceed a beverage-only average check while requiring relatively modest additional equipment footprint inside an existing lab build-out.

Jelynn Jiang, Senior Brand Manager for International Markets at heytea, framed the New York market as the brand's primary testing ground: "New York has always rewarded curiosity, and it continues to be where we try new ideas." The company has not disclosed unit-level economics or AUV targets for the lab format.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.