Welcome to Spill the Tea ❤️

Like all great companies (lol), Spill the Tea was started when all of our parents refused to drive us to the mall for bubble tea. We were only freshmen in high school (meaning we didn't have a license or a car) and had no way to take ourselves to a bubble tea cafe or the mall every time we had a bubble tea craving. And where we lived, it takes 2 hours and 18 minutes of walking on the highway to reach the closest place we could get bubble tea (according to Google Maps).

But our love for this delicious drink was too intense. We were just teenagers who wanted some bubble tea so we sat and thought about it. Why wasn't there any easy way to get bubble tea easily? Why don't we make it at home? It can't be hard right?! All we had to do was find a recipe on YouTube and follow whatever it says.

Wrong. Making bubble tea was a long task with less than ideal results (ok, yes we know we're not Gordan Ramsay or Rachel Ray but we weren't culinarily incompetent either so it wasn't because we were bad cooks). The tea wasn't the right consistency and the boba was too hard.

So we thought about it more. We all knew how to make coffee at home. Just stick in a pod into the Keurig machine, press a few buttons, and bam - coffee is served. And that was when we had our Eureka moment. Why wasn't there a way for us to automatically make bubble tea with a pod and the press of a few buttons? We decided to make the "Keurig for bubble tea."

It was perfect. We convinced my mom to drive us to Lowe's and Home Depot, where we bought plastics, paint, and other materials. We "borrowed" an old Arduino from one of our dads and set to work, coding and building a dispensing machine. We met every weekend, trying to learn how to code, saw wood, and spray paint all at once. Some days we were at each other's houses long through the night.

This went on for a lot longer than we had thought. We kept making reiterations and asking our parents to drive us to more stores. And if you remember our original problem (our parents didn't like to drive us around), then you know that it wasn't long before they were fed up with all of our demands requests. And soon their "investments" (aka our only source of money) had run out.

We needed more funds to continue our machine. We were swimming in the debt we owed our parents and we needed to find a new way to get some moolah before they decided to add interest to it, too. And that's how the Spill the Tea that you all know and love today started. We needed funds to continue prototyping, but we also needed to acquaint ourselves with the culinary expertise behind bubble tea.

So we decided to make bubble tea every Saturday morning and sell it at various events - mostly at school and local nonprofit events in our area.

And bam. Spill the Tea was started and we've never looked back since. Now we've come pretty far and learned a lot, including skills like pricing, marketing, and working with partners, but also things like how much sugar is perfect for our tea recipe and how to spray paint a prototype to the perfect consistency.

And plus, now some of us have our licenses so we don't need to borrow our parents anymore. ;)