People queuing up at White Rabbit milk tea store in Shanghai (Photo/Dfic)

May 31 (NBD) -- Chinese snack maker Shanghai Guan Sheng Yuan Food (Guan Sheng Yuan) opened its first White Rabbit milk tea store in Shanghai on Wednesday, which soon trended on the social network.

National Business Daily (NBD) noticed that the launching of the new shop came after ice cream made from Guan Sheng Yuan's White Rabbit Creamy Candy took the U.S. west coast by storm in February.

Saying the iconic sweets coated with a blue and white waxed paper wrapper recall their childhood memories, some Chinese consumers then called for White Rabbit flavored snacks on the Internet.

Now a series of White Rabbit drinks with price starting at 19 yuan (2.8 U.S. dollars) debuted in Shanghai on the east coast of China and became a hit on the first day of the release.

Long queues were seen in front of the Shanghai store for the whole day and a staff member estimated the sales volume for Wednesday would reach around 2,000 cups.

The fever continues the next day. "It will take at least 4 hours to get a cup of White Rabbit milk tea," said a consumer queuing up at the shop.

Some scalpers even sold the drinks at an exorbitant price of 70 yuan each. The popularity of White Rabbit milk tea reveals the prosperity of the non-traditional tea sector.

Benefiting from consumption upgrade and the large amount of capitals flocking in, the new tea sector posted sales of 40.8 billion yuan last year, representing a year-over-year surge of 29.7 percent, a report from research institution Qianzhan.com showed.

As of the third quarter of 2018, the number of tea drink shops in China rose to 410,000, up 74 percent from the third quarter of the previous year, according to statistics from lifestyle service provider Meituan-Dianping.

The top players including A Little Tea, Heytea and Nayuki have been expanding rapidly in the past three years and they are winning especially the hearts of younger consumers.

It is noted that buying non-traditional tea drinks and posting photos of the products and shops is becoming a routine for the millennial consumers.

The consumption scenarios and drink tastes of the shops well satisfy the needs of young generation, said Zhu Danpeng, analyst in the food industry, in an interview with NBD.

This echoes the ideas of other industry insiders who held the mushrooming of new tea market were partly due to the changing consumer demands of young generation and the social networking feature of new tea drinks.

Email: gaohan@nbd.com.cn