Business
China’s boba behemoth lands in Hollywood
China’s boba behemoth has landed in Hollywood.
Mixue, the fast-growing megachain that boasts a bigger global retail footprint than McDonald’s, opened its first U.S. outpost on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame last month, selling drinks for less than $5 and ice cream for about $1.
Mixue spokesperson Xu Ping said in a written statement in Chinese that the company chose Hollywood as its first U.S. location because the “movie capital of the world” attracts both international tourists and local consumers year-round.
The store, Ping added, “aims to serve a diverse global consumer base and demonstrates the brand’s commitment to the American market.”
The Hollywood opening was followed in quick succession with locations in New York City’s Brooklyn, Koreatown and Chinatown neighborhoods. More Mixue stores are coming to California, Ping said.
The megachain’s entry into Los Angeles’ boba market comes at a time when local shops are struggling with rising costs driven by tariffs and economic uncertainty.
Mixue was founded as a shaved ice stand in 1997 in Zhengzhou, China, by college student Zhang Hongchao, who used money lent from his grandmother. The store’s Chinese name, Mi Xue Bing Cheng, translates roughly to “sweet snow palace.”
The store has more than 53,000 stores worldwide. The lion’s share are in China, but the company also has 4,700 locations across Australia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
By comparison, McDonald’s has more than 44,000 stores worldwide, and Starbucks has more than 40,000.
Founder Zhang and his brother Zhang Hongfu, who control the company, have a combined fortune of $8.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Mixue is a fast-growing megachain that boasts a bigger global retail footprint than McDonald’s.
(David Butow / For The Times)
Mixue is able to keep costs low because it is vertically integrated, said UCLA business administration professor Christopher Tang, a supply chain management expert.
Mixue owns the factories in China that produce its powders, syrups and fruit purees, giving the company greater control over pricing, Tang said. The store’s grab-and-go concept means lower rent costs. Having most of its locations concentrated in Asia means lower transportation costs.
Tang said the chain’s U.S. stores may be operating as loss leaders to expand its global footprint, test the American market, and demonstrate growth to investors after its listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange last year.
“They can use the profit in China to subsidize the loss in the U.S. for the sake of expansion,” Tang said. “Once [they] get the traction in the US, they can grow a little bit further. Once it grows to critical mass they will be able to sustain the operations.”
On Thursday evening, Mixue customers stood outside — the shop does not offer seating — eating soft serve and sipping on boba milk tea and the store’s signature grape drink with taro balls.
Several passersby snapped photos with Mixue’s inflatable snow “king” mascot that stands guard outside the store entrance. Across the street, actors posed on a red carpet, which had been rolled out on Hollywood Boulevard for the premiere of a Marvel TV show at the TCL Chinese Theatre.
Menu items range from $1.19 for the soft serve to $4.99 for its “super-triple” milk tea with tapioca pearls, pudding and coconut jelly toppings. Self-service kiosks let customers order in either Chinese or English and adjust the sweetness levels in drinks, which can range from 0% to 200%.
The chain appears to be aggressively seeking franchisees in California.
Mixue owns the factories in China that produce its powders, syrups and fruit purees. “They can use the profit in China to subsidize the loss in the U.S. for the sake of expansion,” said Christopher Tang, a UCLA professor of business administration.
(David Butow / For The Times)
QR codes posted on the store’s front window, walls and sidewalk signs lead to an application website for prospective franchisees in California and New York. Opening a store requires an upfront investment between roughly $220,000 and $920,000, depending on size and location, according to the website. Mixue does not charge franchisees ongoing royalty or advertising fees.
Some Chinese customers were already familiar with the Mixue brand or longtime fans.
Tourist Kele Shi, a tech worker living in Washington who is from Shenzhen, China, decided to stop by its first U.S. location after seeing videos on YouTube and the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu.
Shi had been in the Miracle Mile neighborhood earlier in the day to visit a museum but decided to go to the Walk of Fame to see whether the affordable soft serve was better than Ikea’s version.
“This is 80% of the reason we are here,” said Shi. “It’s good, not too sweet. That’s always a compliment for Asian people.”
Torrance resident Olivia Y, who grew up in China, was picking up five drinks for her friends after a climbing session in the neighborhood.
Y said she had fond memories of eating Mixue’s ice cream — her favorite menu item — and drinking fresh lemonade while pulling all-nighters as a student in Xi’An, China, and wanted to pay the U.S. store a visit after hearing about it on social media.
Other customers, like tourist Susannah Bartram, from Nottingham, England, had never previously heard of the chain. She had been strolling down the Walk of Fame, parched after taking a three-hour guided tour of Los Angeles, when the bright red store colors caught her eye.
“It’s colorful and accessible, and it’s a quick fix,” Bartram said, holding a cup of iced tea with large slices of lemon.
With pearl tea gaining popularity in her home country, “it is just nice to see something fresh,” she said.
On the other side of Hollywood Boulevard, local business Bopomofo Cafe’s location in the Ovation Hollywood shopping complex was relatively quiet on Thursday night.
Earlier this month, the Asian American cafe, which sells boba and snacks — including a sandwich described by L.A. Times food columnist Jenn Harris as the “apotheosis” version of McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish — shared on social media that it was struggling with rising costs of goods, including matcha powder and paper goods due to “trade wars and economic uncertainty.”
The cafe initially mulled a price increase, but decided to first try removing some items from its menu and offering a limited food menu an hour before it closes, said Philip Wang, who co-founded Bopomofo with partner Eric Wang in 2019. Philip Wang also co-owns the Asian American production company Wong Fu Productions.
Bopomofo’s classic milk tea costs $6.50, and blended drinks such as its guava matcha latte cost $8. Toppings are an additional 75 cents.
“[We] are not just chasing profits and a bottom line,” the cafe wrote in the Instagram post announcing the changes. “We’re also not a massive company with hundreds of locations (or thousands overseas) bankrolling our stores.”
Bopomofo’s Hollywood location opened in February as an experiment to see how it would perform in a tourist-driven mall, Philip Wang said.
The store is known for its ultra cheap products, such as $1.19 soft serve cones and $4 boba.
(David Butow / For The Times)
As it approaches its first year in operation, the shop, located on the shopping center’s second floor, has seen less traffic than its other four locations in Southern California cities with significant Asian populations, such as San Gabriel and Irvine, he said. (A sixth location is to open in Downtown Disney this year.)
Philip Wang said he hasn’t seen noticeable impact on the store’s performance yet in the month since Mixue opened, noting that it’s still early. The holidays boosted traffic, Mixue opened in December, and business slowed in January — a dip he said is typical across the food and beverage industry.
He hopes Mixue’s presence in the U.S. might raise the profile of boba here and encourage more people to “expand their palette” and try local shops.
Bopomofo is no stranger to competing in dense markets: Its original location is San Gabriel, where there are boba and tea shops on every corner. Philip Wang said he’s confident that the drinks his cafe sells, which don’t use artificial flavors, syrups or powders, will continue to attract customers.
But “I would be lying if I said that [Mixue’s] not on our minds,” Wang said.
For the trendiest tenants in Hollywood office buildings, it’s the latest fad that goes way beyond designer furniture and art: mini studios
To capitalize on the never-ending flow of stars and influencers who come through Los Angeles, a growing number of companies are building bright little corners for content creators to try products and shoot short videos. Athletic apparel maker Puma, Kim Kardashian’s Skims and cheeky cosmetics retailer e.l.f. have spaces specifically designed to give people a place to experience and broadcast about their brands.
Hollywood, which hasn’t historically been home to apparel companies, is now attracting the offices of fashion retailers, says CIM Group, one of the neighborhood’s largest commercial property landlords.
“When we’re touring a space, one of the first items they bring up is, ‘Where can I build a studio?’” said Blake Eckert, who leases CIM offices in L.A.
Their studio offices also serve as marketing centers, with showrooms and meeting spaces where brands can host proprietary events not open to the public.
“For companies where brand visibility is really important, there is a trend of creating spaces that don’t just function as offices,” said real estate broker Nicole Mihalka of CBRE, who puts together entertainment property leases and sales.
Puma’s global entertainment marketing team is based in its new Hollywood offices, which works with such musical celebrity partners as Rihanna, ASAP Rocky, Dua Lipa, Skepta and Rosé, said Allyssa Rapp, head of Puma Studio L.A.
Allyssa Rapp, director of entertainment marketing at Puma, is shown in the Puma Studio L.A. The company keeps a closet full of Puma products on hand to give VIP guests. Visits to the studio sanctum are by invitation only, though.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Hollywood is a central location, she said, for meeting with celebrities, stylists and outside designers, most of whom are based in Los Angeles.
The office is a “creation hub,” she said, where influencers can record Puma’s design prototyping lab supported by libraries of materials and equipment used to create Puma apparel. The company, founded in 1948, is known for its emblematic sneakers such as the Speedcat and its lunging feline logo, and makes athletic wear, accessories and equipment.
Puma’s entertainment marketing team also occupies the office and sometimes uses it for exclusive events.
“We use the space as a showroom, as a social space that transforms from a traditional workplace into more of an experiential space,” Rapp said.
Nontraditional uses include content creation, sit-down dinners, product launches, album listening parties and workshops.
“Inviting people into our space and being able to give them high-touch brand experiences is something tangible and important for them,” she said. “The cultural layer is really important for us.”
The company keeps a closet full of Puma products on hand to give VIP guests. Visits to the studio sanctum are by invitation only, though. There’s no retail portal to the exclusive Hollywood offices.
Puma shoes are on display in the Puma Studio L.A.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
Puma is also positioning its L.A studio as a connection point for major upcoming sporting events coming to Los Angeles, including the World Cup this summer, the 2027 Super Bowl and 2028 Olympics.
In-office studios don’t need to be big to be impactful, Mihalka said. “These are smaller stages, closer to green screen than a massive soundstage.”
Social media is the key driver of content created by most businesses, which may set up small booth-like stages where influencers can hawk hot products while offering discounts to people watching them perform.
Bigger, elevated stages can accommodate multiple performers for extended discussions in front of small audiences, with towering screens behind them to set the mood or illustrate products.
Among the tricked-out offices, she said, is Skims. The company, which is valued at $5 billion, is based in a glass-and-steel office building near the fabled intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street.
The fashion retailer declined to comment on the studio uses in its headquarters, but according to architecture firm Odaa, it has open and private offices, meeting rooms, collaboration zones, photo studios, sample libraries, prototype showrooms, an executive lounge and a commissary for 400 people.
Pieces of a shoe sit on a workbench in the Puma Studio L.A.
(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)
The brands building studios typically want to find the darkest spot on the premises to put their content creation or podcast spaces, Eckert said, where they can limit outside light and sound. That’s commonly near the center of the office floor, far from windows and close to permanent shear walls that limit sound intrusion.
They also need space for green rooms and restrooms dedicated to the talent.
Spotify recently built a fancy podcast studio in a CIM office building on trendy Sycamore Avenue that is open by invitation-only to video creators in Spotify’s partner program.
“Ambitious shows need spaces that support big ideas,” Bill Simmons, head of talk strategy at Spotify, said in a statement. “These studios give teams room to experiment and keep pushing what’s possible.”
The rolling robots that deliver groceries and hot meals across Los Angeles are getting an upgrade.
Coco Robotics, a UCLA-born startup that’s deployed more than 1,000 bots across the country, unveiled its next-generation machines on Thursday.
The new robots are bigger, tougher and better equipped for autonomy than their predecessors. The company will use them to expand into new markets and increase its presence in Los Angeles, where it makes deliveries through a partnership with DoorDash.
Dubbed Coco 2, the next-gen bots have upgraded cameras and front-facing lidar, a laser-based sensor used in self-driving cars. They will use hardware built by Nvidia, the Santa Clara-based artificial intelligence chip giant.
Coco co-founder and chief executive Zach Rash said Coco 2 will be able to make deliveries even in conditions unsafe for human drivers. The robot is fully submersible in case of flooding and is compatible with special snow tires.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco, opens the top of the new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Early this month, a cute Coco was recorded struggling through flooded roads in L.A.
“She’s doing her best!” said the person recording the video. “She is doing her best, you guys.”
Instagram followers cheered the bot on, with one posting, “Go coco, go,” and others calling for someone to help the robot.
“We want it to have a lot more reliability in the most extreme conditions where it’s either unsafe or uncomfortable for human drivers to be on the road,” Rash said. “Those are the exact times where everyone wants to order.”
The company will ramp up mass production of Coco 2 this summer, Rash said, aiming to produce 1,000 bots each month.
The design is sleek and simple, with a pink-and-white ombré paint job, the company’s name printed in lowercase, and a keypad for loading and unloading the cargo area. The robots have four wheels and a bigger internal compartment for carrying food and goods .
Many of the bots will be used for expansion into new markets across Europe and Asia, but they will also hit the streets in Los Angeles and operate alongside the older Coco bots.
Coco has about 300 bots in Los Angeles already, serving customers from Santa Monica and Venice to Westwood, Mid-City, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Echo Park, Silver Lake, downtown, Koreatown and the USC area.
The new Coco 2 (Next-Gen) drives along the sidewalk at the Coco Robotics headquarters in Venice.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
The company is in discussion with officials in Culver City, Long Beach and Pasadena about bringing autonomous delivery to those communities.
There’s also been demand for the bots in Studio City, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley, according to Rash.
“A lot of the markets that we go into have been telling us they can’t hire enough people to do the deliveries and to continue to grow at the pace that customers want,” Rash said. “There’s quite a lot of area in Los Angeles that we can still cover.”
The bots already operate in Chicago, Miami and Helsinki, Finland. Last month, they arrived in Jersey City, N.J.
Late last year, Coco announced a partnership with DashMart, DoorDash’s delivery-only online store. The partnership allows Coco bots to deliver fresh groceries, electronics and household essentials as well as hot prepared meals.
With the release of Coco 2, the company is eyeing faster deliveries using bike lanes and road shoulders as opposed to just sidewalks, in cities where it’s safe to do so. Coco 2 can adapt more quickly to new environments and physical obstacles, the company said.
Zach Rash, co-founder and CEO of Coco.
(Kayla Bartkowski/Los Angeles Times)
Coco 2 is designed to operate autonomously, but there will still be human oversight in case the robot runs into trouble, Rash said. Damaged sidewalks or unexpected construction can stop a bot in its tracks.
The need for human supervision has created a new field of jobs for Angelenos.
Though there have been reports of pedestrians bullying the robots by knocking them over or blocking their path, Rash said the community response has been overall positive. The bots are meant to inspire affection.
“One of the design principles on the color and the name and a lot of the branding was to feel warm and friendly to people,” Rash said.
Coco plans to add thousands of bots to its fleet this year. The delivery service got its start as a dorm room project in 2020, when Rash was a student at UCLA. He co-founded the company with fellow student Brad Squicciarini.
The Santa Monica-based company has completed more than 500,000 zero-emission deliveries and its bots have collectively traveled around 1 million miles.
Coco chooses neighborhoods to deploy its bots based on density, prioritizing areas with restaurants clustered together and short delivery distances as well as places where parking is difficult.
The robots can relieve congestion by taking cars and motorbikes off the roads. Rash said there is so much demand for delivery services that the company’s bots are not taking jobs from human drivers.
Instead, Coco can fill gaps in the delivery market while saving merchants money and improving the safety of city streets.
“This vehicle is inherently a lot safer for communities than a car,” Rash said. “We believe our vehicles can operate the highest quality of service and we can do it at the lowest price point.”
President Trump on Friday directed federal agencies to stop using technology from San Francisco artificial intelligence company Anthropic, escalating a high-profile clash between the AI startup and the Pentagon over safety.
In a Friday post on the social media site Truth Social, Trump described the company as “radical left” and “woke.”
“We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!” Trump said.
The president’s harsh words mark a major escalation in the ongoing battle between some in the Trump administration and several technology companies over the use of artificial intelligence in defense tech.
Anthropic has been sparring with the Pentagon, which had threatened to end its $200-million contract with the company on Friday if it didn’t loosen restrictions on its AI model so it could be used for more military purposes. Anthropic had been asking for more guarantees that its tech wouldn’t be used for surveillance of Americans or autonomous weapons.
The tussle could hobble Anthropic’s business with the government. The Trump administration said the company was added to a sweeping national security blacklist, ordering federal agencies to immediately discontinue use of its products and barring any government contractors from maintaining ties with it.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who met with Anthropic’s Chief Executive Dario Amodei this week, criticized the tech company after Trump’s Truth Social post.
“Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon,” he wrote Friday on social media site X.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Anthropic announced a two-year agreement with the Department of Defense in July to “prototype frontier AI capabilities that advance U.S. national security.”
The company has an AI chatbot called Claude, but it also built a custom AI system for U.S. national security customers.
On Thursday, Amodei signaled the company wouldn’t cave to the Department of Defense’s demands to loosen safety restrictions on its AI models.
The government has emphasized in negotiations that it wants to use Anthropic’s technology only for legal purposes, and the safeguards Anthropic wants are already covered by the law.
Still, Amodei was worried about Washington’s commitment.
“We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner,” he said in a blog post. “However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values.”
Tech workers have backed Anthropic’s stance.
Unions and worker groups representing 700,000 employees at Amazon, Google and Microsoft said this week in a joint statement that they’re urging their employers to reject these demands as well if they have additional contracts with the Pentagon.
“Our employers are already complicit in providing their technologies to power mass atrocities and war crimes; capitulating to the Pentagon’s intimidation will only further implicate our labor in violence and repression,” the statement said.
Anthropic’s standoff with the U.S. government could benefit its competitors, such as Elon Musk’s xAI or OpenAI.
Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and one of Anthropic’s biggest competitors, told CNBC in an interview that he trusts Anthropic.
“I think they really do care about safety, and I’ve been happy that they’ve been supporting our war fighters,” he said. “I’m not sure where this is going to go.”
Anthropic has distinguished itself from its rivals by touting its concern about AI safety.
The company, valued at roughly $380 billion, is legally required to balance making money with advancing the company’s public benefit of “responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity.”
Developers, businesses, government agencies and other organizations use Anthropic’s tools. Its chatbot can generate code, write text and perform other tasks. Anthropic also offers an AI assistant for consumers and makes money from paid subscriptions as well as contracts. Unlike OpenAI, which is testing ads in ChatGPT, Anthropic has pledged not to show ads in its chatbot Claude.
The company has roughly 2,000 employees and has revenue equivalent to about $14 billion a year.
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