Simu Liu Called Out a Boba Company for Cultural Appropriation—Here’s Why It Needed to Be Said

One million dollars. Sebastien Fiset and Jess Frenette went on Dragons' Den, a Canadian version of Shark Tank, and asked investors for a cool $1 million (an 18% stake) in Bobba, their company that makes ready-to-drink boba tea. And the Bobba brand owners were this close to getting it. But after actor and potential investor Simu Liu politely raised a few relevant red flags, their bubble finally popped.

The den's dragons—potential investors in the products that appear on the show—were impressed with the numbers Fiset and Frenette had to offer. The Bobba owners claimed they were on track to do $7 million in business by the end of the year, which is pretty fast growth for a company established about two years ago. (Though when you consider that boba tea boasts a global market size of nearly $3 billion, Bobba's growth might not be so surprising.) But when Fiset and Frenette pivoted to sharing what they called improvements to traditional boba tea and using less than respectful language to describe the Taiwanese drink, the pitch went off the rails.

What Happened?

With 11 bubble tea franchisable brands on the market in 2024 and consumers paying top dollar for the drink as goliaths like Starbucks struggle to regain their premium footing, it doesn’t take an economist to realize the profitability of capitalizing on boba’s popularity. But not every brand’s boba launch has been successful. Starbucks itself was recently criticized for marketing their popping bobas as “pearls” as a method to avoid or erase their cultural association. Before that failed experiment, Sonic Drive-In also made an attempt to win over boba fans with their limited-time Bursting Bubbles, and Dunkin’ followed suit with “Popping Bubbles.” Even Del Taco tried to turn soda into boba with “Poppers.”

None of these fast-food boba strivers have received enough positivity to warrant a longer stay in the boba market, and none have stirred up as much wrath as Bobba has with their appearance on Dragons’ Den. And there are a few reasons for this. 

The first is mob mentality and scapegoating. It’s easier for the general public to latch onto a single bad actor (or in this case, a pair). In fact, it’s been much too easy, as Bobba owners Fiset and Frenette have had to publicly appeal for keyboard warriors to refrain from death threats. Dragons like Simu Liu and a backpedaling Manjit Minhas (who withdrew her investment offer due to vehement condemnation) have chimed in to say that this level of animosity is out of line. 

That said, before the Bobba founders were the victims, they were the aggressors, coming onto a public stage with an approach that was totally lacking in respect for boba’s origins. Their biggest mistake? Spitting on the culture they were seeking to profit from. 

The problematic language began with their opening words, which included the phrase “you’re never quite sure about its contents” in reference to boba tea. The pair used the same gimmicky tone you might expect to hear on a late-night infomercial. The immediate demonization of traditional boba tea and othering of its basic ingredients justifiably rubbed Liu the wrong way off the bat. 

Fiset and Frenette then continued to go ahead and call it a “trendy, sugary drink,” which, while not completely untrue based on market statistics and full-sweet recipes, further homed in on an implication that the Taiwanese version is simply a bad fad. Followed by a claim of “transforming” and “disrupting” boba with “[their] famous popping boba” that was one of “two crazy innovations” and a “healthier” experience, the entire pitch was soured.

The Fallout, Explained

First of all, popping boba has been around far longer than this company. Spherification is a culinary technique that’s existed since the 1940s. The first patent for popping boba was filed in 2015 and granted in 2019. Therefore, with that claim, Bobba’s founders attempted to take credit for an already-existing product that they later admitted was sourced from its point of origin, Taiwan. 

They dug themselves even deeper when Fiset elaborated that the recipes and ingredients all came from a Taiwanese partner, even as the pair claimed all of the credit. It didn’t help that this was chased by a defense that boba is “not an [ethnic] product anymore” due to its global popularity.

Additionally, it was antithetical to call their product “healthier”—a marketing buzzword that has quite frankly lost a significant amount of meaning—when one of their “innovations” was an alcoholic version of bubble tea. A great idea, yes, but healthier? Not so much. 

Finally, there was the use of the word “crazy,” an ableist and stigmatic term that is on its way to being phased out as vernacular. But “crazy” was among the least charged words in an overall offensive pitch, and Fiset and Frenette’s word salad became a perfect storm at the worst time—Columbusing at its finest as the backlash fully erupted on what is now Indigenous Peoples’ Day in the United States, adding optimal insult to the injury of cultural theft.

The Context

As Asian cuisine becomes an increasingly bigger business in the Americas, and Asian American and Pacific Islander representation gains ground, there’s been more and more conversation around the differences between cultural appreciation, appropriation and theft. In the past few years, brands and restaurateurs have finally begun to face accountability; ignorance and good intentions are no longer acceptable excuses for not just borrowing from, but profiting from marginalized groups with historically suppressed voices. 

That wave of accountability started with the backlash against the now-shuttered Lucky Cricket in 2018, when chef-owner Andrew Zimmern bashed Chinese-owned restaurants while promoting his take on the food and—in classic white savior style—proclaiming he was here to save the masses from “bad” Chinese food. A year later, the white owner of Lucky Lee’s, Arielle Haspel, was lambasted for similarly marketing her Asian trope-infested “clean Chinese cuisine” as the long-awaited opponent of a type of food she said left patrons “bloated and icky.”

In 2022, Karen Taylor, the self-dubbed “Queen of Congee,” drew ire when she chose to market her overpriced congee kits with orientalist language and smug superiority. She claimed she was “improv[ing]” and “modernizing” a dish that is common, beloved and ever-evolving within the Asian American and Pacific Islander community, positioning it as simply an oatmeal alternative for Western culture. 

Then there’s the ongoing problem of Half-Baked Harvest’s Tieghan Gerard’s continued disrespect of Asian foods, from inaccurately reinterpreting pho to mispronouncing and misunderstanding banh mi, which the Vietnamese community widely interpreted as extreme laziness and an unwillingness to do any kind of cultural research at all.

Never before has there been so much of a reckoning and so many divided opinions about ownership of food heritage, tradition and modern colonialism than now—and that’s even within the Asian American and Pacific Islander community itself. For instance, the dust has only just settled around Korean American chef David Chang’s trademark suit over chili/chile crisp/crunch, when he attempted to trademark words that both Asian and Mexican chefs have used to describe their cuisine for years—one salsa macha company even took legal action against Chang’s Momofuku when he started using the term. But when the call comes from inside the house, is that better or worse? 

What Now?

Since the episode of Dragons’ Den aired, Bobba has issued a public apology—a carefully worded, template-following promise to learn from the experience and do better.

Yet there remains an amount of defensiveness that implies that the harm they acknowledged in the Instagram slides prior isn’t a fully internalized mistake yet. Using English as their second language as an excuse—Fiset and Frenette are from Quebec City—they argued that they meant that they “were not referring to the traditional bubble tea formula found in specialized shops, nor were [they] criticizing it,” which one could argue is textbook gaslighting to a marginalized population of color.

“We were presenting our newest Bobba formula, which hasn’t been released everywhere yet,” they explained. “In this version, we’ve removed all artificial colouring, flavouring and preservatives while maintaining a lower sugar content. This is what we were referring to when we mentioned a ‘healthier’ option on the show,” they said, despite pitching the boozy version in nearly the same breath. 

Since then, they’ve vowed to rebrand and repackage to better illustrate the cultural roots of boba tea. However, that can create yet another issue in and of itself, because isn’t that then just as deceptive, trope-y and orientalist as the canceled brands that came before them? Wouldn’t that then deceptively imply Asian ownership and further cultural theft? Because acknowledging cultural roots is one thing, but it can also be hugely problematic to hide behind a minority facade, treating culture like a mascot while profiting from this misrepresentation. Did we retire Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Mia from Land O’Lakes only to replace them with a new ethnic group to stereotype and turn into cartoons?

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, no one owns boba. As a Chinese American myself, I don’t believe I have the right to gate-keep a cuisine that is ever-adapting, especially with so many of us in the diaspora. I’ve even volubly defended the authenticity of evolved Chinese dishes. And I have no problem with cross-cultural knowledge sharing and the growth of an internationally informed culinary culture. 

Still, there’s a strict provision that those who are learning from others and putting their own spins on another culture’s cuisine ought to do it without ungraciously disrespecting or ungratefully putting down their original muse. 

Ultimately, the source of the outrage around Bobba isn’t about two white folks making boba their own. Personally, I’d drink the hell out of a boozy popping boba, especially one that’s—as we Asians love to say—“not too sweet.”