CoCo Fresh Tea and Juice boba shop causes stir in Westwood

CoCo Fresh Tea and Juice, a boba shop brand with locations across Southern California, held its Westwood soft opening Wednesday, creating lines of thirsty customers out the door.

“It was really crowded. To be honest, we didn’t expect that many people,” said the shop’s owner, Ezikyel Yu. “We had to close 30 minutes before we planned to because we sold out of everything.”

CoCo, located on Le Conte Avenue, is one of two new boba shops in the area, creating competition among similar stores in Westwood.

Previously, customers had to venture over to Sawtelle Boulevard to get a taste of CoCo’s variety of tea, coffee and juice drinks. In Westwood, most students went to Boba Loca, Iso Fusion Cafe or Noodle World to get their fix of the sugary beverage.

However, many students said they were left unimpressed with the options available, a sentiment echoed by Zachary Chin, a second-year undeclared student.

“(CoCo) was recently opened, so I was curious,” Chin said. “I don’t really look around Westwood because I’ve found I don’t really like the boba around here.”

Ly Tan, a third-year biology student, said she went to the location on Sawtelle Boulevard about once a week to get her boba fix, and that the recent opening in Westwood means more convenience for her and her friends.

“This new place means I won’t have to bother people to get me (to Sawtelle),” Tan said, laughing. “I can just come down here and get it myself.”

Yu said he chose to open the Westwood location because of its proximity to UCLA and the limited number of existing boba shops in the neighborhood.

“In Sawtelle, if there are a hundred customers then every place gets probably a quarter of the business. Here, we will probably get around half,” Yu said.

Yu said he also saw the new location as an opportunity to try out a new atmosphere for the shop, which was designed to cater to the student and youth demographic.

Yu said the store is laid out to create a hangout environment with open-bar style seating and store owners plan to get a DJ to perform tracks on weekends.

But CoCo isn’t the only new shop on the block. Koala Tapioca started serving up boba drinks Jan. 9, with a planned grand opening sometime in March.

Koala Tapioca originally started out as a food truck owned and operated by two UCLA graduates before parking into its current brick-and-mortar location.

Vincent Ho, co-founder of the store along with David Mangold, said he thinks the physical location provides a place for students to study while grabbing something to munch and sip on.

“The way that David and I started off, we always wanted this to be a place for students and for the UCLA community,” Ho said. “All along the walls there are outlets for students’ laptops – we built this philosophy into our infrastructure.”

Ho pointed to the differences in CoCo’s and Koala Tapioca’s atmosphere and the fact that CoCo serves food as differences in the shops’ business models.

Ho added that he thinks the new influx of boba shops to the area is the market responding to an increased student interest in the drink and a limited number of places in Westwood to find quality boba.

“I think it’s interesting to see the market respond to the realization that UCLA has a very localized and very centralized Asian population,” he said.

Standing in line at CoCo, Tan said she thinks the new competition is exciting for customers, and she hopes it will improve the quality of each shop’s product.

“I think it’s good that a lot of these places are coming in,” Tan said. “People can choose what they like and maybe people will come (to Westwood) for boba.”