Consumption upgrading has driven the tea beverage market to continually subdivide in recent years. Nongfu Spring and other beverage giants have undertook an aggressive spate of tea drink product launches, which become hugely popular in high streets and back lanes. In 2018, the domestic tea drink market started to develop in full scale, since that, RTD tea beverage set has ushered in a new development stage, with new types of RTD tea beverages featuring health, freshness and individualization springing up. At the moment, tea drink products in the market mainly include ice black tea, green tea, lemon tea, oolong tea, jasmine tea and so on.

Reputed as the famous sugar-free tea drink product in China, Nongfu Spring Oriental Leaf enjoys a considerable market share and public praise with its unique flavors. But when Oriental Leaf debuted in 2011 as a forerunner of sugar-free RTD tea drink, it paid a lot for challenging the tradition and became the target for a lot of criticism by netizens at that time. Oriental Leaf was once rated as "one of the most revolting drinks ", which made it famous on the internet.

But some netizens said Oriental Leaf was a product that you’d fall in love with after drinking for three times, but once you were into it, it could be hard to change. Especially in the sugar reduction era, its health attributes of zero sugar and zero calorie are increasingly popular among consumers. As sugar-free tea drinks enjoyed a explosive growth in 2018, Oriental Leaf ranked the first in the sugar-free tea drink category of 2018 China Net Promoter Score.

Many years after its introduction, Nongfu Spring launched mini packaged 335ml Oriental Leaf featuring zero sugar, zero calorie, convenient size and warm drink. It comes in three flavors, that is, mellow oolong tea, jasmine tea, and black tea. It is known that the bottle body of mini packaged Oriental Leaf has been thickened and reinforced, which greatly improves its heat resistance and stability and enables it to be served hot, further broadening drinking scenarios. Apart from the change in packaging structure, these three products deliver an elevated experience in taste, and they’re better suited to be warm drink thanks to the manufacturing process and raw materials. To open up the winter warm drink market, mini packaged Oriental Leaf chooses the flavors that are better fit to drink in winter and closer to Chinese consumer's understanding of "tea".

Beyond the taste, the novel packaging design of Nongfu Spring Oriental Leaf also attracts wide publicity. The package, designed by British Pearlfisher design agency, is the winner of 2012 Pentawards Silver Award. Its illustrations are inspired by historical elements: Tea-horse Ancient Road and Japanese Matcha. The packaging design caters to consumers’ psychology of pleasing just yourself, which helps to attract new young consumers and inspires them to take pictures and share the moment in a real-time way. This tea product doesn’t adopt a non-transparent bottle body design, only wrapped by packaging paper from two sides. Most tea drinks on the market are packaged in non-transparent bottle body due to the oxidizing discoloration problem. While Oriental Leaf, who has devoted much effort to developing anti-oxidation technology, is able to maintain the natural color, aroma and flavor of tea to the most extent even kept for several months.            

It’s time for sugar free tea drinks to gain momentum. With numerous brands entering the aisle, new launches keep emerging. An increasing number of sugar-free tea drink brands dip their toes in this category, lifting the market to a new high. As the tide of consumption upgrading goes deeper, healthy sugar-free drinks become hugely popular among consumers. To deliver on consumers’ increasing demand for sugar-free products, Oriental Leaf launched two new flavors recently after it debuted on the market a decade ago. The citrus reticulata Pu'er tea flavor and brown rice tea flavor are sugar free, zero calorie, non-fat, no essence or preservative added, delivering an multi-layer taste as well as health benefits to consumers. As such, the new launches attract much attention of young consumers. It’s expected that Oriental Leaf will enjoy larger growth space after years of dormancy.