Beta Test: Aura Tea brings sugar-free, vegan boba to S.F.

Beta Test is a column where we periodically test and sample locally made products made by entrepreneurs around the Bay Area. Have a product that you'd like us to consider? Email us at: sbloomberg@bizjournals.com.

Aura Tea

Boba was a big part of Kashish Juneja’s high school life. Maybe a little too big.

She grew up in Cupertino and boba was one of those drinks that was always around. Coffee may be for adults, but boba is for everybody. It added a lot of sugar and dairy to her diet, though, so she decided to make a version that was free of both.

Juneja, 22, is a senior at UC Berkeley where she’s majoring in business and minoring in data science. On top of her coursework, she’s been building Aura Tea, a sugar-free and dairy-free boba café and brand with co-founder and COO Cinque Holliday. Holliday will help operate the café, which they opened at the end of March at Rincon Center in downtown San Francisco.

They hope to capture more foot traffic as employees return to working at the office.

“Our goal is to take over the whole downtown S.F. and bring our tea to every office,” Juneja told me, adding that they’ve established a discount program for Twilio employees.  

The menu offers six tea drink flavors, boba add-ons, espresso drinks and extra "functional boosts" like CBD hemp extract, turmeric, ginger and cacao.

Aura Tea’s drinks are served with unsweetened almond and oat milks from Califia Farms, and they’ve partnered with other local suppliers for many of their staple ingredients, Juneja told me.

The boba pearls come from US Boba Co. in Hayward, a no-calorie sugar substitute called PureCane is from an Emeryville company and the coffee beans are from San Francisco-based roaster Saint Frank.

When developing the drinks, they did a blind taste test with stevia, monk fruit and Purecane, the latter of which is made by fermenting sugarcane to preserve the sweetness while transforming it into a zero-calorie product.

“People can really tell the difference between the aftertaste. So it was basically about finding the closest one-to-one substitute. And Purecane, it’s also local,” Juneja said. ”We wanted to really keep it Bay Area focused” with the ingredients, as much as possible.

The classic boba pearls are tapioca-based and sweetened with a house-made, zero-calorie syrup. And a keto version is made from agar agar and fruit jelly.

In addition, Aura Tea is sourcing its green tea from China and black tea for the masala chai flavor from India.

They’ve raised $65,000 in pre-seed funding from a private investor, as well as friends and family.

Direct-to-consumer online sales of pre-packaged drinks will launch nationwide at the end of April and the company will be focused on growing sales the rest of the year. In 2023, Juneja hopes to launch a second café that will be based in Los Angeles.

She’s also already thinking about collaborating with artists and other brands, as well as looking for additional branding opportunities like a boba-inspired makeup palette.

“We have a collaboration with Fitness SF, as well. Something we’re working on is protein boba,” Juneja said, and the Bay Area gym has told Aura Tea that it wants to stock that product as soon as it’s ready. 

The first storefront at Rincon Center in San Francisco will be open from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. while they gauge the optimal hours.

Tasting notes

The menu had six flavors when I stopped by for the launch at the end of March. They included several fruity jasmine green tea drinks and a chai-inspired milk tea with ginger, black pepper and cinnamon called Classic Clouds.

I ordered the Classic Clouds with almond milk as well as the Berried Treasure, a strawberry jasmine green tea, with oat milk. Both drinks had a good amount of tapioca pearls.

The Classic Clouds was very lightly sweetened with a hint of cinnamon, ginger and black pepper, flavor notes which became a little more prominent after the drink settled for a few minutes. And the boba had that slight chew you'd expect from tapioca pearls but they weren't overly sweet.

Berried Treasure had prominent strawberry notes, and the addition of the oat milk made it taste like a very light version of strawberry milk.