HappiTea, the international brand of Vietnam’s Phúc Tea, has signed more than 35 franchise outlets across eight Indian states and is now targeting a network of over 150 stores nationwide during 2026. The rollout runs through a master franchise partnership with Franchise India (FranGlobal), with regional master franchise and area developer rights being released across multiple markets.
Phúc Tea began in 2017 as a single tea cart in Cần Thơ, in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. The brand now reports more than 170 stores across three countries — Vietnam, the Philippines and India — trading internationally under the HappiTea name.
India was entered in early 2025, but the operating rollout only began in earnest in April 2026 with first outlets in Hyderabad. Stores are now trading in Pune, Gurugram, Kharari and Dwarka — a deliberate spread across West and North India rather than a single-city cluster.
Franchise India’s involvement is the structural piece worth noting. Rather than appointing unit franchisees directly from Ho Chi Minh City, Phúc Tea handed country-level responsibility to a domestic partner with an existing franchisee-recruitment engine, then layered regional master and area developer rights beneath it.
“HappiTea’s arrival in India reflects the growing appeal of global bubble tea concepts,” said Gaurav Marya.
Marya, Chairman of Franchise India Group, framed the brand as a Vietnamese tea and coffee proposition aimed at “a young, experience-led Indian consumer market” — bubble tea, fruit tea, matcha and Vietnamese coffee served to Gen Z and millennial customers.
Most cross-border franchise traffic into Southeast Asia flows inward — American, Korean and Japanese systems buying their way into ASEAN consumer markets. Phúc Tea is running the trade in the other direction, and it is not alone: Vietnamese coffee and tea operators have spent the past two years pushing into regional markets through local partners rather than waiting to be acquired.
India is the harder version of that test. It is a tea market by default, dominated by black tea at scale and by price expectations that are unforgiving of imported cost structures. A Vietnamese chain arriving with a bubble tea format proven in Southeast Asia has to prove the format lands with Indian consumers who already have both a domestic tea culture and a crowded field of international beverage entrants — Segafredo Caffè signed its own India master franchise this year, and it will not be the last.
Two things stand out for master franchise buyers watching this.
First, the sequencing. Phúc Tea proved international portability in the Philippines before attempting India — a smaller, culturally adjacent market that de-risked the supply chain question before the brand committed to a country with 28 states and no shared logistics assumptions. Brands that skip that step tend to discover their unit model was market-specific all along.
Second, the structure. Eight states and 35 signed outlets in roughly five months of active rollout is fast, and it is fast precisely because the country partner is doing the recruiting. For investors evaluating master franchise versus area development rights, this is the model working as intended: the franchisor supplies the format and the supply chain, the master partner supplies distribution into a market it already understands.
The number to watch is not 150. It is how many of the 35 signed outlets are trading, and to standard, by the end of the year. Signed and open are different businesses. For brands originating in Vietnam and looking outward, Phúc Tea is currently the most instructive case study available.
