From earning 119 yuan a day to generating a monthly turnover of 1 million yuan, the post-2005 college student who started with a street stall has expanded the business to 20 stores.

From a single pushcart to 20 stores, from a daily revenue of 119 yuan to a monthly turnover of millions, the recent lemon milk entrepreneurship story of a post-2005 college student has drawn attention from all walks of life.

This college student from Huzhou, after thousands of formula adjustments, replicated the lemon milk flavor of her hometown in Hangzhou and successfully opened 20 stores.

Through this inspiring entrepreneurship story, I once again see the category window for lemon milk.

From 119.6 yuan to monthly turnover exceeding 1 million yuan

Turning a cup of lemon milk into a 20-store business

On April 25, 2025, at the Xiasha University Town in Hangzhou, Wang Yuxuan, a freshman at China Jiliang University, and her partner pulled a small pushcart to set up their first stall selling lemon milk.

There was no exquisite decoration or complicated equipment on the cart, only milk buckets, an insulated box for ice, knives, a chopping board and fresh lemons. In front of the stall, a small blackboard marked the price: 9.9 yuan per cup, 15 yuan for two cups.

At the first stall, more than a dozen cups were sold in over two hours, with a turnover of 119.6 yuan.

Over a year later, this small stall has developed into a lemon milk brand with 20 stores.

This is the recently highly concerned college student entrepreneurship story. The protagonist Wang Yuxuan is a native of Huzhou, and lemon milk is a drink she has been drinking since childhood.

After entering college, she found that there was hardly any authentic Huzhou-style lemon milk in Hangzhou, and she could not order a cup nearby when she wanted to drink it after working out.

During a casual chat by the basketball court, she and her friend who is pursuing a doctoral degree reached a consensus immediately: "Lemon milk is niche enough, and it will be much easier to operate than the mature milk tea track."

All the above images are from Xiaohongshu @Tenjoy🍋 (not replying to private messages)

From setting up stalls on campus to opening the first physical store, and then expanding stores to cities including Hangzhou, Nanjing and Ma'anshan, she spent more than a year bringing a characteristic drink from her hometown to a broader market.

According to the report of Qianjiang Evening News: The brand called Tenjoy currently has 20 stores, selling a total of about 60,000 to 70,000 drinks per month, with a monthly turnover of over 1 million yuan.

The store products include lemon milk, lemon green milk, watermelon milk, cola milk and other fruit milk products, priced at 12 to 16 yuan. On Dianping, many consumers commented: "The taste exceeds expectations", "I drank 6 cups in 10 days and can't stop at all".

Behind this inspiring entrepreneurship story, I once again see the potential of the long-established category of lemon milk.

From Huzhou street stalls to national menus

Lemon milk saw concentrated explosive growth this year

Lemon milk is not a new product that emerged out of nowhere.

It has taken root in Huzhou, Zhejiang for more than ten years, and is a familiar street flavor for local residents. The traditional practice is "yellow lemon + non-dairy creamer". Its earliest prototype can be traced back to iced lemon milk in Hong Kong-style tea restaurants and Taiwanese-style lemon green milk.

It did not become a hot spot in the industry until the summer of 2026.

The views of the related topic #LemonMilk# on Xiaohongshu exceeded 84 million, and the related topic play volume on Douyin exceeded 150 million, with many consumers making special trips to Huzhou to check in.

Grandpa Does Not Make Tea first launched "Orchid Fragrant Lime" in May 2025, and its cumulative sales exceeded 13 million cups by August 2026, ranking first in the brand's repurchase rate for a long time;

Lemon Forest launched 7 lemon milk products at one go, among which the Yashi Xiang Dancong Lemon Milk became a smash hit, selling nearly 150,000 cups within 2 weeks of launch, with repurchase accounting for 45%.

Bawangchaji sold 80,000 cups of its two special lemon milk blends in three days after launch; Oriental Dark Orchid sold 190,000 cups of its new product "Qingxian Lemon Milk" in the first week of launch; Bingliwang's new mint lime iced milk launched in July rushed into the top 3 of its sales list that month.

Heytea, ChaBaDao, CoCo, Mixue, Jasmine Milk Tea, Hushang Ayi, Shuyi and other brands followed up intensively; the search volume of "lemon milk" on Xiaohongshu rose by 210% in three months, and some stores saw this category account for 60% of their daily sales.

Good Mo Ning, a sub-brand incubated by Cha Yan Yue Se, focuses on "lime milk tea". After accumulating more than 100 directly-operated stores in Changsha in three years, it stepped out of Hunan Province for the first time in September 2026 and opened its first store in Guangzhou.

The potential of lemon milk

Has not been fully tapped

A number of industry insiders said that the potential of lemon milk has not been fully tapped.

First, compared with lemon tea, lemon milk is a product that can be sold all year round.

Perfume lemons are in stable supply throughout the year, which can be made into iced drinks or hot drinks, without relying on seasonal windows.

In other words, it is not "creating a new flavor", but based on the existing public cognition of lemons, repositioning lemon from a "low-cost drainage product for quenching thirst" to a "mid-priced single product with milky texture, tea base and suitable for daily sale".

This structural position gives lemon milk an advantage that other hit products rarely have: it does not survive by relying on "novelty".

The life cycle of seasonal fruit tea is tied to the supply window, and it has to be removed from shelves once the season is over; lemon milk has mature raw material foundation, standardized operation and is available for sale all year round, which theoretically has the conditions to become a long-lasting classic product.

"Lemon + milk will be a long-term trend, not a flash in the pan," said the person in charge of the brand Chami Youyan. The person in charge of Oriental Dark Orchid also believes that lemon milk is still in the stage of potential development and is expected to become a long-term category following lemon tea.

Dai Jianbo, R&D staff of Bingliwang, said: "Lemon milk is a good product. As long as everyone thinks it is good, there will be joint force to promote its development."

Second, lemon milk requires no taste education and comes with a healthy halo.

"Lemon milk has the fresh and vibrant flavor of lemon as well as the smooth and balanced texture of dairy products, which belongs to the second growth curve of lemon," explained the brand side of Oriental Dark Orchid.

"The addition of milk not only enriches the taste layers, but also to a certain extent alleviates consumers' resistance to lemon tea in winter. With real milk, real tea and real lemon, it meets consumers' demands for health while retaining a rich taste," Zhang Lu, founder of Lemon Forest, believes.

Technological progress is also paving the way for this category: acid-resistant milk technology, membrane filtration, and better emulsification stability have turned the process of "no coarse flocculation when acid meets milk" into a controllable procedure.

Most importantly, lemon milk is a category that has been verified by the market.

Regional brands such as Ningmeng Tang and Lemon Milk Tyrant have been operating in the Huzhou area for a long time, and the iced lemon milk in Hong Kong-style tea restaurants and lemon green milk in Taiwanese milk tea have long had their prototypes. However, in the past, the technical problem of milk protein coagulation and layered caking caused by fruit acid restricted the stability of product output for a long time.

The essence of this round of explosive growth is that after the region completed the formula and market verification, leading brands used their supply chain capabilities to push it to the national menu.

In the future, the extension of "Lemon +" is expanding. The industry has begun to follow the same logic to find hit products of "Lemon +" with the idea of special blending.

Conclusion

From "summer limited" to "year-round permanent", from a single SKU on the menu to an independent category, the story of lemon milk is still very long as it develops from a single hit product to a product matrix.

Wang Yuxuan's success is not an isolated inspiring story, but a spray splashed when this category expands from the regional market to the national market.

What she did was to seize the time window when lemon milk just spread out of Huzhou and had not been fully covered by giant brands, and caught the dividend of this category with a pushcart and the earnest attitude of adjusting the formula thousands of times.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Kamen" (ID: KamenClub), written by Guojun, and released with authorization from 36Kr.