From a Street Cart to 20 Stores: A 21-Year-Old Student's Lemon-Milk Chain

Wang Yuxuan's business began last year with a hand cart of iced lemon milk parked on the edge of Xiasha, the university district of east Hangzhou. She is now a 21-year-old junior at China Jiliang University, and the brand behind the cart — Tenjoy — counts twenty stores across Hangzhou, Nanjing, Ma'anshan in Anhui and Jingzhou in Hubei. The chain moves 60,000 to 70,000 cups a month and has cleared a million yuan in monthly revenue. The Hangzhou Daily report that pushed her up the trending boards this week carried the details readers loved most: the first shop cost 30,000 yuan to open, occupied less than ten square metres in a mall food arcade, ran mostly on secondhand equipment, and paid about 40,000 yuan a year in rent.

The drink is lemon milk (柠檬奶), a speciality of Huzhou, the lake-dotted city next door: lemon slices muddled with sugar and shaken with chilled milk until the drink turns the colour of thin custard. Wang drank it as a child on family trips, and on noticing that Hangzhou — a city that consumes milk tea by the reservoir — had no authentic Huzhou version, she saw the gap. "Lemon milk is niche enough," she told Qianjiang Evening News. "Building it is easier than fighting inside the mature milk-tea lane."

That niche logic is also what lets a student operate at chain speed. Tenjoy's twenty stores did not all require her savings: the model is joint operation (联营), in which partners put up individual shops under the brand while she and a PhD-reading friend supply the recipe, the training and the name. It explains how seven months took the count from one shop to twenty, across four cities — a pace of expansion that has made her case study material even before graduation.

Her own telling is less sleek than the numbers. "This journey has been like an against-the-odds comeback," she said — "countless late nights adjusting the recipe, going back and forth revising the promo posters — but it made me believe that when you have a dream, you should dare to try it." It is a genre sentence, but it lands differently in 2026, when record cohorts of graduates are entering a tight job market and the stall-to-chain arc carries the same aspirational weight a civil-service post once did.

The drinks market she entered is restless by nature — the same churn that earlier this autumn saw China's young people trading milk tea for two-litre bottles of 'big water', and before that turned a lemon-milk niche into a Huzhou export. What happens to Tenjoy as the partner network stretches from Hangzhou's malls to Jingzhou's high streets is the real test; a brand that lives on one founder's recipe has twenty points of failure. For now, the university district where the cart once parked has the distinction of having watched a national business story get its start at cart height.