Quincy couple hopes to capitalize on popularity of boba drinks with new business at 36th and Maine

QUINCY — Richie and Tram Supaswud, who first met as grade-school students in Atlanta, moved to Quincy with the plan of raising a family and eventually bringing the city its first boba drink location.

Then COVID got in the way.

Then three kids got in the way.

The Supaswuds have finally opened Qboba at 3600 Maine. The business had a soft opening during the week of June 14-20, and it’s now open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesday to Sunday each week.

Forty years ago, Marv Hufford brought the TCBY frozen yogurt franchise to Quincy in June 1986 when he opened a store in the same building. Now the Supaswuds are renovating the building (they still need chairs, tables and signage) to give Quincy another place to try boba drinks (also known as bubble tea, pearl tea, bubble milk tea, boba, boba fruit tea or tapioca tea) that have been gaining in popularity around the nation.

“It’s kind of like an iced coffee,” Tram said. “It’s milk tea and sweetener, and then you can add any flavor syrup that you want with it, or you can do just a fresh fruit tea, which is basically a sweet tea with flavoring. We do all types of toppings. We have brown sugar boba. We have jellies that we can put in there. There’s grass jelly, mango jelly, egg pudding — which is a custard. It’s just basically dessert in a cup.”

“If you want to try something that is not going to give you that coffee taste that you don’t like and you don’t want a soda, you can try something that’s refreshing,” Richie said. “If you’ve ever been curious about something different, it’s not going to rip your wallet apart.”

Traditional milk boba tea is served with tapioca balls made of starch and found at the bottom of the cup. The balls have the consistency of something between chewing gum and Jell-O. Most tapioca pearls are black, but some versions are white, and some are transparent.

Boba tea, which originated in Taiwan in the 1980s, is available in both hot and cold versions, and it is typically served in a wide-mouthed plastic cup and sealed shut with a plastic wrap. They typically cost around $7 each, with extra toppings costing an extra 50 cents each.

“You can get it after lunch, after dinner, before lunch,” Richie said. “It’s kind of like a smoothie-ish drink.”

Richie said he enjoyed his first boba drink when he was 14 years old in Atlanta.

“If you go to Atlanta right now, I can promise you there’s a boba shop every five miles,” he said. “You can see it on TV. You can see people going to certain shops when they go out of town. It’s everywhere. Then you come back to Quincy and it’s nowhere, right? If you want to get something traditional like this, you’ve got to drive two hours away to Springfield or St. Louis to scratch that itch you have.”

Well-known international chains that serve the drinks include Gong Cha, Kung Fu Tea and Sharetea. Boba Guys has a strong presence in the United States, with Tiger Sugar, Xing Fu Tang and Ten Ren’s Team also are notable. Fortune Business Insights reports the U.S. bubble tea market is projected to grow from $496.75 million in 2025 to $865.87 million by 2032.

Richie said the drinks are popular among young people. Tea shops have created a social lifestyle for the 20-to-29 age group, serving as places to gather with friends. He hopes the location, only a couple of blocks from Quincy High School, will make Qboba a place for high school students to hang out.

“I’ve got the best WiFi stuff,” said Richie, who works in the IT department at Blessing Hospital. “We want to have the high schoolers come here, be comfortable, be able to work on something and have a drink. Maybe they just want to meet with somebody, and they don’t want to go to their house.”

The building still has a drive-up window from its TCBY days, but Richie says the property doesn’t have enough room to accommodate the number of cars necessary to meet city ordinances.

The Supaswads started selling boba tea during the Saturday morning farmers markets in Washington Park in 2023 before making the move into their own building. They are leasing from Ellington Hills LLC, which bought the property in September 2024 for $290,000 from Personal Finance Company, LLC, of Baltimore, according to property tax documents filed in Adams County. Matthew Brink is the agent for Ellington Hills.