On a Thursday night along Sydney’s George Street, teenagers Sasha Luangrungvilai and Livinia Boyden are looking for a “little treat” after a big day of window shopping. Although it’s Luangrungvilai’s first time at Mixue, it’s been a long-awaited visit – Boyden has been hyping up the Chinese bubble-tea juggernaut for weeks. “I love having so many dessert options for treats,” says Luangrungvilai. “It gives me a chance to try new foods which is always great.”
The first Australian outpost of Mixue opened in 2023 in Sydney and now they have more than 10 locations across the country. The brand is part of a wave of fast food and quick service restaurant chains originating from east and south-east Asia that have set up shop in Australia in recent years.
Since 2023, chains such as Marrybrown (Malaysian halal fried chicken), Nana’s Green Tea (a Japanese cafe brand), Miguelitos (soft serve from the Philippines) and Molly Tea (premium Chinese bubble tea) have made their Australian debuts.
Just last month, Indonesia’s Sederhana landed in Melbourne, serving Minang cuisine from West Sumatra, and Makkee Dessert, a Chinese chain specialising in tong sui – sweet soups – arrived in Sydney, with photos on social media showing queues going down the block on opening day.
Meanwhile Japanese curry house Coco Ichibanya is opening in Melbourne at the end of the year and beloved Filipino fried chicken chain Jollibee has teased its Australian arrival for years.
Australia is the first foray into the international market for many of these brands, as Asia is nearby and there is an appetite for diverse cuisines here. “Australians like to think of ourselves as culinarily sophisticated,” says Teresa Davis, associate professor of marketing at the University of Sydney. “Australia has always been a very broad church when it comes to cuisines and food in general.”
Michael Yee, co-owner of Sleepy Bloc cafe in Sydney, says the globalisation of Australia’s food and beverage market has changed people’s expectations of what fast food could taste like. See the “snowing cheese” – a sweet and savoury cheese flavour – from Korean fried chicken brand NeNe (which opened in Melbourne in 2015) or Molly Tea’s pistachio jasmine coconut brewed tea. These are examples of menu items that “excite the palate, even if that means being divisive or slightly unconventional,” says Yee. “It makes Sydney and Sydney’s developing metropolises a more exciting place to be.”
Their marketing and visual merchandising cuts through the extremely competitive fast food market in Australia, says Davis. Bright, cheery and cutesy, their marketing is very much youth-oriented; Yee describes these chains’ packaging as “bombastic”. Of NeNe’s lurid yellow container, he says: “You don’t even see the chicken … you just see the box.” Plus their jolly mascots are hard to ignore: Mixue is home to a beaming snowman, Marrybrown has Brownie the chipmunk and Coco Ichibanya has a spoon-wielding cat.
Anthropomorphic animals aside, these chains are also enticing customers with coveted merchandise, from millennial pink cooler bags to magnets, as well as jumpsuits for Labubus. These trinkets are particularly appealing to gen Z who are swept up in a “little treat” culture.
This, coupled with a strong social media presence, puts these chains in the best position to grab the attention of the younger generation – after all, the largest demographic of people eating takeaway food in Australia is aged 15 to 24, according to IbisWorld.
The environment of these chains is “optimised” for younger customers with touch screens to order, QR code menus and modular and interactive seating, says Davis. They “foster” young people in a way that is not particularly attractive to an older demographic.
These chains have also capitalised on changing consumer behaviour when it comes to dining out, says Davis. Instead of sitting down to eat our major meals, she says there is now a type of “grazing eating” that goes on. “People tend to eat in bits and pieces and at different times,” says Davis, and fried chicken, skewers, bubble tea and soft-serve lend themselves to being eaten quickly.
The proliferation of Asian chains was not something Cindy Chen expected when she first moved to Australia five years ago from Tianjin, a city south-east of Beijing. She was worried that the only food options she would have available to her were “fish and chips, burgers and steak”, but was pleasantly surprised upon first touching down in Sydney.
Since then she has noticed more of the franchises she grew up with come to Australia, which fills her with a “sense of belonging”. Now she’s happy she doesn’t have to go back to China just to have her favourite drink. “It’s pretty good living in Sydney … you don’t have to go overseas to have these different foods from different places.”
