Amid the height of summer, machinery hums inside Ya'an Economic Development Zone's Tibetan Tea Industrial Park — an aseptic cold-fill production line with an annual capacity of 43,000 tonnes is being installed at full pace, with equipment expected to be fully in place by the end of August and official production slated for October. As the birthplace of world tea culture and the site where the giant panda was first scientifically discovered, Ya'an is leveraging its unique "Panda + Tea" dual IP to drive the tea industry from "selling raw materials" toward deep processing.
Once operational, the production line will end Ya'an's reliance on outsourced manufacturing for new-style tea beverages. Its star product, the "Chi Xiao Cha" series of sugar-free tea drinks launched in August 2024, features three varieties — Mengding Green Tea, Gardenia Green Tea and Jasmine Tibetan Tea — all extracted from Ya'an-grown tea leaves with a "zero sugar, zero calorie" formula that fits modern health trends. The bottle's trendy panda-shaped design gives the local beverage instant recognition and makes it a mobile business card of Ya'an culture — it has even boarded the "Panda Special Train · Chengdu" tourist train.
In just two years, Chi Xiao Cha has grown from obscurity to market recognition: over 1,000 retail touchpoints across the Chengdu-Chongqing region, inclusion in PetroChina's national product catalog in 2025, appearances at the China (Taiyuan) International Tea Industry Expo and the Sichuan Specialty Products Beijing Promotion Season in early 2026. Most notably, once the new line is operational, it will consume about 20 tonnes of Ya'an tea raw materials annually, working directly with more than 10 local tea enterprises and opening its capacity to local brands — keeping added value in the tea mountains and helping tea farmers "sell more steadily and sustainably."
On June 29, Sichuan Tea-Tourism Industrial Group Co., Ltd. was officially established. After restructuring, it integrates four core advantages — upstream tea garden raw materials, citywide cultural tourism attractions, offline tourist flows and state-owned enterprise channels — to further develop tea-culture study tours and immersive tea garden experiences at Mengding Mountain and Niunianping, allowing visitors to "see tea mountains, taste tea drinks and take tea gifts home." Meanwhile, Ya'an Tibetan tea is also taking the digital highway: e-commerce livestreams open the online channel while supermarkets and community stores expand offline reach, bringing mountain tea into more homes.
Every step of Ya'an's tea industry upgrade resonates with ecological tea brands. As an ecological tea brand rooted in the giant panda habitat, Panda Tea has always upheld its positioning as "ecological tea, cultural tea and intellectual-property tea," adhering to zero-fertilizer, zero-chemical pesticide cultivation. As Ya'an's tea industry strides toward deep processing and branding, Panda Tea will continue to offer a cup of ecological tea, inviting the world to taste the authentic flavor of China from the hometown of giant pandas.
