If you run a bubble tea shop, the pearls are one of your most-used ingredients and one of the easiest costs to get a real handle on. The short version: a typical drink uses about 20–30 g of dry tapioca pearls, and at wholesale that’s roughly 9–11¢ of pearls per cup. Here’s how that math works so you can plug in your own scoop size.
Quick answer: cost of pearls per cup
Doking’s black tapioca pearls come in 1 kg bags, sold by the case (20 × 1 kg). Using the by-the-case wholesale price, here’s the pearl cost per drink at a few common scoop sizes:
| Dry pearls per drink | Drinks per 1 kg | Cost per cup (ON, $3.75/kg) | Cost per cup (QC, $3.50/kg) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 g | ~50 | ~$0.075 | ~$0.070 |
| 25 g | ~40 | ~$0.094 | ~$0.088 |
| 30 g | ~33 | ~$0.114 | ~$0.106 |
Prices are Doking’s current by-the-case wholesale price list (Ontario and Québec). The single-bag retail reference price is higher, so buying by the case is where the margin is — more on that below.
How much tapioca actually goes in a drink?
There’s no single “correct” amount — it depends on your cup size and how pearl-forward your menu is. As a working range:
- Standard serving: ~20–25 g of dry pearls
- Generous / signature pearl drinks: ~30 g
- “Extra pearls” upsell: ~35–40 g
Dry pearls roughly double to triple in weight once cooked, so a 25 g dry scoop becomes a satisfying cooked portion. The most reliable way to know your number: weigh your standard scoop a few times and take the average. That one measurement turns every price below into an exact cost for your shop.
Why buying by the case matters
The same pearl costs very differently depending on how you buy it:
- By the case (wholesale): about $3.50–$3.75 per kg — the price that makes the per-cup numbers above.
- Single bag (retail reference): noticeably higher per kg, which roughly doubles your cost per cup.
For a shop selling even a modest number of drinks a day, the pearls move fast enough that case pricing pays for itself quickly. The same logic applies to your other high-volume ingredients — syrups, powders and toppings all have a meaningfully lower per-cup cost when bought by the case.
The rest of the cup
Pearls are only part of the recipe. A full pearl milk tea also carries the cost of tea, a creamer or milk, and a sweetener. Two other Doking staples that shape your cost per cup:
- Non-dairy creamer and milk-tea powders — the base of most milk teas.
- Brown sugar syrup — the signature for brown-sugar pearl milk. It comes by the case as well, so it’s easy to fold into the same per-cup calculation.
Add your pearls, base, tea and sweetener together and you have a true ingredient cost per drink — the foundation for pricing your menu with confidence.
Bottom line
Weigh your scoop, multiply by your by-the-case price, and you’ll know your pearl cost to the cent. For most shops that lands around 9–11¢ per cup at wholesale. If you’d like current by-the-case pricing or a free sample to test in your own recipe, we stock locally in Toronto and Montréal.
