The new Dunkin’ Popping Bubbles are tasty and fun to eat. You get a giant paper straw the size of a small pipe and get to scavenge the icy depths of your drink for sugary treasure. Unfortunately, they were implemented with no apparent plan in place and as little guidance as possible on how they could be ordered.
Let’s make one thing clear: Dunkin’ is not serving bubble tea. Yes, they now offer those big, fun tapioca balls full of flavor that you’ve seen around in, you know, bubble tea. Those are the new strawberry-flavored “Popping Bubbles,” which you can add to any cold or iced drink on the menu. They appear as an add-on, listed next to the turbo shots and flavor additives. No new drinks have been added to tell customers “Hey, you should put the bubbles in this.”
It’s like if a restaurant started offering waffle cones for its desserts but never got around to adding ice cream to the menu and thought, “Oh well, we have carrot cake and apple pie. They can just add them to that.”
Imagine if, instead of adding avocado toast to the menu earlier this year, Dunkin’ just let customers add avocado spread to items that were already on the menu. That’s what they’ve done here.
Also, the bubbles only come in strawberry.
Dunkin’ Popping Bubbles
So, what the heck are customers supposed to do with the bubbles? According to Dunkin’s own press release on the matter, the strawberry bubbles pair well with “iced drinks like new Dunkin’ Coconut Refreshers or Lemonade.”
Lemonade makes zero sense. I ordered one anyway. I can confirm this is not a good idea.
The Coconut Refreshers, on the other hand, actually work with the bubbles. If you look closely at the menu, you may see a promo featuring the refreshers as one of the options for a bobble-addled drink. This is a good call. The Coconut Refreshers are cold, milky and sweet, a solid complement to the bright bursts of flavor from the tapioca bubbles. They’re pretty similar to conventional bubble tea. However, the refreshers include zero actual tea. Instead, they combine “coconutmilk, flavored fruit concentrate, and B vitamins.”
I feel like I’m losing my mind writing about this. Dunkin’ has twisted itself into knots trying to justify the addition of a flashy ingredient that cannot have been easy to distribute to nearly 10,000 locations nationwide.
They went through all this trouble to get the tapioca balls. Why not just add an actual drink called “bubble tea” to the menu? They did all of the work, but stopped just short of being able to say “Hey, we’ll sell you bubble tea for $3 when it will cost you at least double that anywhere else.”
So what do they taste like?
I have a lot of complaints about everything Dunkin’ has done in regards to introducing this product. But the Popping Bubbles themselves? They’re pretty good.
They’re everything you look for when you get a boba or bubble tea. They’ve got that signature bounce and give a satisfying pop when you burst them in your mouth, releasing a thick, syrupy blast of flavor.
The actual flavor is reminiscent of the center of those strawberry hard candies that somehow find their way onto the coffee tables of grandparents everywhere (AKA strawberry bon bons). It’s candy-sweet, which really limits the number of drinks the bubbles actually pair well with. But in terms of sweet, fruity iced summer drinks, they’re a really cool thing to throw in.
They’re fun to eat, add an exciting treat at the bottom of your cup and only cost 70 cents to add to a drink. In this case, I got the popping bubbles in three different drinks: Peach Coconut Refresher, lemonade and an iced tea with milk and flavor shots.
The Coconut Refresher was the best option of the three, providing the creaminess and sweetness that’s most reminiscent of an actual bubble tea. However, since the Refreshers don’t have an actual “tea” element, the sugar and overall sweetness run rampant. It’s a firehose of sweet flavors that amplified by the deep-sea excavation you’re performing while sipping up the bubbles.
The lemonade is also super sweet, yet somehow doesn’t provide a lot of actual flavor. It’s not a good pairing. I’d say the bubbles make the lemonade better, but it’s probably more accurate to say the lemonade makes the bubbles worse.
I also tried out an iced tea loaded with milk and flavor shots to try and replicate a milk tea that is typically used in bubble tea. If you jack up the sugar content enough, it could work. But again, it requires you really nailing a custom order to get something that should be standard.
The final word
A word of warning: Make sure you get the correct straw. When you order the Popping Bubbles with a drink, you’re supposed to get a huge paper straw that has orange and pink stripes twisting around it. You have to get this from an employee behind the counter.
If you do not get this straw, you will have a bad day. No, the straws over by the napkins will not help.
This is what happened to me the first time I ordered a Popping Bubbles drink. I didn’t get the special straw and instead tried to drink this with the bigger standard straw, which has about half the diameter of the tapioca ball.
If you get the correct straw, you get to play the fun game of sweeping around the bottom of your drink for the fun little pockets of sweetness that come shooting up the pipeline. If you get the wrong straw, the bubbles will all burst and you will get bits of tapioca with the texture of peeled grape skins accompanying your drink.
At no point during all of this did Dunkin’ seem entirely prepared for the Popping Bubbles. It’s like someone just dropped a bag of them at every location and said “Ah, let the customers figure out what to do with them.”
What could go wrong?
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“I ate it so you don’t have to” is a regular food column looking at off-beat eats, both good and bad. It runs every other Thursday-ish at noon-ish.
You can send any praise/food suggestions to nomalley@masslive.com. Please send all criticisms and complaints about how Dunkin’ has too many fancy drinks and stories about what you like to order to cmcgrath@masslive.com. You can check out the rest of the series here.
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- I drank the new Dunkin’ Pink Velvet latte so you don’t have to: It’s the pinnacle of Valentine’s Day sugar nonsense
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