When Michele Chen was growing up, boba was everywhere around her. Boba was often an after-school surprises from her mom, and she has fond memories of boba at Taipei night markets. Boba has always been the kind of comfort food that feels like home for Michele.
But when she got deeper into fitness and competitive powerlifting, boba started to feel harder to fit into her routine. Like a lot of people trying to eat healthy, Michele found herself cutting out foods she loved. Eventually, she came to the realization that keeping boba out of her diet was not sustainable.
That was the seed for what became Lunar Lifts Nutrition. During the pandemic, Michele started experimenting in her family kitchen, working backward from her mom’s milk tea recipes and blending premium tea ingredients with whey protein. Her goal was to make a boba drink that had to have 26 grams of protein and no added sugar. She didn’t want to just make a protein shake that vaguely reminded people of boba.
Lunar Lifts is part of a growing wave of Asian American-founded brands showing that better-for-you food can still be fun, nostalgic, and rooted in real flavor.
We talked to Michele about boba-shop memories, powerlifting, testing more than 100 recipes, building a national retail brand, and why healthy living should not mean giving up the foods you love.
Let’s jump in:
K-Snax: You grew up around boba shops and later became a competitive powerlifter. When did those two worlds first start to feel like one brand idea?
Michele: I’ve always been a huge foodie. My 7th-grade PE report card telling my parents I was dangerously overweight is proof of that! So from the very start of my fitness journey I was obsessed with finding ways to enjoy my favorite foods while sticking to my macros. Boba was at the top of that list, and the one I assumed was impossible. I also grew up at a unique moment: I got to watch boba explode in popularity while social media was teaching a whole generation about training, protein, and taking care of their bodies. I’ve always been business-minded, which is something I got from my mom, so when I started experimenting with premium tea ingredients and whey protein, it pretty quickly clicked that this could be something the market hadn’t seen before.
K-Snax: What did boba represent to you growing up, and how did that change once you started thinking about it through fitness and nutrition?
Michele: Growing up, boba was a lot more than a treat I enjoyed. It reminded me of visiting the night markets in Taipei, of moments after school when my mom would surprise me with a boba. So it was also something that was a comfort food for me and felt like home. When I first started getting into fitness and nutrition, I fell into the trap of really demonizing a lot of foods that I loved, and just an overall fear of anything that wasn’t your basic chicken breast and salad. This led me to fall into a cycle of over-restrictive dieting and then overeating to curb my cravings, which was really unhealthy overall. That’s why my mission with Lunar Lifts is to make our protein boba teas feel like there’s no compromise needed to be made! I didn’t want them to taste like protein shakes inspired by boba. I wanted them to taste like an actual boba shop drink that happened to have 26 grams of protein and clean ingredients! I don’t believe in feeling guilty for enjoying good food, and I want Lunar Lifts to reflect that.
K-Snax: Your story mentions working backward from your mom’s milk tea recipes. What did your mom or family think when you first started turning those flavors into protein powder?
Michele: I was living at home during the pandemic when I first started experimenting with protein boba tea recipes. At the time, I think my family saw it as a creative project to keep me busy. I don’t think anyone expected it to turn into an actual business.
But once they realized I was serious about building Lunar Lifts, they became incredibly supportive. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs, so instead of pushing me toward the safe path — I was just finishing a computer science degree, and most of my peers were heading into tech — they encouraged me to take the risk and see how far it could go. I’m really grateful for that, because building a business is such an emotional roller coaster, and having people who believe in you makes all the difference.
There’s also something special about the fact that it started in our kitchen, reverse-engineering my mom’s milk tea recipes. A brand built on the flavors I grew up with is now reaching customers across the country, and my family got to be part of it from the very first batch.
K-Snax: You reportedly tested more than 100 recipes before creating your first core flavors. What was the hardest Asian drink flavor to translate into protein powder?
Michele: The hardest flavor to turn into a protein powder was definitely our taro ube. Taro is one of the boba shop flavors that, when using the milk tea powder blends from suppliers, notoriously have to use a lot of artificial flavors for, because the flavor profiles of real taro and ube are quite subtle. We use only real taro and ube in our formulation, so we had to meet with a bunch of suppliers to find the highest quality ingredients that captured the depth in flavor I was expecting. Recreating a flavor profile people expect, especially one they’re used to getting from artificial flavoring, using only the real thing was the real challenge. Also as someone whose boba shop order has always been taro milk tea, I was painfully picky with this one.
K-Snax: You recently shared that Lunar Lifts is going national at Whole Foods in 400+ stores. What did that milestone mean to you as a founder?
Michele: It’s honestly still surreal. Before I launched Lunar Lifts, I remember telling a friend, “If Whole Foods knows who I am in five years, I’ll be happy.” At the time, I was fresh out of grad school, and even running a small e-commerce business felt like a huge undertaking. Fast forward to today, and we’re in more than 400 Whole Foods stores, and over 500 stores nationwide. I don’t think I’ve fully processed it yet, but more than anything it’s super validating. From day one, I’ve obsessed over every detail of the brand, from the ingredients and flavor development to the packaging and customer experience. Whole Foods took a chance on us very early, before we had years of retail sales data to point to, and that level of belief meant a lot. Seeing customers discover Lunar Lifts on shelf and hearing that our products are bringing new people into the protein category has been one of the most rewarding parts of the journey so far.
K-Snax: What has been the biggest difference between selling online to a community that already gets the brand and selling in a national retail environment?
Michele: Retail and e-commerce feel like two completely different ballgames. With e-commerce, you can really cultivate a community that gets to follow the journey and know the brand and founder on a deeper level. This is all part of the marketing, and we can also identify who we want to target for our ads, for example. In a national retail environment, the biggest challenge isn’t just targeting the customers, but you’re also fighting for attention on the shelves. You don’t get to show people who walk down the aisles a 60-second video of you talking about your brand and the benefits. On shelf, you have just a few seconds to communicate what you are, why you’re different, and why someone should pick you up instead of the dozens of other options around you.
K-Snax: How do you think Asian American founders are changing what “better-for-you” food and beverage can look like?
Michele: For a long time, “better-for-you” came with a pretty narrow flavor vocabulary and this underlying idea that eating healthy had to mean eating boring foods. What I love about what Asian American founders are doing now is that we’re building products around the flavors we actually grew up with: the ones tied to our childhoods, our families, our home countries. We’re proving you can make something functional and clean without stripping out culture, nostalgia, or the joy of eating. For me, Lunar Lifts is proof you don’t have to choose between the foods you love and your health goals. My boba order has always been taro milk tea. I wasn’t willing to give that up, so I built a version I didn’t have to. I think that resonates with people far beyond the AAPI community. Healthy living shouldn’t mean giving up what makes you happy! It should mean finding better ways to enjoy it. We Asians love our food, and I think the work coming out of this generation of founders really reflects that.
K-Snax: What are your favorite Asian snacks?
Michele: Aside from boba obviously, pineapple cakes are probably number one. I also love mochi rolled in peanut powder, Hello Panda, and honestly anything from a Taiwanese night market.
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