Menu Price Increases & Inflation 2025

We apologize, Camellia Rd will have to implement a significance price increase to maintain its operations. This price increase will help us build towards a more sustainable business and keep up with rising operating costs, ingredient costs, and develop new seasonal menu items.

Menu Price Changes

Individual pricing

First, we no longer do a single price for our Milk Teas or our Tea Frescas. While ingredient costs have risen across the board, not all products have increased at the same rate and doing individual item pricing gives us some flexibility to minimize the increases and better reflect actual costs of ingredients or labor. We’ve eliminated our “$5 milk tea” pricing structure.

Milk Tea base prices (20 fl oz) to $6.30 - $7.50

• Barley Milk Tea: $6.30
• Chrysanthemum Milk Tea: $6.30
• Thai Milk Tea: $6.50
• Camellia Blend Black Milk Tea: $6.60
  
• Genmaicha Milk Tea: $6.60
• Scottish Caramel Milk Tea: $6.60
• Hojicha Milk Tea: $6.70
• Jasmine Green Milk Tea: $6.80
• Oolong Milk Tea: $6.80
  
• Matcha Milk Tea: $7.50

Tea Frescas (20 fl oz) ranging from $5.60 - $5.90, examples:

• Strawberry barley tea fresca: $5.60
• Mango green tea fresca: $5.60
• Pineapple mint oolong tea fresca: $5.70

Other

• Alternative milk: +$0.50 (no change)
• Standard toppings: +$0.90
  
• The price of specials, seasonal drinks, and special toppings will vary.

Rising costs

“Inflation is the biggest buzz word in any news involving the U.S. economy right now. We’ve certainly experienced heavily inflated costs in some areas of our operations this last year…”

The above quote block is taken directly from a 2022 post, but it strongly applies today. Below, I'll reflect on some of the rising costs we're experiencing.

Cost of Goods: There’s a wide range in the increased cost of goods sold (COGS). Some items have gone up substantially very quickly, while others have slowly gone up over time.

• Milk, sugar, fruit, and herbs are grocery basics that we use heavily at Camellia Rd. Some things, like fruit, have seen major fluctuations depending on the season but on average it's been a slow, steady increase.
• For our last order of cup supplies, we paid roughly 2.5x what we paid in 2022. We expect this cost to go down and be closer to 1.5x-1.75x by the end of next year as we work with a new supplier.
• Tea is our biggest cost of goods increase. Matcha green tea's raw ingredient cost increasing the most. With the matcha shortage, we’ll be seeing an increase over 30% from February 2025 (this increase is not year-over-year or from 2022, but from our last shipment earlier this year only 8 months ago).
• All of our tea is imported - there’s 0 tea that is grown in North America (that we source). Regulations for imports and shipping have caused issues with delays and new shipping requirements. It's hard to give an exact number as this fluctuates and varies depending on the origin, supplier, and shipping method, but on average we’re seeing a 6% price increase (hopefully temporarily). This is forcing us to order in larger quantities and recently, we've unfortunately lost a shipment of tea at customs.

Wages

• We love San Diego - but it’s one of the highest cost of living places in the US. We want to compete on wages, especially compared with other food service establishments. Currently our average wage is around ~$18.60 (depends on your training and experience), but we want to keep growing this as well so we can attract and retain team members over the long haul. We use minimum wage metrics to help us gauge market rates.
  • San Diego City minimum wage: $17.25 per hour
  • CA Fast Food Workers: $20 per hour
  • San Diego’s tourism hospitality employees: $25 per hour

Processing fees and monthly maintenance

• There are a lot of B2B monthly services and software subscriptions that Camellia Rd uses. This is an area I didn’t talk about in the 2022 inflation post, but it’s become more significant now.
• Square point of sale’s processing fees*
  • When we first opened, Square’s processing fee pricing was a flat percentage. It changed this to a fee structure of 3.5% + 10c, and it changed its pricing structure again this year for in-person from 2.6% + 15c, changed from 3.5% + 10c. For lower cost items, it would be better to have a lower flat fee and higher percent (3.5% + 10c) and for higher cost items, it would be better to have a higher flat fee and lower percent (2.6% + 15c). The breakpoint for this formula is around $5-$6; so for single drinks and cheaper menu items Camellia Rd would pay more in a transaction fee; for bigger orders or more expensive premium drinks we would pay less, relatively speaking.
    
• Monthly services
  • Interestingly, the following services are part of most food establishment's monthly processes, and these have gone up more significantly then other ones for us:
    • Plaza waste and trash service
    • Grease trap facility cleaning
    • Restroom supply and cleaning supply service

Future Changes

With these price increases, it will help us cover some of the rising costs, but it's also to help us be able to do more things in the future.

Earlier this year, I sent out a survey to our email newsletter subscribers to get a sense of what our customers wanted, and have spoken to people in-person. Here are some of the things in our pipeline:

• For each month in 2026, we plan to offer new seasonal teas and toppings. We've made the difficult decision to remove earl grey and sticky rice puer from our permanent teas, but we plan to offer new interesting milk tea flavor (and bring these back in the rotation)
• Expand hours, including opening on Mondays
• Introduce a loyalty rewards program
• Share recipes and dive deeper into tea knowledge
• Update our interior space

This price increase may not be the last one we do in the short term. But we promise that we’ll do our best to make calculated changes and communicate our processes as best as we can.

If you want to read more about our process with pricing, see our blog post here: https://www.camelliard.com/blogs/blog/the-camellia-road

-Ricky Lau

*Square and other point of sales' transaction fees include the processing fees that major financial institutions like Visa, Mastercard, AmEx and banks charge on their networks to businesses as part of an aggregate fee to retailers like us. These network fees vary depending on the provider.