Hey folks!

Of late you’ve surely seen a pretty purple latte on someone’s instagram or a drink with a beautiful violet swirl on your feed that’s just too vibrant to ignore. That’s ube, the Filipino yam that has quite literally been taking over the world’s menu. But ube is more than just a colour trend.

For a good while, matcha had the title. The Japanese green powder was everywhere. In lattes, desserts, skincare and sometimes, shockingly, in pastas too! By September 2025, matcha had starred in almost 70,000 tiktoks. It was undefeatable until ube showed up, The Korea Herald even called ube “the next matcha”.

That statement is apt. Ube has grown 230% on restaurant menus in the US over the past four years, according to food analytics firm Datassential, and now features at 95 chains across the country and is predicted to grow more. Matcha never had this kind of trajectory. 

The coffee chains were quick to catch on. Starbucks tested ube at its Reserve locations in 2025 with an Ube Iced Coconut Latte and an Ube Espresso Martini, and people liked what they tried. This spring, they brought ube to its regular coffeehouses across the US.

In Europe, Starbucks rolled out an ube range including an Ube Vanilla Velvet Matcha Latte which is essentially the passing of a torch. Costa Coffee joined in with a Sweet Ube Frappe and a Sweet Ube Hot Chocolate across its UK stores.

This simply goes to show how the purple yam is evidently now a global chain staple. 

But how did ube suddenly slip into the limelight?

Well, it was partly the colour leading to over 1,20,000 tiktoks posted and 7,50,000 Instagram posts tagged with it, partly because of the taste and partly because the food world runs on novelty and ube is just novel enough to feel exciting and not divide people. 

But here’s the twist. The louder the demand outside the country, the quieter things are back home. The Philippines exported nearly 1.7 million kilograms of ube in 2025, that’s up 20% from the year before. But production has been declining by close to 2%, with processors buying in bulk to feed global demand. The Philippines, where ube comes from, has begun importing purple yams from Vietnam to meet local demand. And the global supply chain too has found a workaround to this demand-supply problem. They’re using purple sweet potatoes, a faster-growing stand-in that only looks like the real thing, to cash in on the trend, while missing ube’s floral aroma.

Matcha took a decade to get here and ube did it in just four years. So maybe, whatever takes the market by a storm next is probably already growing in someone’s backyard, waiting to be discovered!

Here’s a soundtrack to put you in the mood…

En Iniya Thanimaye by Sid Sriram, D Imman and Madhan Karky

Shoutout to our reader, who prefers to stay anonymous and goes by the initials “RCR”, for this beautiful rec.

What caught our eye this week

The Strange Economics of a Creepy Little Doll

At first glance, Labubu doesn’t look like something that should spark a global frenzy. It looks slightly unsettling, almost odd, with its sharp teeth and mischievous expression. And yet, over the past year, this strange little character has quietly turned into something far more interesting. Not just a toy, not even just a collectible, but something that began to behave like an asset. Some versions sold for thousands, queues stretched outside stores, and online communities tracked resale prices with the kind of intensity usually reserved for stocks.

Which raises an obvious question. How did a toy end up behaving like a financial instrument?

Because if you strip the story down, Labubu doesn’t have the qualities we usually associate with value. It doesn’t generate income, create value, or produce anything. 

And yet, people were willing to pay increasingly higher prices for it. 

But why?

You see, the answer lies in something deeper than the product itself.

We are living in a time where almost anything can become an asset, as long as it has attention, liquidity, and “perceived scarcity”. Social media spreads demand instantly, resale platforms make it easy to trade, and global supply chains make distribution seamless. 

Put these together, and you no longer need the traditional fundamentals to create a market. You just need a story that people believe in.

Labubu, created by Pop Mart, was designed perfectly for this environment. It wasn’t sold as a simple product, but through blind boxes, where buyers didn’t know which version they would receive. This introduced randomness, and randomness created rarity.

At that point, people were no longer buying Labubus just because they liked them. They were buying them because they believed someone else would pay more later. This is the classic “greater fool” dynamic. 

However, what makes the Labubu story particularly interesting is how the bubble ended. Unlike financial markets, where external forces such as interest rates or liquidity shocks trigger corrections, this one collapsed because of a single internal decision. Pop Mart increased its supply by pushing out about 30 million toys each month, which was a whopping 10 times higher than the previous year.

Once that happened, the logic of paying a premium in the resale market started to break down. If buyers could easily purchase Labubus at retail prices, there was little reason to pay inflated prices elsewhere. As flipping became harder, speculative demand disappeared. And once that demand faded, prices followed.

This also highlights an important strategic choice. For companies like Pop Mart, a booming resale market can amplify demand, but it can also distort it. Because when too many buyers are motivated by resale rather than genuine interest, the product risks becoming a speculative instrument instead of a brand.

Today, the frenzy has cooled, and attention has shifted elsewhere. But the Labubu still exists as a collectible with a loyal following — just one without the inflated expectations that once surrounded it.

And perhaps that is the real takeaway. In today’s world, value is often less about what something is and more about what people believe it could be worth. And once that belief fades, the entire structure can unwind just as quickly as it was built.

Infographic

So Apple finally made it official. John Ternus is the next CEO. And honestly, his backstory is kind of wild.

This guy joined Apple in 2001 to work on monitors — not the iPhone or the Mac. He spent 25 years quietly working his way up, and now he’s running a $4 trillion company.

Before Apple, he was at a VR startup nobody remembers, building headsets in the late ’90s when VR was basically a science experiment. At Apple, he had his hands on pretty much everything—every iPad ever made, AirPods, the Mac Pro redesign, you name it. He led the shift from Intel to Apple Silicon, and worked on Vision Pro, the iPhone Air, and more.

Tim Cook is moving to Executive Chairman. Ternus officially takes over on September 1.

The trillion-dollar question though is, can he crack Apple’s AI problem? That’s the one area where Apple has been stumbling. And Ternus is a hardware guy through and through.

Can he figure it out?

Readers Recommend

This week, our reader Shivangi Yadav, recommends reading The Book of Tea by Kakuzō Okakura.

Shivangi says,

It’s a Japanese book that talks about tea — its philosophy, culture, a bit of history, art appreciation, and my favourite part, the “cult of flowers”.

Overall, it was a really interesting read for me. I think it’s worth flipping through.

Thanks for the recommendation, Shivangi!

That’s it from us this week. We’ll see you next Sunday!

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