HEYTEA Oat Mango Boom

The HEYTEA Oat Mango Boom is $10.49 and 245 calories. Fresh mango with oat milk and jasmine tea, and the only drink on the board that HEYTEA labels plant-based outright.

That label is the reason it exists. Everything else on the menu with a creamy texture uses dairy milk or a dairy cheese cloud, and asking for substitutions gets you a compromised version of a drink built around milk. This one was built around oat from the start, which is a different thing.

Oat milk suits mango better than most alternatives. Soy carries a beany note that fights tropical fruit, almond is too thin to give body, and coconut adds a flavour of its own that competes. Oat is neutral, slightly sweet and thick enough to coat, which is exactly what mango needs.

The mango is fresh rather than a purée out of a carton, which shows in the texture. Real fruit leaves the drink slightly fibrous and gives it the weight that separates it from a mango-flavoured milkshake. It also means the drink is better in mango season than out of it.

Jasmine tea sits underneath and does the job dairy does elsewhere on the menu, which is to stop the fruit from being the only thing in the cup. It is a light presence rather than a strong one, and anyone expecting a tea-forward drink should order from the Tea Lab range instead.

Numbers land at 30g of sugar, 7g of fat and 3g of protein. The sugar figure is high because mango is a sweet fruit and oat milk carries its own sugars, and the protein figure is low because oat milk has almost none. Anyone switching from a dairy drink for protein reasons is going the wrong way.

Boom on this menu means fruit blended into the drink rather than layered on top, which is the same convention used on the Mango Grapefruit Boom and the Coconut Mango Boom.

It runs as a seasonal, so it moves on and off the board without notice. Check the menu page before planning a trip around it.

For a dairy-free drink that stays on the permanent menu, the Coconut Mango Boom is $8.99.