Trends
For eighteen straight months, "walovi" sat at about 1,000 US searches a month. In June 2026 it hit 5,400. In July it hit 6,600, the highest month we have on record. The reason is a Norwegian striker speaking Mandarin in an advert so strange it became its own meme.
The interesting number is not the spike. It is what happened next. Celebrity campaigns almost always peak in the month they launch and decay from there. Walovi went up again in month two. Meanwhile every American better-for-you drink brand in our database is going the other way: Olipop, Poppi and Celsius are each down 33% year over year. The thing growing in that aisle is a herbal tea recipe from 1828.
Key takeaways:
- "walovi" went from 1,000 to 6,600 US monthly searches, up 560% year over year, classified as EXPONENTIAL in the Rising Trends database (data as of July 2026).
- The step is dated. Erling Haaland announced the partnership on June 8, 2026; our data moves from 1,300 in May to 5,400 in June and 6,600 in July.
- His announcement post alone drew 440,315 likes and 4,556 comments.
- Walovi is the international name for Wanglaoji, a Cantonese cooling tea founded in 1828 by a doctor named Wong Chat Bong.
- The brand survived one of China's biggest trademark fights. In 2012 an arbitration ruling stripped the licensee of the mark after red-can sales had passed 10 billion RMB.
- In the US it is cheap and thinly distributed: $6.49 for six 310 ml cans on Weee, and sold out at the single-can grocers.
Let's get into it.
The search spike, in numbers
Here is the monthly curve for "walovi" from our database. The flat part is the story as much as the tall part.
Eighteen months at roughly 1,000 a month. That is a real but small diaspora audience buying a familiar can. Then June 2026 at 5,400 and July at 6,600, which is a 560% year-over-year move and the highest month in the series.
The second month matters more than the first. A one-off celebrity moment shows up as a spike and a slump. This went 1,300, then 5,400, then 6,600. Whether that holds through the autumn is the open question, and the live walovi trend page is where it will resolve.
Now put it in the aisle it is trying to enter.
Olipop and Celsius each draw 135,000 searches a month as of July 2026, twenty times Walovi. On size, this is not a contest. On direction, it is not close either.
Olipop, Poppi and Celsius are all down 33% over the year. Generic "herbal tea" is down 55%. The label "functional beverages" is down 84%, which is what happens when a category stops being a concept people look up and becomes a set of brands they buy. Walovi is the only term in the group growing, and it is growing from a base small enough that it can keep doing so for a while.
What Walovi actually is
Walovi is the export name for Wanglaoji, known in Cantonese as Wong Lo Kat and written 王老吉. It is a caffeine-free tisane, not a tea leaf infusion, and it belongs to a Chinese category called liangcha, or cooling tea, drunk to clear what traditional Chinese medicine calls internal heat after spicy food, stress or hot weather.
The ingredient list, per Wikipedia's entry on Wong Lo Kat, is water, sugar and seven botanicals: mesona (the grass jelly herb), plumeria, microcos paniculata, chrysanthemum, honeysuckle, prunella vulgaris and licorice. It tastes sweet and faintly medicinal, which is the whole proposition and also the adoption risk.
US distribution is the gap between the search curve and the business. On Weee, the largest US online Asian grocer, a six-pack of 310 ml cans runs $6.49, about $0.08 per fluid ounce, listed at 25% off and carrying a weekly-sold badge and 1,535 reviews. At the smaller grocers it is a single can for $1.75 and frequently out of stock, as above. It is also on Amazon by the case. What it is not is on a shelf at a mainstream American supermarket.
Why it is suddenly everywhere
On June 8, 2026, Erling Haaland posted the partnership from his own account.
The caption is nine words: "Excited to be the Global Brand Ambassador of WALOVI!" It drew 440,315 likes and 4,556 comments. Our June figure is the direct consequence.
The campaign runs on the slogan "WALOVI, WE LOVE IT", built around a deliberately absurd advert in which Haaland speaks Mandarin, and it landed ahead of the 2026 World Cup. The absurdity is the mechanism. As one Instagram account summarising the reaction put it, "his wonderfully random ad has gone viral across China. The result? Haaland has become an internet celebrity overnight. Behind the memes is a true Guangdong classic."
That is a rare thing to buy. Most sponsorship spend produces recall without curiosity. This produced a search curve, which means people did not just see the can, they went looking for what was in it.
The trademark war nobody mentions
The brand Haaland is fronting spent a decade being fought over, and the outcome explains why there are two nearly identical red cans in the same American grocery aisle.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1828 | Wong Chat Bong, a doctor in Guangdong, creates the recipe |
| c. 1949 | Private assets are seized; the family continues in Hong Kong, the mainland mark passes to the state |
| 1997 | Hung To Group licenses the mark; its subsidiary JDB makes the red can |
| 2008 | Red-can sales exceed 10 billion RMB; it tops Chinese canned drink volume three years running |
| May 2012 | Arbitration voids the licence extensions; JDB loses the name and rebrands |
The detail that lands: before the ruling, the licensee's red can was doing over 10 billion RMB a year while the state-owned green carton version had been running at a fraction of that. Back in 2004 the split was roughly 1 billion RMB for the red can against 80 million for the green carton. The state owner won the name in arbitration and inherited a brand the other party had built.
Both descendants are still on sale, which is the part that makes an American grocery aisle briefly confusing. On Weee today, Walovi's six-pack is $6.49 and the JDB-lineage Jiaduobao six-pack is $7.49, sitting side by side in near-identical red cans. If you have ever wondered why two products that look like the same drink are shelved together at different prices, this is why: they are the two halves of a 2012 court outcome, still competing.
What it means for the drinks business
Heritage is the new functional claim. The American better-for-you aisle sold gut health and got a 33% search decline once the novelty wore off. Walovi's pitch is 198 years of continuous use, which is a claim no startup can manufacture. The same logic is powering the rest of the functional drinks category we track, where the winners increasingly borrow from older traditions rather than inventing new ones.
Distribution is the whole risk. A search curve is not a sales curve. Right now the demand Haaland created lands on Asian grocers and Amazon, and at least one of them is sold out. If mainstream retail does not follow within two quarters, the curve decays and the sponsorship was expensive brand advertising.
Caffeine-free is an underrated position. The energy drink shelf is crowded and increasingly scrutinised. A sweet, cold, caffeine-free can with a wellness story sits closer to the functional soda wave than to Celsius, and that is a less contested place to stand.
What to watch next
August and September volume. Our series ends in July at 6,600. Two more rising months would mean the campaign converted curiosity into a habit. A drop back toward 1,000 means it was a meme.
Whether a mainstream retailer picks it up. Walovi's own English-language web presence is effectively an Instagram account. Its dot-com still shows a coming-soon page, the Wanglaoji corporate site did not respond when we checked on September 11, 2026, and the parent group's English site returns an error. For a brand that just bought one of the most visible athletes in the world, that is a striking gap. A working US site and a Target or Kroger listing would be the signal that the company is treating this as a market rather than a campaign.
Whether anyone else copies the play. A 198-year-old brand bought a World Cup striker and got a 560% search move. Expect other heritage Asian beverage brands to test the same route, the way non-alcoholic challengers did when feel free tonic proved a botanical drink could be sold on ritual rather than ingredients.
The honest read is that Walovi has the rarest thing in consumer packaged goods right now: rising attention in a category where everything else is falling. Whether it converts depends on something far less glamorous than the advert, which is whether you can buy a can without ordering it online.
Want to spot a brand while it is still a search curve? Read our guide on how to identify market trends, follow the live walovi dashboard page, or see what is breaking out right now on the Rising Trends dashboard.
