Conditions for Specialty Matcha Preference Acquisition

 

Ryan 
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha podcast. I'm Ryan.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Hello, I'm Zongjun and Ryan frequently calls me Sam.

Ryan 
So there's not three people on this call in case it's confusing. We actually did that with an investor recently and just say it could have gone better.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Hahaha

Well, that was definitely intentional to make us sound like a larger team.

Ryan 
Yeah, magical third person, virtual third person, compliments of generative AI. We're going to pipe them in from some LLM to naturally respond to the conversation.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
There we go. Ha ha ha.

Alright, alright.

Ryan 
Anyway, today's going to be a discussion about a blog post that we just put out called the conditions for specialty matcha preference acquisition. In other words, how does someone go from not drinking specialty matcha to wanting to buy and regularly consume specialty matcha? And this article makes the case that matcha is on the cusp of a specialty revolution. So...

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Certainly a very interesting piece of argument that you are writing there, Ryan. So can you actually define very shortly what exactly is specialty matcha?

Ryan 
Thank you.

Yeah. So you hear about terms like culinary grade or ceremonial grade matcha all the time. Those classifications are basically meaningless. They just give, there's not regulated terms. You can call matcha any of those terms nearly no matter what's in it. So they're kind of used and abused and the lack of regulation has like capitalism and profit seeking motives.

do its work and they're very unreliable labels. So because of these unreliable labels and classifications, we are going to adopt a word that we have stolen from coffee and refer to any matcha that is single origin, single cultivar that has a story, or even blends that are well produced or have some specific heritage.

to call it a specialty product. And what we really mean by that and something that the blog post gets into is that it's not really commodified in any way. If I were to give you a very special cultivar, let's say like Asahi cultivar matcha, specifically from a particular farmer in Uji that was grown in the year 2023, right? That product is not a commodity in any way.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Right.

Ryan 
But if you buy one can of specialty matcha, or excuse me, of ceremonial grade matcha, in your coffee shop, you can swap that out and you're still serving ceremonial matcha even though you've changed suppliers. So it's something that really is highly differentiated by things that consumers generally value.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, and I think that's really a good idea to kind of borrow this term from coffee, because if you look into the past 20 years, what coffee has undergone this specialty revolution, matcha is pretty much doing very similar, pretty much in a very similar situation. So before specialty coffee,

it was the era of canned coffee, box coffee, where all the coffees from different production regions get mixed and blend together under a giant label and then packed into all these packages and shipped globally. This is very much what matcha has been till these days in a very large portion. So matcha are

90% of the matcha are basically milled and packed in Japan and gets shipped into the world. But Nowadays, we start to see people talking about single origin matcha, matcha from specific area in Japan with very distinctive taste, or matcha being made from a single cultivar, which also produce very distinctive flavor profile.

Ryan 
Yeah, exactly. And the rate at which this has changed, at least for Western audiences, has been really fast. So we both started our tea journey a little over 10 years ago. And at the time, it was very opaque. Like when I would buy a can of matcha, like in New York City at Ippudo, I would walk, excuse me, Ippodo.

Ipudo or Ipodo? I always get those two mixed up. One of them is ramen and one of them is matcha. Ippodo. It's Ipodo. With two O's. Both are very good. But anyway, it was one of the few places where you could buy retail matcha at the time. And they would all have poetic names. It was super confusing. Like, they weren't really talking about cultivars. Maybe they were sort of talking about regions.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Ha ha ha. You pulled off.

Ryan 
But it was mostly blends and being college students at the time, we'd generally pick one of the cheaper ones. And we'd come back and we'd drink it and no one could probably pronounce or remember that name. And we weren't really developing or cultivating any set of complex preferences other than we like matcha and we like consuming this. But now there's so many new vendors and merchants and it's a rich ecosystem.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Hehehe

Ryan 
where you can start developing real preferences. Like I like Asahi cultivar matcha, and yabukita is just kind of okay. And you can start to make those types of distinctions when those things finally get on the label and differentiate things as specialty products.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Haha

That's right. I mean, I also practiced Omotesenke back in the days. And, you know, it's very interesting that, you know, doing Chanoyu or learning Japanese tea ceremony in an institutional way doesn't necessarily really teach you like what matcha or like tea really is and how much that gets made and all the, you know, histories about how, you know, about like

trading matcha, making matcha, and delivering matcha into the bowl that we drink. All of these processes are pretty much not gets talked about very often in those learning curves.

Ryan 
Yeah, I had the exact same experience. I studied in Omotesenke for a few years, which was one of the larger tea ceremony schools, the larger internationalized tea ceremony schools that's been around, I think for 14 generations, it's been a continuous lineage, or it could be 16. The other major schools, Urasenke and one of them is 14 generations, the other 16.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
and

Ryan 
So these schools have been around a while. And when you join as a student, you basically learn everything but tea. It's a lot of napkin folding, it's how to walk, it's how to act, it's about the philosophies. It's much more of a general culture education experience.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
It's more about the ceremony itself rather than the tea

Ryan 
Yeah, you certainly enjoy tea after sitting in Seiza for 30 minutes, patiently waiting. Um, it's a wonderful thing to breathe life back into your legs. Um, but you know, it's kind of like taking up karate, thinking that you're going to learn how to fight, but really you're just mostly practicing forms and punching into space. It's not a lot of like, uh, combat, which is I'm sure why most

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Hang fully, way nice.

Ryan 
I'd say like aspiring five-year-olds who want to do something really cool, like watch Kung Fu Panda 4 way too many times, would want to learn those skills. They might have some initial disappointment.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Hahaha

Yeah, I mean like tea or matcha really serve as an element in Chanoyu or Japanese tea ceremony. It's not really like the center of the spotlight. And I feel like that, you know, like everything, the name, the packaging, the culture centering

it's pretty much in alignment, right? It's very intentionally vague. It creates this poetic ambiguity to distinguish tea culture from like, culture of the commoner. Ha ha ha.

Ryan 
Yeah, and definitely less of a profit motive too. I mean, the system around Japanese tea ceremony was very much patron of the arts type of model where these large schools or different people practicing the tea ceremony would sponsor artists and producers and things just were not marketed the way they are in other specialty products. Both back in the days and...

Even now, all the traditional Japanese tea ceremony companies haven't changed drastically in the way that they're marketing their products. But that's starting to change with other what I'll call outsiders, foreigners, non-Japanese people who may or may not study tea ceremony that are interested in matcha. And they're really changing the scene and kind of reframing what matcha can be.

new audiences that might not be interested in tea ceremony.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, that's right. People started to really trying to extract matcha as an element out of the ceremonial context and really put a lot of focus into the tea itself, which I think is the core spirit of specialty matcha.

Ryan 
Yeah. The spirit is really well encompassed by specialty coffee. But they always say that specialty coffee is lightly roasted seed of a fresh fruit from a coffee cherry. Right. So there's a lot to unpack in that. First, it's a coffee cherry. It's a seed. Right. So different growing conditions, different cultivars, all can produce different flavors.

the way it's processed or the way that fruit is fermented off can change the flavors, and then the way it's roasted. And they specifically mention that it's light roasted because the darker you roast something, the more homogenous it gets in flavor profile. Kind of like cooking a steak, if you were to really overcook a steak, and you can have a great piece of A5 Wagyu beef that's perfectly marbled and was really well produced, and then you could take a really low-quality cut of meat,

roast it heavily, it's not going to taste as different than if you cook them both medium-rare. Very similar thing in specialty coffee, where it can highlight the seed of that fruit. And, you know, matcha has its own equivalence of this, but it's really about focusing and celebrating the flavor differences, intrinsic to the fact that it's an agricultural product, just like coffee, chocolate, wine.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
That's right. Such appreciation really requires a lot of formative experience from the consumer. That's why a larger foundation of people with experience to matcha is really necessary for such revolution to occur, specialty matcha revolution to occur.

People need to have the experience of different matcha or the very notion of matcha itself to be able to start to distinguish the differences from different cultivars, different regions, or different producers.

Ryan 
Yeah, exactly. And that sort of gets in and is a great segue to the meat of the article, which is how preferences are acquired. And the example that I use is that just a random person off the street doesn't wake up one day deciding to go buy a bottle of Chateau Lafite or any other expensive wine, right? You have to acquire the preferences first to value such a product. And that...

can be that type of value judgment, you need to cultivate your own preferences and understand why something is special to ever lay out any money, whether substantial or even a little bit, to buy such products.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, or even if they get like jackpot in MegaMillion and decided to really buy the bottle of expensive wine, they probably wouldn't be able to really enjoy it.

Ryan 
Yeah.

Yeah, they haven't built up the experiences and the knowledge to fully contextualize it and appreciate it. So I kind of moved things into two buckets in the rest of the article. One was around developing the tasting experiences necessary, which is all around the cultivation of your own perception, right? Because you can give the same product to two different people. And let's say you give it to an expert who's had many examples.

They're going to use very different descriptors, very different language, and have a very different perception about what they taste, where someone else off the street might just say, oh, this is bitter. I don't like it. So they're having two very different perceptions. They're not looking at the same painting, so to speak. And then, of course, there's different sets of knowledge that you need to contextualize things. I might be able to appreciate a new type of fruit that was just discovered in the Amazon jungle.

and really appreciate its taste, but you know if I don't know anything about it, maybe there's a whole history behind it, a different cultivars and a legacy and stories, right? I might not be able to enjoy it or value it as much as someone that's able to place it in the canon of where it exists among other specialty products.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, the enjoyment of specialty product is really not just about the taste, but also about, you know, everything around it.

Ryan 
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. I think I have a really great line here. Let me find... Oh, here it is. A specialty product, romance, is not only the senses, but the mind.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yep.

Ryan 
And I think that rings true for the both of us, who both are consumers and like to find other specialty products and probably have some hobbies that are a little painful on the wallet.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, well, I mean, we all have all these gate way appreciation into different things and finally find the main focus of our life. For me, it was whiskey at first, then craft beer, and then I start drinking more tea along the way. What about you, Ryan?

Ryan 
Yeah, largely tea focused, especially into Pu-erh and like aged oolongs, terrible rabbit holes to go down, especially when you decide and realize that you should probably start aging your own Pu-erh, only to realize that it's actually a very difficult thing to make sure you have the right setup. Yeah, my Pumidor. And then I'm also really into coffee and I've gone down that rabbit hole as well.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
doing up your pormidor.

Ryan 
Of course, both you and I have in past lives, worked in product development, sort of at the intersection of AI and leveraging consumer preference for flavor to bring new product concepts to life. So we also kind of have this from the industry lens of the broader food and beverage industry.

So Sam, around perception adapting as you have new tasting experience, you have done thousands of trainings with consumers on how to taste food and beverage products. And I know you've conducted studies from many in China and ranging from countries like Indonesia, Germany, Singapore, Philippines, among many others.

not being very good at describing what they taste and what they like, to someone who is very good at attributing their preferences to certain flavors and being able to pick up more subtlety and more nuance. How have you seen that journey among people that have gone through a repeat set of exposures and training to develop their palate?

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, so certainly very interesting to see the changes or even to see the difference to begin with.

Because back in the days when we do all these testing, we always have what we call the calibration samples to serve to the testers first. So these are the samples that have the same formulation, same format, and we just serve to different taste testers around the world to try to compare their differences. The difference are huge.

among different countries. It's the same product, but people are tasting very different things. For a beverage drink, in one country, people can perceive it as overly sweet, while in a different country, people might actually be able to find bitterness. So the place where everybody begins...

is already very different. And as they start to have more exposure to different food and beverage products along the way, you see that they landed on very different kind of description to those products that are very tangible to things that they taste or they see or they feel in their daily life.

So this is very much related to their experience in their life in general, and also the language that they grew up with, like the ability that they're able to describe certain products vary a lot based on their education level, based on different kind of family background they come from.

and also based on their culinary preferences. So people with certain preference in certain food categories might end up using more description that are related to those categories.

Ryan 
Yeah, that makes sense and kind of echoes my experience doing that type of testing as well.

So for your own consumer journey around developing and sharpening your perception, what does that look like in matcha, for example? You're a relatively new regular consumer of matcha. We've both had it and we were both tea ceremony students for years. But now that you've had many more matcha examples, how has your perception changed? What are some flavors that you're noticing in specialty matcha?

and the range of flavors that can exist.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, so before I really get into matcha, I was very much a matcha latte drinker, so matcha with milk. And you know, and back in the days, what I really essential care is like, if the matcha tastes fresh, or it doesn't have, you know, very stale, like yellow color kind of grassy notes.

that was all that I care. But with more exposure to different kinds of matcha, with exposure to different cultivars, different producers, I started to notice the differences between all these different variations. So one thing that I noticed is that for a lot of people that consider as very high quality matcha, a sense of kind of savory.

umami or seaweed or nori note is very much desired by a lot of people. I don't find them particularly likable. I like my matcha to be more nutty, more creamy, sometimes a little bit like toasty or roasty. That's very much where my preference is. I don't know about you, Ryan, but you seem to like the nori note much.

more than I do.

Ryan 
Haha,

yeah, I like the umami quite a lot and the savoriness and sort of the sweet aftertaste that it leaves. But I noticed something very interesting that you said, Zongjun you were, before this, like your preferences lied mostly in matcha lattes. And you said that you wanted freshness, you didn't like, and you didn't like the off notes when it wasn't fresh, right? So you didn't really like a lot of bitterness.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Mm-hmm.

Ryan
You didn't like the grassiness, sort of the flavors that start to happen when it gets old and really yellow. And you were defining your preferences by flavors you didn't like. And actually, it's really interesting. And then now that you've had more and more flavors and more examples of different types of cultivars of matcha, origins of matcha from across Japan, you're talking about flavors that you do like.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
That's right.

Ryan 
and don't like, right? But it's really interesting how that flip in defining your own preferences went from mostly dispreferences to a more even mix.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, yeah, certainly with experience, because back in the days when you mix matcha with a very intensive milk flavor, you don't necessarily be able to detect a lot of these nuances. It was only until I started to drink more pure matcha that I was able to learn more about the nuances between different variations.

Ryan 
Yeah, for sure. And you can look at the parallels in coffee. Like, look at people who have not made the leap to drinking specialty coffee, which is almost always consumed without milk, right, to taste all the subtlety and nuance from those beans, right? Or at least a very large percent of specialty coffee is drunk without milk. And I have no personal judgment on that. But most consumers who would claim not to like it and they would taste it would probably...

say, oh, this is too bitter, I don't like it, it's not for me. And like there's two things going on there. First, it is bitter, and cream and sugar are one of the best masking agents to remove bitterness from coffee, to make it closer to people's preferences. But also there's an, in sensory science, in the science of taste, there's something very common called bitter-sour confusion among consumers.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
God.

Ryan 
where you give consumers something that is very sour, they'll often report it as bitter. And it kind of sounds ridiculous when you say it this way, but you and I have both done tastings, many, many tastings, probably tens of thousands of consumers, it's definitely a thing, bitter, sour confusion. And it just so happens that specialty coffee is also usually pretty sour, which it doesn't help people bridge that gap very easily.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah.

That's right.

Ryan 
And you actually start to see a lot of specialty coffee make slightly darker, less sour roast profiles that are kind of an active, a nice bridge to get people into specialty coffee. And, you know, I think it would be interesting to start seeing more of bridge products to help move consumers from, you know, I only like my matcha with milk to, Oh, wow.

I didn't realize matcha could taste this way and I like flavors X, Y, and Z.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, and also the time point where you started to get exposed to specialty coffee really matters and really have a heavy impact on your preference to the product itself too. I started to get into specialty coffee when natural process was like a big thing, and it was all about these very tropical fruity flavor profile.

in coffee that are, you know, considered as a popular preference. So that still very much remained as a preference for me until these days. I really like the sourness, I like the fruity notes from the coffee. But you know, now the common mainstream has shifted to what you were just talking about, making the coffee taste darker and I have a less sour flavor profile.

Ryan 
Yeah. So pivoting a little bit, right, that's all in taste and perception and flavor. That's all like primary perception. That's what you would get in like a blind tasting, and that's the experience sort of going on in someone's mind when, you know, that beverage hits their palate. But context also really matters in appreciating food and beverage products.

If you look at any wine label, bean to bar chocolate label, or specialty coffee, that label has tons of what we would call metadata, or things that are really important for the consumer to know, to start developing their own preferences for. So things like origin, processing, vintage, cultivar, and there's all of these other

Today in like professional lingo, it's a very transparent label. There's a lot of transparent sourcing. People know exactly where it's coming from and have a good picture for it. So, you know, that also is super important because then people can start making associations like, oh, you know, I really like matcha from Uji. And, you know, the ones from Yame, I've had a couple now, you know, they're generally not my favorite, for example. Or maybe they really like a particular cultivar.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah.

Ryan 
or there's different things like that.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
That's right, or like a specific producer in a specific year. You know, that has not been really a norm yet in matcha but I think the general trend is heading towards that direction.

Ryan 
Yeah, and it's super important that it does because if people don't develop those preferences, they can't demand it, right? And in order to have a really rich and thriving specialty market for matcha, you need to have people that are able to say, this is what I like and this is what I don't like, and who can explore and celebrate all the diversity.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah.

Exactly.

It's all the reference point that people can use to build a community of languages that they can communicate with each other.

Ryan 
Yeah. I just thought of an interesting analogy, curious what you think of it. Like in machine learning and AI, right? If you're just tasting things blindly and you have no labels associated with them, like about what the product is, like cultivar and origin, harvest, et cetera, how many days it was shaded, right? That's kind of like unsupervised learning. You're not giving that learning system any context about anything, and they just have to go through and sort of brute force make associations.

or classifications, where this is more like having all of that context is like semi-supervised or supervised types of learning, where you can start making attributions and associations and that you can usually build a really much stronger, it's easier to build a mental model, or in this case, a machine learning model to learn and predict preferences.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, I like this analogy. It's very much the case. Not only in Macha, but also in all the other specialty products. You need this sort of...

knowledge structure to fit in all of these attributes that you care about so that people can have a legit conversation with each other, that they know what each other is talking about. These reference points are very important.

Ryan 
Now,

it's super important because really the future of the specialty matcha industry will depend on this because if your mental model is wrong enough times, then consumers won't develop the preference and then there won't be your consumers anymore. They're going to fall off the bandwagon.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah.

Yeah, it's super important to have a set of vocabularies basically that everybody agreed on to have any valid communication to occur. Otherwise, you know, people will be just using different terms and what I like doesn't necessarily translate into a thing that you would understand.

And that just doesn't really help in any conversations.

Ryan 
And sort of the last reason why I think matcha is on the cusp of a specialty revolution, like the beginning to early stages is there's also a lot of qualitative context being shared beyond just like how many days it was shaded. There's a lot more storytelling. You have like platforms like Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. And there's like a whole new generation of storytellers that are visiting the origin, talking to farmers.

talking about different flavor profiles, different growing techniques, different histories and lineages and heritage of farmers. And it's really creating ripe conditions for people to get even more interested because not only do we have breadth, but we also have depth that's now grown available in our matcha offerings and the stories behind these products.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, it's exciting to look at all these activities are happening so naturally. It's not like a group of people are advocating this kind of concept. It's really like people's real interests start growing and start to expanding into all these realms.

Ryan 
Yeah, it's like perfect feedback loop where people get more interested, which creates more demand, which means a larger audience for content creators and merchants, and it can become a self-fulfilling loop.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
That's correct.

Ryan 
The makings of a new specialty matcha market, which I know is a future that we both look forward to.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah, very exciting future.

Ryan 
All right, well, Sam, Zongjun I think this covers everything that's in the blog post. We have more coming and we'll record more of these. If you have any questions, comments, debates, or if you want to come on as a guest, we'd love to have you and look forward for more content in the future. Thanks.

Zongjun (Sam) Li 
Yeah.

Yeah, sounds good. See you guys in the next episode.

Ryan 
All right.

See ya.