Founding Sanko

 

 

Ryan Ahn (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matchup Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my co -host Zongjun

Zongjun (00:04)
Hello, hello.

Ryan Ahn (00:05)
and we're the co -founders of Sanko Macha Products. So typically, we use this podcast to discuss one of our more recent writings that we put up as a blog post. we realized that we've never really talked about our company, what we're building, what our goals are, and we wanted to give the time and space to share what we're working on.

Zongjun (00:27)
Yeah, well, you and I have been traveling quite a lot in the past week. And this is kind of a fine excuse for us to not do another chapter and write another chapter. But yeah, and naturally catch up, that's right. Although you are in the same space.

Ryan Ahn (00:42)
Haha

and naturally catch up.

We're currently in.

Zongjun (00:55)
Welcome back to Changsha, Ryan.

Ryan Ahn (00:55)
Yeah, we're in the same...

I love Changsha. We're currently in China working on product development.

Zongjun (01:02)
Yeah, it will be quite excited for the coming weeks to see a lot of these new progresses, not just the bold, but also our prototype machine.

Ryan Ahn (01:17)
Yeah, that will mill matcha fresh. In a week or two from when this is released, we'll get to see our prototype for the first time, which is a countertop machine that will be able to mill matcha fresh. So we'll find out once and for all, you know, how many iterations we're going to need to do in our prototyping phase. Knock on wood, it is as close to working as possible the first time.

Zongjun (01:38)
Haha.

Yeah. Well, it's something that we learned from product development is that there always will be another round of iteration. This will never end.

Ryan Ahn (01:45)
I doubt it will be the case.

Yeah, no

silver bullets. No silver bullets and product felt

Zongjun (02:02)
Yeah. So... Oh my god, I don't even want to think about it. But we will see, we will see. I'm excited.

Ryan Ahn (02:04)
We haven't even gotten to manufacturing yet. That's gonna be...

Me too. And we have very good partners. Everyone we're working with so far is, they really feel world class. Like, you know, people say that, you know, Chinese manufactured goods, it's so cheap here and it's because of the cheap labor, but it really, one, I think that's just not the case anymore. You get cheaper labor in other countries, but like the fact that the supply chain exists over here and the fact that tons of these suppliers,

reinvest in R &D so much, like it's where the manufacturing skill is. You know, you can create world -class products in China in a way like you couldn't in any other country.

Zongjun (02:57)
Yeah, it's really a place that you can basically turn your idea into physical form overnight. We kind of learned that in a very, very personal way. Back in the days, we only heard about legends of product being developed so quickly, but now we can really feel it.

Ryan Ahn (03:18)
Yeah, and even me coming in from an outside perspective, I'm an American, grew up in the States, just the pragmatism here is incredible. How quickly and practical everything's are. Even these business meetings that we walk into, they're like, everything is just down to the point. How quickly can it be done? What are your requirements? There is none of the stuffiness. It's not like going to Japan and walking into a business meeting.

and you leave the business meeting and you ask yourself, I'm not sure if anything just happened.

Zongjun (03:52)
Yeah, usually.

Ryan Ahn (03:55)
Not to critique

Japanese business meetings. It's just a different culture.

Zongjun (04:00)
It's a different cadence. Usually it takes maybe a three or four meetings for you to have a more solid kind of feeling of progress.

Ryan Ahn (04:09)
Yeah, at least from an American perspective, very little progress seems to be made. But I think it's just a lot of consensus building needs to happen first and more social factors need to be considered in Japanese business environment, which we will learn very soon. Yeah, better or worse, because we're about to go on a grand adventure trying to source Tencha ourselves. So we'll learn firsthand.

Zongjun (04:24)
Yeah, for better or worse. Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (04:37)
I'm sure we'll have a lot more to talk about in the future on this podcast about what it's like sourcing tea.

Zongjun (04:43)
Yeah, yeah. So Ryan, you came up with the original idea of building this company. And at the time, you were, I think, traveling in South America.

Ryan Ahn (04:55)
Yeah, I was traveling through Latin America at the time. So I spent, I guess it was around seven years with the same startup company, lived the startup life, did a lot of travel, got to work on a lot of product development with a lot of cool food and beverage companies during my time. And I was transitioning away from that role. And so I decided to take six months off just to travel, decompress.

sort of reflect on what I wanted to do with my life. I was traveling through South America and I noticed that at the Starbucks, the primary drink feature section were three matcha drinks. And I thought, wow, that's interesting. This is the last place I was expecting to see matcha be so popular, let alone at Starbucks. And I was like, wow, there could be some real opportunity here.

And before the startup company that we both worked at, we were both part of the Tea Institute at Penn State and had a deep passion for tea. So I wanted to, whatever I was going to do next, I wanted to merge my passions for tea, so it's like tech and innovation and the food industry. And I also had the great fortune of working a lot in Japan. I actually spent my 25th birthday in Japan. It's my first trip there. It was also a business trip.

fell in love with the country, the culture, the food, the tea, everything. And got to go a couple times a year for work since then. And I really wanted a job that would bring me back to Japan. So pursuing something in matcha, both felt like good timing and well aligned with where my head was at the time.

Zongjun (06:45)
So it was really lifestyle driven I guess.

Ryan Ahn (06:48)
Yes, it's important that you do what you love.

Zongjun (06:51)
That's right. Well, that's part of the reason why I end up joining too.

Yeah, back in the days we were, so Ryan and I both worked for food and beverage development back in the days. And we both traveled to a lot of countries together, collecting data, delivering projects. And at the time we have seen, we have been seeing a lot of products, not just drinks, but also food that contains the flavor matcha.

The trend is already there, but there hasn't really been a lot of innovation going on in the past few years.

Ryan Ahn (07:34)
Yeah. And you know, something else that we always were into in the food and beverage industry were how products get more premium and more sophisticated or more specialty. Like how is it that someone goes from, you know, I only drink Coors Light or Budweiser beer to drinking high -end craft beer? What had to happen to get someone to change their habits, to change their preferences?

and how those were acquired. So we're also both students of that consumer preference acquisition and the ladders that influencers build, that companies build, that retailers build to help consumers develop preferences. So we're both very personally interested in things like wine, things like coffee.

and have learned a great deal about working in those industries over, I don't know, the past seven years. And we're able to borrow a lot of knowledge structures to apply to matcha and say, oh, why hasn't anyone done this yet? And spoiler alert, I realize people had. But at the time, I was like, wow, this is weird.

Zongjun (08:54)
Ha ha.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, like when you start drinking beer like Bud Light, Budweiser, and then, you know, probably a natural upgrade is, you know, craft beers, right? Like IPA, Stout. And then you go into, you know, like deeper realm, like a natural fermentations. But, you know, for matcha, there isn't really, well, at the time, you know, we quickly realized there are...

there are, but at the time, there isn't really kind of a natural upgrade from like matcha latte or matcha snacks. If you want to go deeper, boom, quickly, chanoyu, tea ceremony, doing set out for two hours and then you get a bowl of tea and then you learn about calligraphies and how to walk the tea house properly. It's not really a viable natural upgrade for regular consumers.

Ryan Ahn (09:54)
Yeah, or if you wanted to buy a really expensive can of matcha, it was some blend that was like something, something, no shiro, and it is preferred by the grand master of one of the tea ceremony schools, and that's all they tell you about it. And it's $3 a gram.

Zongjun (10:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's very not that transparent and you don't really know where to go.

Ryan Ahn (10:23)
Yeah, so part of the thinking at the time about starting, actually the original version of Sanko was to become almost like the blue bottle of matcha. I was very inspired by the founding story of blue bottle back in the days and discovered blue bottle as a consumer. I discovered the brand as a consumer probably when they were at their peak in 2013, 2014.

They used to have this experience called the Siphon Bar. It was at their Chelsea Market location. When you went up the stairs, this is now gone. But it used to be there, and it was a nod to kissaten -style Japanese coffee preparation, but in a more contemporary way with fantastically sourced coffee. So I think there were only four seats there. There was a coffee professional. There was this huge menu. You could get it prepared almost any way.

And there was this dialogue, and you'd order this coffee, and you'd talk about it with them. And it's a really interesting space. And the primary sensory experience of drinking that coffee and learning about it and appreciating the way it was processed and roasted and sourced, et cetera, was really at the center of that experience. And it was almost also everything, all the distractions of that were stripped away.

Like they weren't trying to upsell you on something or get you to buy a t -shirt. It was just the putting the beverage front and center. So it was like, why doesn't this exist for matcha? And it was, you know.

Zongjun (12:03)
It does.

Ryan Ahn (12:04)
Yeah, it does, but it just doesn't really in the States until very recently does this.

Zongjun (12:09)
Yeah,

not in the States at the time.

Ryan Ahn (12:13)
Yeah, that would be chapter two of this story. The first one foreshadowing.

at the time, it was kind of obvious from my food science background, working in product development, and also being someone who is very obsessed with coffee, that matcha should be ground fresh. If you want to create a space where you're really honoring the product, matcha has so much surface area that it's going to oxidize. And I had a great deal of personal frustration with this. I'd buy a very expensive can of matcha when I was working or even when I was a student.

you know, 10 years ago, and the flavor would change. Like, you know, you keep that open, even in the refrigerator for a week or two, I noticed that it tasted much worse, much more bitter, it lost a lot of subtlety and nuance, all those fresh characteristics, and it was really disappointing because it was expensive and it went bad really fast. I was like, well, it obviously needs to be ground fresh.

So I hired a translator on Upwork. I first tried to search for how to buy a traditional Japanese millstone to mill matcha fresh. And I made very little progress, at least in English. I don't really speak Japanese. So I submitted a job on Upwork saying, assistance with

a Google search in Japanese. And I found a great translator who actually had a lot of tea connections in the tea industry, which was just serendipitous. And he got me a bunch of quotes for traditional millstones. And I was shocked by the price. We hadn't even gotten to shipping. And I was also shocked to learn that they only mill 20 to 40 grams of tea an hour. And I thought, wow.

Wow, you've got to outlay like tens of thousands of dollars to import an industrial piece of equipment that's probably very loud and doesn't look very nice. And it can only mill like a tiny can of matcha an hour. Like, no wonder no one has done this. And I had a light bulb moment. I was like, wow, there has been no innovation in matcha milling ever.

Zongjun (14:20)
Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (14:29)
They just took stone age technology, or maybe it's a little more sophisticated than stone age technology. Millstones like this have been used since Song dynasty, probably even before, but not for tea, but for making powdered tea since the Song dynasty. And all they did was strap a motor on top. So it felt a little crazy to me. So I did a deep dive into the literature about what makes an ishi usu special.

and how you need to be careful for milling temperature and you need a certain shape of particles and you need to get them to a certain size. And it took me a long time to really figure out, okay, what's the goal? When you're milling matcha, what's the goal? And once I finally had a good handle on that problem, I thought, ah, you know, someone needs to make a countertop device to mill matcha fresh.

Zongjun (15:17)
Yeah, well, I mean, there are still a lot of technology going on in the pattern and the concavity of the issue. So we kind of learned that later that different patterns will result into different shapes of powder, which it is quite complicated. But the art or the science has existed for so long that like,

there has been very little innovation in terms of commercializing in a modern way that has been going on there.

Ryan Ahn (15:56)
Yeah, it's also very gate -kept. I think there are around a dozen people alive in Japan that know or certified how to make ishi usus And like it's a very protected craft and there are not very many like master craftsmen that make these things. To think is another reason why, one, Japan is a very traditional culture, but you know in the case of millstones, it's another reason why.

There hasn't been very much innovation in the space.

Zongjun (16:29)
Yeah.

Well, I guess sourcing all of the hardware equipment was one of the main reasons that we didn't end up pursuing that route. But Ryan, you've been to MTCH in Bangkok. They are kind of doing things that matured in vision at the time of next generation matcha Can you share us a little bit more about

Ryan Ahn (16:54)
Yeah.

Zongjun (16:57)
your experience over there and your thinking.

Ryan Ahn (16:59)
Yeah, so after leaving Latin America, I went to Southeast Asia to travel for a bit, first to Malaysia and then later on to Thailand. And completely coincidentally, around that time, I had first learned of a company called Ooika run by Marc who has traditional Japanese millstones and is milling matcha fresh in New Jersey.

But I think his brand was just getting started at the time. It was like October 2022. And I just discovered him and I messaged him. He happened to be in Bangkok at the same time. So I messaged him and said, like, hey, I'm a tea person. Would love to meet up. And we met up at a place called MTCH, which is a contemporary matcha bar in Bangkok. And...

Marc introduced me to that teahouse and he actually later created a YouTube video about it, which I highly recommend watching. And MTCH completely changed the way I viewed what I think the future of matcha can be. It is a cafe that feels completely contemporary. You have none of the Starbucks feel. It's a lot more of the blue bottle feel. And...

They don't serve coffee, it's just matcha, and they have tons of both their own house -made blends, which are made for different reasons to express different flavors, and they're very good about communicating that, and they tell you what's in the blends, as well as single cultivar. And it was there that I realized, wow, I actually didn't realize that matcha came in different cultivars. And over the course of that trip, I went back many, many, many times, and have been back many times since.

and worked their way through the menu. And it just opened my eyes to what Matcha could be. And then later on, they bought their own Millstone too. And I was like, realizing, oh, this is a real problem space. And I'm not the only one seeing this, that Matcha should be ground fresh. So it made me realize that there was a window of opportunity opening because there was more awareness and...

hopefully growing demand because people like Marc and people like MTCH were investing so much in the ability to know matcha fresh. So, you know, then I realized, well, you know, the infrastructure to make matcha radically better doesn't really exist in a scalable way without, you know, creating tons of these Ishiusus that can only be, that are only really made by a dozen people.

You know, let's apply some technology and material science to this problem and

Zongjun (19:48)
Yeah. And also

the unit production of each ishi usu is just so low. It's so slow and the quantity is so low that it's not really a commercially viable solution for modern cafe.

Ryan Ahn (20:07)
Yeah, no, not commercially viable for almost anyone. loud, they're heavy, they're hard to move, they're industrial pieces of equipment. And if something goes wrong with that equipment, it's not like you can just call someone up for maintenance.

Zongjun (20:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, better, you try better luck waking up grandpa from Japan in the middle of the night trying to fix the problem. That's not gonna happen. But it's not just the grinder, it's also a lot of stuff. The bowl, the whisk, all of the equipment are just like...

Ryan Ahn (20:33)
Hahaha!

Oh

Zongjun (20:48)
this weird retrofitting of legacy

that was made for ceremonial purpose in the past that people are nowadays using them for commercial usage. What it used to be like just one bolt of matcha per day and the ceremony lasts for two hours.

To nowadays, you know, it's like a hundred bowls of matcha a day for matcha latte.

different use case. But people are trying to retrofit all of these equipment into basically a different consumption scenario. And it's not really going to work. And we've been seeing a lot of people. Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (21:34)
Yeah, and it doesn't.

Doesn't work well, at least. I mean, there's a lot of very sad matcha setups. And that became very obvious the moment that we decided we wanted to get into matcha hardware, looking at like, OK, who are these people using matcha equipment? Where is most matcha made and consumed? Well, the answer is cafes. And what tools do they have? And it was

very obvious that a first product should be whisking bowls after looking at all of these setups. I was going, like, I was in New York at the time and I was going around to different cafes, talking to baristas, asking about their matcha programs, looking at their setups. And I went to a very prominent cafe by a very well -known specialty coffee company in Midtown Manhattan, actually in Flatiron. And their setup was a very traditional, actually quite beautiful chawan that was

covered in matcha on the side of the bowl. And they have this disgusting looking whisk that's turning black inside it. And they're weighing out their matcha. They have a temperature controlled kettle and everything. And it's the saddest matcha set up ever. And it looks so dirty and disgusting and sits right above their dishwasher. And I thought, this is a very sad sight. sad sight.

Zongjun (22:55)
Oh my god.

just that place. It's a lot of these places with a matchup program that, you know, all of their equipment looks at.

Ryan Ahn (23:06)
Yeah. And actually that's around the same time when you started the company. So I was like, you know, this matcha mill sounds very complicated and you had just left your position at the last company for completely independent reasons. And, you know, we were chatting and I was complaining about all these matcha setups. And I was like, you know what we should do? We should create whisking bowls and simplify this process so that no one ever has to use these

ugly looking chawans. The chawans themselves look great, but they look really ugly when they're covered in matcha and not cleaned properly. So the people have a purpose -built device and I'd be like, this would be the easiest thing to start our company or brand with. Like, could you help me manufacture these in China?

Zongjun (23:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, both you and I are a student of Omotesenke school, Chanoyu. And, in a tea, proper Japanese tea ceremony, there are cleaning procedures baked in to the ceremony that all of these utensils and wares need to be properly cleaned before and after usage. And that's not the case in modern cafe.

You have customers after customers waiting in line asking for matcha latte. And you don't really have the time to properly polish and wash your utensils. So at the time when we were thinking about this idea that a new product must be developed for baristas to be able to wash and clean and use.

very easily in the modern cafe scenario.

And in terms of ease of use, back in the days, we spent weeks and weeks trying to learn how to do the zigzag whisking in a bowl, in a round -shaped bowl, to be able to generate this beautiful foam of matcha. And I remember it being very difficult. And we were working on it.

Ryan Ahn (25:08)
Yeah.

Zongjun (25:20)
requires a lot of technique to build into a muscle memory at the end. And that's not going to happen in modern cafe. You don't train your baristas for weeks for them to be able to finally generate some good foam for customers. So one natural thinking is that how do we simplify this process? And we came up with the idea of one dimensional whisking.

So instead of doing the zigzag whisking motion, it's just a one dimensional back and forth whisking that will produce a good quality film.

Ryan Ahn (26:00)
Yeah, and it works really well. After prototyping this, and we can probably record separate podcasts about launching the Kickstarter, designing that product, manufacturing things in China. But seeing that come to life and seeing like, wow, our idea for functional design actually worked. It's producing a fantastic product that's very liberating.

Zongjun (26:23)
Yeah,

yeah, it's pretty fun. We learned a lot about a ceramic manufacturer. It's not just the shape, the glaze also matter that helps building up thick foam and then helps the matcha stain to come off very easily with a simple rinse.

Ryan Ahn (26:44)
Yeah, yeah, the hydrophobic glaze and getting that all right. Yeah, that took a lot of testing.

Zongjun (26:49)
Yeah, so it was really trying to develop a product with the intention of empowering baristas or how to make their life easier in the modern consumption scenario instead of simply creating a beautiful looking bowl that requires a lot of mintness.

Ryan Ahn (27:12)
Yeah, exactly. And I'd say that's a large part of the goals for our entire company, for all the equipment that we want to create. We want to create contemporary teaware tools using new materials, functional design, technology to create a better experience, ultimately to increase the quality ceiling of matcha. How can we make it radically better?

using science, using tasting and sensory to create the better tools to create a better product. So we started with whisking bowls, but we're also looking at matcha whisking, matcha sifting, fresh ground matcha. And then we also want to be able to source our own tea because right now there is no Tencha supply. Even if you got an Ishi Utsu to mill matcha fresh,

Zongjun (27:50)
Yeah, it's.

Ryan Ahn (28:08)
you'd have to get someone to sell you the Tencha. But right now, it's very difficult to buy Tencha online. It's not like you have producers just putting it up for sale direct to consumer or something.

Zongjun (28:20)
Yeah, it's still going to take some time for us to figure that process out. So well, we are going to Japan soon, and we will figure that out how difficult it will

Ryan Ahn (28:32)
So Sam, what was your experience deciding to join the company as co -founder to take another leap back into startups and to start this journey?

Zongjun (28:44)
Yeah, I still remember so vividly sitting in your New York apartment with 20, 30 cans of matcha laying on the table and some matcha grinding machine. And then you were so passionately talking about your ideas. And I was like, wow, this is interesting. And this all makes sense. But.

And we were looking at doing all these innovations. And I quickly realized that this is a very different realm of specialty. Both you and I came from the beverage development world. And it's nothing related to hardware. And we are going to be doing a lot of hardware innovation. And I have only heard about.

Ryan Ahn (29:34)
Big change.

Zongjun (29:35)
I've only heard about crazy stories in the past of how difficult it is to create hardware from scratch. But it's interesting. I don't know. Ever since I was a little boy, I was so into Lego buildings and building own devices, taking devices apart. That has always been a passion deep down inside me.

And this has indeed been a pretty difficult journey, but it's also very exciting. It's exciting to see your creation work, and it's also exciting to see people using your creations. So we have already done a Kickstarter round of our bowl. And there are already a lot of real life users being using the bowls in cafe scenarios. And we've...

Ryan Ahn (30:31)
Now prototype balls.

Zongjun (30:33)
Yeah, our prototype broke both. And we have heard a lot of good or bad feedbacks, but very appreciate that people are using them. And it's quite exciting to see your own creation out in the world.

Ryan Ahn (30:48)
Yeah, I agree. Something you can touch and feel is very gratifying, even though they say hardware is hard. But prior to this spending eight years of my life working on software and an AI product for the food and beverage industry, I wasn't ever able to physically touch

Zongjun (30:57)
Ha ha ha.

Ryan Ahn (31:08)
So, you know, able to work on hardware is a different problem space. But, you know, it's an exciting one. And I think that it's just one that needs to happen. If we don't create these tools, you know, someone else will. I hope other people do. You know, I hope we'll have competitors in the future because it means the whole pie is growing.

The day that someone comes out with another fresh ground or fresh milled matcha milling device, I'll be very happy. It is competitive, but I think that it also means that the whole industry is growing and competition breeds better innovation. And if we want to win long -term as a company,

Zongjun (31:51)
Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (31:54)
We've got to create the most value and create the best products and it will force us to be better.

Zongjun (31:59)
Yeah, right now it's really the problem of how we should grow the pie bigger and make matcha more accessible for everybody. It's a wonderful drink. Yeah, it's a wonderful drink. And it should be more accessible by more people.

Ryan Ahn (32:10)
Totally agree.

Well, you know, it's really like matcha is like a fresh flower. Like it is kind of crazy and it's so sad and the world deserves better matcha. Like imagine you have this beautiful, perfect rose and then it gets shipped for two months in a cargo ship or container or in an airplane and then sits in a warehouse. And then by the time it gets to you, it's half of the petals are gone and it's, you know, it's

it no longer has a beautiful scent. Like, matcha is just like that. It really should be treated like a fresh food. It's so sad and so crazy that so much matcha is like half dead on arrival. Like, even like this statistic, I can't get it out of my brain, is that according to this paper, which we can link in the notes, around 40 % of the EGCG, which is one of the primary catechins,

Really one of the primary reasons why people drink matcha, one of the major health benefits associated with it, degrades two months at room temperature. At perfect cold storage, it's pretty well preserved, but no one has a perfect cold chain for matcha. So probably 99 point something percent of the matcha consumed in the world, half of the EGCG, almost half, is gone. That's so sad.

And not even talking about the flavor or the other nutritional components behind matcha. We're really at a stage where I hope we look back in a few decades from now thinking, wow, we were not drinking very good matcha at this time, relatively speaking, compared to how high we can lift this quality ceiling.

Zongjun (33:48)
Yo.

Ryan Ahn (34:11)
by just milling it fresh closer to the edges where people are actually consuming it.

Zongjun (34:16)
Oh yeah, bit by bit, just a little bit will be a giant progress. I mean, like bad matcha are just like bad. They bad tasting and they sad looking and they don't really have any functional ingredient left. And it's very off putting for a lot of, you know, first time drinker or people trying to get into matcha more seriously. It's not.

good for the industry as a whole, that we supply people with inferior quality matcha. It's actually doing the opposite job. Like some people might try matcha for the first time and then they decided, okay, this is not for me. But it was really just bad matcha. It's not the problem that matcha is not tasty. It's actually very tasty.

Ryan Ahn (35:09)
I just hope, once our prototype works and we go to Japan and try to source tencha from farmers, from producers, from blenders in Japan, that they'll be open -minded to the experience. In our eyes, can we produce something that's better because it's fresh ground compared to the perfect ideal product milled in Japan that is then three months old when it's consumed?

And I'm reasonably confident that we're going to create something that beats that standard. Are we going to get as good as an ishi Usu? Probably not for the first version of this machine. Are we going to get very, very, very, very, very close? I think we will. And we'll know in a few weeks. But to see how this is adopted from the Japanese tea industry perspective, I'm really hoping that they're open -minded to the idea.

this possibility for innovation.

Zongjun (36:07)
Yeah, well, we will see. It's a very traditional industry and so are a lot of other things from Japan, but we will see.

Ryan Ahn (36:18)
We'll see.

Zongjun (36:19)
the machine is coming up. We will be able to see the first prototype in, I think, one and a half week, depending on the timeline of the components. But yeah, super exciting.

Ryan Ahn (36:28)
Super exciting!

Yeah, so we've been working with the firm the past couple of months that specializes in producing like a lot of coffee gear and equipment They were the perfect partner to do the mechanical design work for this mill. And all the parts are either being one -off manufactured or 3D printed right now. And we're super excited to start building together and to see it firsthand.

Zongjun (37:00)
Yeah, and we also have a separate vendor for the Millstone, which is going to be very cool to see how its capacity in real action. It's made out of ceramic, and it's very different material from traditional Ishi Usu.

Ryan Ahn (37:23)
Yeah, but we kept a very traditional design. And a huge shout out to Marc from Ooika who we went to go visit in New Jersey, who gave us tons of design feedback on our initial millstone designs and kind of taught us a little bit more about the theory behind that. Which we're really hoping will shorten the development cycle to bring these things to life. That was very helpful.

Zongjun (37:48)
Yeah.

Turns out there's a lot of science in millstone design. Although it hasn't really gone through a lot of innovations, but it's so complex. The pattern, the groove pattern, the concavity, all matter into the final shape of the matcha powder.

Ryan Ahn (38:08)
And

this information is very difficult to access. Like you cannot find it on the English speaking internet very easily. At least not until Marc started doing content about it. Like very few people. And Jared from Jaga Silk in British Columbia, he also does a lot of work. And I've talked to him and he's been super helpful as well. So we're a small but growing community of English speaking, matcha milling people.

And it's very exciting to see that everyone is really interested in just growing the size of the pie rather than competing with each other. It's a really cool industry to see, because we've worked in other industries where it's definitely not the case.

Zongjun (38:53)
Yes, yeah.

Ryan Ahn (38:54)
where there's a

lot more one -up -upsmanship.

Zongjun (38:57)
Yeah, much more antagonistic. But I guess this is really a tea culture kind of environment. It's not just Japanese tea, but also Korean tea, Chinese tea. It's about sharing. It's about better tasting tea. It's about the happiness that tea and companionship that gives people.

Ryan Ahn (39:24)
Yeah, most serious tea people don't necessarily even do things for the money. They do it out of passion, and that clearly shows in our industry.

Zongjun (39:34)
That's right. Well, I guess it's it is really lifestyle driven that we are founding this company, Ryan.

Ryan Ahn (39:42)
Tea is

life.

Zongjun (39:43)
to use life.

Ryan Ahn (39:44)
So I guess along the way, we'll share more startup stories and more stories about manufacturing things in China or even difficulties that we have, challenges, and share them very openly.

thanks for listening.

Zongjun (40:00)
See you in the next episode.

Ryan Ahn (40:01)
See you.