Interview with Match Product Developer Pat Penny

 

 

Ryan Ahn (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my cohost Zongjun

Zongjun (00:05)
Hello, hello.

Ryan Ahn (00:06)
And we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha products.

Zongjun (00:09)
Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we are going to have our first ever guest to the podcast.

Ryan Ahn (00:19)
we're thrilled to welcome our friend, Pat Penny. So Pat is a food scientist by training and works on product development in Seattle and has also worked on matcha product development. He is one of the founding members of the Tea Institute at Penn State and also a student of a Omotesenke Chanoyu. Actually, my very first lesson of traditional Japanese tea ceremony, Omotesenke, was with Pat. Pat.

has traveled to Japan countless times, both professionally and personally, visiting tea farms, getting to visit lesser known Japanese tea ceremony schools, and getting to meet grand masters of pottery, including Raku pottery. He's also lived in Japan for two years after graduating Penn State where he taught English as part of the JET program. On a more personal note, Pat is a great friend and an early tea mentor of mine where we first met at Penn State over tencha years ago.

So welcome, Pat.

Pat P (01:15)
Hey, thank you guys for having me. And wow, thank you for the illustrious intro. I feel like, whoo, made me feel so special. Thank you. I did forget those early day, a Omotesenke lessons, Ryan. Now that I'm thinking about it, like I can remember, you know, my legs going numb with you together. That, you know, that's some really early trauma bonding right there.

Zongjun (01:16)
Welcome, welcome.

Hahaha!

Ryan Ahn (01:34)
Ha!

yeah. I don't know who decided the schedule, but for some reason those lessons were always like at 9 a ⁓ on Saturday and Sunday mornings, which made it extra special.

Pat P (01:47)
Yeah, especially as like a college student, right? Like we all, you know, went to bed at 8 a on Friday night to really get ready for that 9 a Chanoyu lesson. I think that was just the absolute worst setup ever, yeah.

Ryan Ahn (01:55)
Exactly.

Zongjun (02:00)
Wow, I guess I missed some fun good old days.

Pat P (02:06)
You

missed some serious suffering, but you know, we had nice bowls of matcha, we learned. Ryan, I don't know how much better have you gotten at Chanoyu since then, but I can't say that I've gotten that much better.

Ryan Ahn (02:17)
no, no, definitely very much a novice.

Pat P (02:20)
Yeah, you know, I've drank many bowls of matcha since, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, but yeah, it's really interesting. I think personally, like as a tea person, I've always been interested in the connoisseurship of the product. And even though I really respect, you know, a lot of the culture surrounding tea ceremony, you know, on the Japanese side, as well as the Chinese side, it's been one of those things that's always been really difficult for me to get into. Every now and then I get a little bit of a bug, like let me try and get back into.

Japanese tea ceremony and I'll stick my toes back in the water for a little while and I still have trouble sticking with it even after all these years, but maybe one day.

Ryan Ahn (02:55)
I feel the same way. I get intermittent spouts of motivation to want to continue my lessons, but it's a big commitment.

Pat P (03:05)
cats are now trying to join the podcast.

Ryan Ahn (03:08)
Welcome to the party!

Zongjun (03:09)
Future guests.

Pat P (03:10)
are tea experts, I will say that. They've sat with me for many tea sessions.

Ryan Ahn (03:15)
Yeah

so Pat, could you tell us a little bit about your tea journey and sort of origin story about, your experiences in tea and in matcha and like matcha is a specialty product as well.

Hello, Ryan from the future. Part of this conversation gets a little technical so we wanted to define a few terms:

Organoleptic: the perceived flavors in a product

RTD: Ready to drink so like those plastic bottles of ready to drink green tea you can just consume it you don't have to brew it 

Gongfu cha: traditional Chinese tea ceremony

Omotesenke: one of the primary schools of Japanese Tea Ceremony

 

Pat P (04:00)
Yeah, most definitely. So I think kind of my earliest forays into tea were really as a child. So my grandma, you know, lived in Manhattan for all my life and I would go, you know, visit my grandma in Manhattan on the weekends. And, you know, she was a very cultured person. She had traveled a lot. She had been to China multiple times. And so I really got exposed to tea through her. We would go into Chinatown to go, you know,

at some good dim sums, some restaurants, or explore some shops. And I remember going to a lot of shops and seeing like the really large tins of tea with, you know, various writing that I could not read at the time. Proud that now I could definitely read it if it's a tea name. I feel pretty confident about that. But, you know, I'd see those tins of tea, I'd see all the teaware. And I was just fascinated by it. I really don't know what exactly drew me in, but I think I just saw all of it. And...

I got to drink, not gongfu, but I got to try teas at some of these medicine and tea specialty shops in Chinatown. And it just got me really interested in the flavor. And so I remember being in sixth and seventh grade and buying tea in Chinatown and buying a pretty crappy ceramic teapot and bringing it home and just brewing up really probably terrible tea, just probably throwing boiling water over low grade jasmine tea and...

just loving it though, just drinking it to death. And I probably didn't learn too much about tea after that for a while. I just continued to enjoy it as a beverage. But then I think like, definitely like you Ryan and Zongjun, maybe not so sure about you since you obviously have a very different background. But when I got to Penn State was when I really learned that next deeper step into what tea could be. So always loved it as a beverage, but never.

really learned more about it until I found a group of people who were like -minded and wanted to learn more. From there, Ryan, you know a lot of my tea story, but for the audience, I had helped to develop the Tea Institute at Penn State. When I joined, it was just a Chinese tea ceremony club, but then I was one of the first members of the Tea Institute and helped to...

turned the Institute into what it was. So I was one of the first researching members who was doing some research through our food science and agricultural college at Penn State. So I had done some research on Taiwanese oolongs, different roasting parameters, and how it affects both polyphenol levels, but then tying that into some sensory data too. So trying to see if the presence of polyphenols has any effect on sense organoleptic liking, or if it's totally separate from it. So.

Did some awesome research there. I got the opportunity to travel to Taiwan, Japan, Korea through the Tea Institute at Penn State, you know, meet many of the same tea mentors that you, Ryan and Zongjun got to study with. But, you know, it was really my gateway into traveling, into learning about other cultures, and to learning more about tea. And after I had graduated from Penn State,

I had the chance, as Ryan mentioned, to live in Japan for two years where I got to continue studying tea, but also living in a tea culture and traveling to many different tea pottery sites, which was amazing. And then coming back from Japan, I started to work in product development, which is where I got to kind of develop a different appreciation and lens for commodity tea products and learn things that were quite outside the realm of what I had learned in the specialty tea.

you know, as a hobby, but also as an industry. So, I feel like I've had a really good chance, you know, in the last tencha years, cause wow, holy crap, I graduated tencha years ago. ⁓ I had a good chance to really just round out my understanding of tea as a product. you know, as a, as something that consumers like and not just as something that us specialty hobbyists like, but you know, what is tea for the masses? So, I feel like I've had a small chance to do it all and I'm excited to, you know, continue doing it for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. The tea journey never stops.

Ryan Ahn (08:02)
so based on your experience living and working in Japan, what's your perception of how the average Japanese person views matcha? I feel like in the West, when we talk about matcha, matcha culture, a lot of people think that it exists in Japan in this very rich way, this very traditional way. It touches a lot of Japanese consumers. In my experience working there, I've never lived there, I feel like...

Actually, a lot of Japanese people don't know a lot about matcha culture, especially younger people or people of working age. And when you start asking them about matcha, they're like, yeah, yeah, it's very traditional. I don't really know anything about it. And it's kind of put on this pedestal and you either know something about it or, you know, it's not as approachable even within Japanese culture. So like a correct perception or what was your lived experience there?

Pat P (08:55)
Yeah, I feel like you kind of hit the nail on the head. So obviously your time traveling there led you to some pretty deep insights, I think. But I would say, you know, I, so I taught while I was living in Japan. So I came into contact with people of all ages. You know, I was teaching elementary school, junior high school. The people who I was working with were between my age and probably in their sixties and seventies. So I think I had a good.

chance to talk to lots of different people of different backgrounds. And I would always talk about tea, because that's what I'm passionate about. And so at some point it would come up. And usually, when I'm doing school lessons, or if I'm meeting people for the first time and I'm the token foreigner, you give a self -introduction. And I would always say, my hobby is tea. And so polite Japanese conversation, if someone has an awkward silent moment with me, at some point they'd ask me, how did you get into tea? Or why do you like tea? This or that.

And of course I try and turn it into a conversation. And so I would ask them, you know, do you like tea? What, do you know anything about tea? Do you study tea? And invariably the answer was like, ⁓ I like, you know, matcha lattes or I enjoy matcha soft serve ice cream. But very rarely did I run into people who actually study tea in any way, shape or form. And I think the parallel I kind of drew was that actually it was very similar to the West, right? In the U S where.

You know, I think, Ryan you might've said this before in a different podcast, but once you know, you know, a little bit about tea, you know, more than 90 % or 95 % of the population. And that, that felt like it held true in Japan. So, I don't think the average Japanese consumer really knows how much it is made, how it's cultivated, what makes it different than any other green tea besides maybe the format. so I never really got the inkling that.

people were particularly interested in it. I think it was just, it was certainly put on a pedestal as something that was traditional and important because it was traditional and in many ways important because it was Japanese and we were in Japan. And so there's a level of national pride, you know, to the product. But, you know, when I did meet tea people, you know, I think they knew a lot about their own products and they knew a lot about matcha, but the average layman,

I don't think knows any more about matcha than your average person in America knows about black tea. That was my perception.

Ryan Ahn (11:20)
So it was really no one's morning cup of coffee, like equivalent to what we have in the West. Like maybe for some people, but...

Pat P (11:27)
No!

No, when I would go into school, you know, in the morning, everyone would have some kind of like fukamushi sencha or sencha of some sort on their desk. And usually there was a person who was a tea lady, didn't need to be actually a lady. But often it was an administrative assistant who made tea for everyone in the morning in a giant pot. It was some kind of dirt cheap shizuoka, you know, real value tea.

Zongjun (11:54)
Hahaha.

Pat P (11:57)
It gave me a headache and so I didn't drink it, which often led to questions of like, I thought you liked tea. But everyone did seem to drink tea in the morning, but I think it was very much similar to the way that in the 90s and 2000s everyone drank Folger's coffee in the morning. I don't think it was a beverage that they think about, and certainly matcha isn't what showed up, but.

Ryan Ahn (12:01)
Hahaha!

Zongjun (12:01)
Hahaha.

Ha ha ha.

Pat P (12:21)
Green tea would show up in the morning and people would drink it but it was just another hot beverage and Maybe it gave them a little energy, but I don't think they thought much beyond

Zongjun (12:28)
You know, it's really similar to what the status of Chinese tea in China is as well. You know, like it's, it's, there's some sort of national pride, some sort of cultural recognition, but it's just so ubiquitous that, you know, it's almost just like, drinking water for people on daily basis. You drink it for dinner, you drink it for breakfast, you drink it for, you know, any kind of situation that people just do not find such a...

like a personal interest into this kind of things on a daily basis.

Pat P (13:03)
Yeah, I feel like the average consumer beyond a matcha latte maybe comes into matcha only through RTD products or dessert products. I don't feel like even though a lot of Japanese from what I've seen and experienced at least really drink a lot of straight matcha. Like if you're not practicing tea ceremony, you're probably not sitting down to a bowl of usucha. You certainly have probably never experienced koicha. But you know, your experience of matcha is probably like, this is the...

RTD product that I get out of the vending machine or from the 7 -Eleven, and that's my experience of Matcha.

Zongjun (13:36)
Pat, I have a question actually. Do people have some kind of association with some age or a cultural identity to someone that consumes matcha in Japan that is Japanese for other people? Because in China, if you say you drink tea every day and you do Lao Ren Cha, the very term of Lao Ren Cha means elder's tea. There's a very...

Pat P (14:02)
for people.

Zongjun (14:03)
Yeah, very, very strong age label towards that kind of a practice.

Pat P (14:10)
Yeah, that's a really good question. I wouldn't say that I noticed for tea enthusiasts, a really specific group of people, whether that be age, gender, or anything of the sort. I do think when you talk about tea and you're living in Japan and you're a foreigner, most people do find some other foreigner to reference that's involved in tea.

So like when I was living in Japan, there's a few other Westerners, not usually Americans, but some Europeans who were famous for writing some tea books in both English and Japanese. And then you can find these books. I'm not going to promote them on your podcast or talk about them, but you know, they're bilingual Japanese and English tea books. And so anytime I would mention like, I like tea and someone knew a little bit about tea, a Japanese person, they would often point me to this other foreigner who writes about tea.

So that was the only experience I really had of someone associating tea with a specific group of people. They're like, you're white, here's another white guy who wrote about tea, let's talk about him. So that was my experience.

Zongjun (15:07)
Maybe

you guys can become friends.

Pat P (15:13)
Yeah, you know, I mean, it was definitely all done with the best of intentions, but yeah, it was pretty funny.

Ryan Ahn (15:20)
So Pat, one of the things we've been talking about on the podcast is like, what is matcha? From a consumer perception definition, from a legal definition, from an industry definition. So how would you best answer the question of how do you even classify and define what makes matcha matcha?

Pat P (15:40)
Such a good question, because I think we are industry people, and so we have a certain perception of what we think matcha is. But if I were to take a step back and just try and put myself in the feet of the consumers, I think they just think of it as maybe Japanese. I'm not even sure that all consumers think of it as Japanese, but green tea that's in powder form. I don't think that the average consumer knows anything about shaded cultivation. I don't think they know anything about deveining.

I don't think they know anything about the milling process or what kind of mill, right? Like an Ishi -usu or whatever is used. And in fact, I think most consumers' perception, at least in the West, is detached from tea ceremony. So they don't even think about taking a chasan and then a bowl. They just kind of see it as another product that can end up in a milky beverage or a sweet. When I personally think of matcha, my kind of...

definition of it and one of the working definitions in the industry, but certainly not the only one, is, you know, a shade cultivated green tea from Japan that is milled by a stone mill, at least for the higher quality product. And often you do see some micron number associated with it when you're in kind of the, I think more R &D or...

quality side of you know tea and so often you'll see numbers thrown out like you know below tencha micron I've certainly had many amazing matcha products that are above tencha micron but I have seen that number thrown out I think it's a little arbitrary but you you will get as fine as that in some people's definition of what matcha can be

I'd be interested in what your guys' thoughts are on how you define matcha as people who are kind of trying to work on what the next evolution of matcha milling could be.

Ryan Ahn (17:27)
Yeah, it's a whole can of worms because you have consumer perception, which is very different than industry. And then you have the questionable, like legal definitions, which there aren't really any. I think there's some rules in Japan around what can be labeled and sold as matcha, but it's really a mess of a system where you have all of these overlapping interpretations that overlap a little bit, but not completely.

I think the word matcha to most educated consumers' mind should be a product that is Japanese,

perceive any powdered green tea, they would call matcha. I don't know if we call Chinese origin matcha , Mo Cha, which is the Chinese word for it.

I think that I don't know if that would be more or less confusing to consumers and would help or hinder the category as a whole. Because maybe matcha could be a more umbrella term like wine, which can be grown anywhere, or it should be more regional specific. And yeah, I don't know. It's hard to say.

Pat P (18:28)
Yeah.

Yeah, it

is super confusing. Yeah, it is because like you were saying, you know, you have Mo cha, right, for Chinese ground tea of any sort. You know, from Korea, Korea does have a tea practice. There is a whisking portion to their tea practice. no, not the predominant form that you'll see. And they have Malcha, right, which is the Korean equivalent of matcha.

Ryan Ahn (18:54)
Hmm.

Pat P (18:55)
And certainly, I think if you threw those names out there, it would probably be so confusing for Western consumers, like just thinking about Americans, if they saw three similar products in the market with those three different names, and they kind of all start with an and all end with an A. But I bet you you'd have so many people who are like, what is the difference between this? I the other day just saw on a website, I won't call out who they were, but something labeled as black matcha. And it turns out it's hojicha, powdered hojicha.

And I just thought to myself like, you know, I could see where that might be an easy step for consumers mentally to go like, I know matcha and I know it's green and this is roasted, but it's kind of like matcha. But I thought to myself as like at least someone who really enjoys tea, right? Like it feels so deceiving, right? Cause it is quite a different product. It goes through very different processing. It has a very different end flavor, but the format is the same. And so you have to ask yourself like,

Ryan Ahn (19:23)
⁓

Zongjun (19:23)
⁓

Pat P (19:51)
Is it more helpful to consumers or more harmful to consumers to try and tie these kind of products together? So it is really interesting when you do have this lack of legal definition, what it ends up coming onto the market, right?

Zongjun (20:05)
Yeah, but I think, you know, like by the end of the day, the very word matcha is a Japanese term, like it's from the Japanese language. I think, you know, it might not be necessarily beneficial, like, you know, to kind of bastardize the term into other region or other culture. It's like calling a cava like Spanish champagne.

Ryan Ahn (20:05)
Yeah.

Zongjun (20:31)
I don't think that would be overall beneficial to all the products coming from those regions.

Pat P (20:39)
I think that's a great parallel to draw and it leads me to a question for you two. Have you had products that were high quality that were produced like a matcha coming from outside of Japan, so Korea or China? I've had a few opportunities to try some matcha like products from other countries and just wonder what your guys thoughts have been on them.

Ryan Ahn (20:58)
Yeah. So we have tasted a few Chinese ones on the lower end and are not that impressed, but we've actually recently ordered a bunch of samples and are trying to get in contact with some producers in China. And we're, it's very interesting because a lot of the Chinese tencha shop production, which is the precursor to matcha, they're using identical cultivars. And we, we learned that Yabukita, which is the primary Japanese tea growing cultivar.

was legally brought into China in like the 1970s. There's actually a really long history of Yabukita cultivation in mainland China. And they have even some of the higher end Japanese cultivars, ranging from Asahi, Samidori, Okumidori, that are all being shade grown, processed on similar equipment. They're importing Ishi -usu, Japanese millstones. It's the processing and cultivars are...

very, very similar. All those nature and nurture components, the only thing that's different is the country. And even the climates are not that drastically different for the regions where they're growing this stuff. So it's, you know, we've anecdotally heard that it is producing very similar results. And we've also anecdotally heard that there's a lot of exportation of Chinese Tensha into Japan to be finished processing and some...

questionable labeling decisions.

Pat P (22:20)
not be surprised.

Yeah, I mean a lot of those machines like you were saying right a lot of the processing and all that is the same a lot of the machines in Chinese factories for matcha type tea production are Japanese machines So it really is You know aside from being in a different location It is almost the exact same product and process just displaced to another location But you said you tried some products on the lower end. Did you find anything on the higher end that you enjoyed?

Ryan Ahn (22:47)
Not that we've tasted yet, but we're early in our consumer journey there, and our research journey. How about you?

Pat P (22:49)
Okay.

Okay, I promise you

that it's out there. Yes, it's out there. There's some good Chinese matcha. It does take a lot of hunting and it is, I would say that the value is there for it. So the price point is, you're not gonna save an amazing amount of money, but it is a slightly better price point, but it does take a lot of work to find it.

On the Korean side, I've had some really great Korean matcha, but that's another one where the juice might not be worth the squeeze. I think on the Chinese side, it's worth it once you find it. But on the Korean side, it's a lot of work to find a product that's of similar caliber to high quality Japanese matcha, and it's much more expensive, so probably not worth it.

Ryan Ahn (23:35)
Do you know if they use Japanese cultivars?

Zongjun (23:36)
Interesting.

Pat P (23:38)
in Korea.

Ryan Ahn (23:39)
Yeah.

Pat P (23:40)
So of the facilities that I've been to in the factories and plants that I've been to I have seen Both Japanese cultivars that have been legally imported similar to what you were saying. So like I did see Yabukita I've seen Gokou I've seen Asahi Those are the three I can remember for sure off the top of my head that I have seen in Korea I didn't see those in traditional Korean cultivation areas like Hadong

Jirisan area, I saw those in Jeju. So I'm not sure how prevalent they are outside of Jeju. But in addition to that, there were Korean native cultivars, or sorry, create Korean native varietals, but then also cultivars that were purposely developed to be made into matcha. But then other fascinating cultivars as well in Korea that are made for like specifically skincare products and things like that. So.

The Korean tea industry is very advanced and very interesting, albeit extremely small.

Ryan Ahn (24:38)
Interesting.

Zongjun (24:38)
Interesting. It might be cool to see in the future, like in China, people would repurpose some of the Chinese green tea cultivar into, you know, making matcha.

Pat P (24:50)
Yeah, I mean, for sure in China, I'm sure there's already tea that's being repurposed for lots of other things like, you know, food and beauty products and all that. So I think one day you'll certainly if if the way the industry moves is closer and closer towards single cultivar, which is what it seemed to be doing for the high quality, you know, connoisseur market, I would not be surprised if one day, you know, China wants to have a Chinese.

matcha, right, that speaks to their own territory, their own cultivars. So I think you'll see it one day, or it might be a bit of a revivalist, you know, production where they try and find, some old varietal that was used for mocha, right, in the Song dynasty and try to recreate that or something. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of marketing around it like...

Zongjun (25:30)
Yeah.

Yeah, because right now, if you are using Japanese cultivar, Japanese equipment, Japanese processing method and growing method, it's really matcha. It's not motcha. It's matcha growing in China, basically, and be made in China.

Pat P (25:49)
Yeah, just different export tariffs. That's about it.

Zongjun (25:53)
Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (25:54)
So Pat, you've been into matcha as a consumer for much longer than I have, probably by like three or four years. So going back into the really early 2010s, maybe even earlier, how have you seen that evolve? Like you've been in and out of New York City all that time. Like how have you seen, like we, in very recent years, seen the rise of single origin, single cultivar, single estate, matcha. It feels like a very new phenomenon.

Like how has that transformation happened by your perception?

Pat P (26:28)
Yeah. So I think you pretty hit it hit it pretty accurately. I really only got exposed to matcha through Japanese tea ceremony and that started at the Tea Institute. So I never heard of matcha or had it before 2010 actually. So I only got a little head start on you Ryan. But I will say you know over the last 14 years between being in you know the northeastern United States living in Japan and then kind of coming back.

It was interesting to see how prevalent matcha was and how much it grew, I think, in the time that I was gone and came back to the U .S. So I certainly as a tea consumer noticed when I went to cafes, you know, prior to moving to Japan, when I was in the U .S., like in Pennsylvania, New York, I would notice when matcha was on the menu and if there was actually something unique or special going on with the matcha, like if I saw in the front of the store in a lobby.

for a cafe that they were selling, right? Individual tins of a single cultivar matcha. That was something that I'd like definitely noticed and it was relatively rare. And then, you know, living in Japan and coming back to the US, I felt like in that two year period, it felt like matcha had a, certainly had a boom. And I felt like every good cafe I went to, you know, had a source of single origin matcha. It wasn't just kind of one of the...

large Japanese companies that we're all kind of familiar with, but it was something special or something kind of small. And it looked like a lot of what I saw from cafes was that they were promoting either the small farmer or single cultivar product. I would say what I've noticed in the last couple of years, probably the last five years, is that it just seems more and more ubiquitous. And I don't know that it's specifically the high -end product that I've seen as more ubiquitous, but just matcha as a whole.

so I definitely feel like I saw that, that third wave moment where you really started to see the high end matcha products pop up. But then I feel like it almost felt like it got drowned out by just a massive wave of matcha and everywhere you go now. I don't, I don't care if it's, you know, mom and pop shop or a large chain. I feel like you can find multiple variations of some kind of matcha beverage. It's the same matcha product, right? But, multiple variations of matcha beverages on every cafe menu and.

in every supermarket. So it's just become so much more massively popular. I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of years that popularity starts to kind of converge on once again, high quality matcha. I think the setting is right. I think the consumer is interested. I think it's just really time for companies who are interested in promoting single cultivar or higher quality matcha.

It's time for them to find their angle, right, and to get it out onto the market.

Ryan Ahn (29:12)
Makes sense. And a lot of that's being driven by forces at the farm level and sort of the middleman layer of tencha and matcha of these like blending houses, right? Like it used to be that a lot of this tencha just didn't get finished as single cultivar products and then just got moved into some blend. But like now is it just that farmers have more and more power?

because these Western markets want single origin, single cultivar products, and they're finishing more and more of their products that way. And it's removing power from those big intermediary blending houses, which buy a bunch of tencha from a bunch of farms and use it to create products. How is that trickling down at the farm level? And how is the supply chain adapting to this new demand as you see it?

Pat P (30:04)
Yeah, yeah, I think from at least the experience that I've had, it's really on a farmer to farmer basis. I think you have some farmers who find their avenue or access into the Western market. And these are farmers who are very passionate about their product, right? They have something special. And so they are sought out for this reason. But I think you have farmers who have seen that through, you know,

providing their product direct to consumer. Not only do they foster greater communication with who it is that's going to ultimately consume their product, but I think they have more control over their product and they can kind of bring into the world the product that they want their matcha to be, that they want their tencha to become. Whereas I think the large blending houses and the large finishing houses, they have a purpose.

And they still exist and they're still putting out ton of product. you know, there's always going to be a market for them, whether it's RTD product or whether it's like culinary grade product. but I think just the, the internet, right. And access direct access to consumers, has really just opened up a whole new world for specialty matcha. and I think we're just seeing year over year, more and more people putting their hat into the ring, more farmers seeing as a viable option. and, and it's great because.

in Japan, I think over the last about tencha years, particularly for tea farming, a lot of farmers have not really known what their succession plan is going to be. So a lot of them, you know, were producing Tencha, selling to some kind of intermediary, whether it was a holding company or directly to a blending house. And they thought they were going to just kind of keep doing that. And one day, whether they have an heir or they don't, no one was probably going to take over their farm. And

Ryan Ahn (31:34)
Hmm.

Pat P (31:53)
You know, they were, from what I understand, farmers, you know, it's a difficult living. They're not making tons of money as Tencha farmers. But through having direct access to consumers, the not farming industry, but being a producer of Tencha or Matcha is a little more attractive to younger farmers because they see this route of e -commerce. And I think that that...

has started to revive the industry a little bit because they can see, like younger producers can see an avenue for them to kind of develop their life and develop their product beyond what their successors have done.

Ryan Ahn (32:31)
Yeah, that makes sense. It's really interesting. You're starting to see all these Tencha farmers, even on Instagram. I was doing a bunch of research a year ago and one of the major farmers, Tsuji -san, I think who I believe is is most awarded tea producer in Japan. I took a screenshot of his account when I was really first researching this stuff and I think he had 5 ,000 followers last year. And I checked yesterday, he's 10 thousand

So like what happens when you yeah, it doubled. Like you have this whole ecosystem of these rockstar Tencha producers that have direct access to these consumers. Like what does that mean for matcha brands? What does that mean for these large middleman companies? It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Pat P (33:01)

Yeah, and I mean, his products are pretty readily available through the West, you know, via vendors like OIKA and some others. So yeah, it's pretty amazing how the internet, right, can kind of democratize people who are at the top of their game. You know, you can become a rock star in whatever industry you're in, as long as you have a good Instagram.

Zongjun (33:36)
Yeah, that's so true. You know, you kind of see a vertical integration of producers and manufacturers and also farmers in some of the other industry that have went through similar kind of a specialty movement with like, for example, in China, like for the wine industry and the coffee industry, you start seeing a lot of young people, you know, not only you just trying to build a new brand,

but also really trying to cultivate their own farm, like really understand how their product is being made from end to end. And that actually brought a lot of new generation into like what used to be very tedious job that no one wants to do, like harvesting coffee cherries or harvesting grapes, growing grapes. That's all very interesting.

Pat P (34:26)
Yeah, now if only TikTok was, or sorry, Instagram was half as good as TikTok as an e -commerce program or platform, these Japanese farmers would be totally set.

Zongjun (34:35)
Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (34:35)
Yeah.

What's that song? Like radio killed or?

Movies killed the radio star. Video killed the radio star. I feel like that rings true here.

Pat P (34:39)
Yes, video killed the radio star. Yeah, video killed the radio star, yeah.

Ryan Ahn (34:46)
So Pat, you have a food science background. You know a ton about food freshness, chemistry, biology, all of these different food processes. One of the things that we're working on is the ability to mill matcha fresh. How would you put that in importance to milling coffee fresh? Is it as important? Do you think it's not as important? Because you see coffee being milled fresh ground everywhere. Even if you go to a random

cafeteria in a hospital, they'll have a coffee grinder that's, you know, grinding coffee fresh. And it just doesn't, it seems like an infrastructure problem in matcha, but from a food science perspective, how important do you see that problem?

Pat P (35:26)
I think it's super critical. So anything you can do to bring that last processing step, you know, like so grinding and coffee, but mailing in matcha, anything you can do to bring that closer to the actual phase when you incorporate the product, whisking or brewing, that that's going to make the product, you know, fresher and the organoleptic experience better. You know, matcha is such a delicate product, extremely delicate.

You're talking about something that is so fine, right, in micron. You know, for most matcha powder, you've got some kind of particle size distribution between, you know, let's say three to four micron up to about 20, 25 micron, depending on the product. You're going to have that particle oxidize so quickly, you know, once it's been milled.

So anything you can do to reduce the amount of time that it's sitting in a milled state before it's being prepared and consumed is going to make sure that you get the best tasting, the most aromatic and the freshest feeling flavor experience. You know, matcha, not just through oxidation, but through temperature and many other factors is going to degrade into a product that I think we're all pretty familiar with. Like we've all had like old matcha.

Ryan Ahn (36:42)
Yeah.

Pat P (36:44)
And I think, you know, anything you can do that's going to reduce its exposure to high temperatures, reduce its exposure to moisture, reduces exposure to oxygen, is going to give you as a consumer a better experience. And I think it, you know, it has nothing to do with like tea ceremony. It's just as a person who enjoys good tasting products, the fresher your matcha is milled, the more you are going to enjoy the taste of that product. I think thinking about some of the ceremonial aspects, and I'm not talking about Chanoyu, like tea ceremony, but...

thinking about like when you're at home and you take your coffee and you grind it, right? That kind of sets you in the mood to enjoy your coffee. And so for me, like I'll grind my coffee at home. I do a pour over. There's all a little bit of ritual to it. I think, you know, whisking matcha already is so much of a ritual to have the ability to, you know, grind it, right? Or mill it at home, which, you know, I know isn't exactly what you guys are doing. You're looking more, I think, at cafes, but.

to be able to incorporate the milling as part of the ritual of preparing your matcha, beyond just the organoleptic experience, I think would also just help you get into the zone, right, to enjoy the product a little bit more. So I know that's a long way, winded way of answering it, but I mean, freshness is paramount, that's for sure.

Ryan Ahn (37:58)
I was really interested recently because matcha does have such high surface area to volume ratio to do a calculation in a 30 gram can, sort of a standard gram can of matcha, how much surface area is in it, assuming that the particles are spherical, which is not true, and assuming they have a ten micron diameter, which is a little generous, it's a little large. In reality, I think it's probably smaller on average for the really high end stuff. If my calculation is correct,

it's approximately 200 square meters of surface area. So like

2 ,000 square feet?

Pat P (38:34)
It's insane.

It's insane. Yeah, it's insane is what it is, but it's definitely true. I mean, you think about it after the product has been milled at whatever location, somewhere probably in Japan. It's nitrogen flushed, but the minute you open it, I mean, the amount of oxygen exposure, even if you're storing it in the refrigerator, even if you are trying to do everything you can do to pull out air, those particles, I mean, once it's been exposed,

I mean, we've all experienced it. You've definitely got less than a few days before that product changes. And often I think the highest quality matcha tastes totally different the day after you opened it and the next day. I mean, it's like having a different product every day. But the unfortunate thing is it's not in a good way, right? Like, I mean, it really goes downhill so fast.

Ryan Ahn (39:21)
Absolutely.

so to conclude, do you have any questions for us?

Pat P (39:26)
Yeah, when can I get my hand on one of these matcha mills?

Zongjun (39:29)
We're working on it. It's actually a very complex and difficult problem to solve. You need to reduce, first reduce the size of traditional Ishi -Usu into a countertop machine, which eventually you're reducing the grind phase, like how large the millstone is.

And by reducing the size of that, you no longer can utilize gravity as your source of pressure. So there are a lot of things that we need to tweak to be able to mimic that kind of pressure in a smaller surface. And not to mention about grinding matcha in such a small surface can generate a significant amount of temperature, which cannot be just naturally deposited.

like a traditional stone mill. So low temperature grinding in a smaller machine and you still want to maintain a higher output and to reach a similar level of granularity. There's a lot of problem we need to solve right there, but we are working on it.

Pat P (40:37)
Any any exploration into interesting territories you guys doing any wet milling or introduction of like any liquid nitrogen or anything funky?

Ryan Ahn (40:47)
Some of those areas we think have a lot of potential. Actually, both of those would be very interesting. It's like grinding in an oxygen -free environment or seeing wet milling as a viable method. So we're early on in the concept phase of thinking through what that could look like. But keeping this system contained free of oxygen might be a V2 or V3, or maybe a more industrial version of this mill that's

not meant to be lower price point. Because right now we're shooting for about the price of like a very nice coffee grinder at a cafe. So definitely pretty far above what most consumers would probably pay, but still like totally within the realm of what a specialty coffee shop could afford.

Pat P (41:30)
Yeah, I mean, well, I'm excited to see it hit the market. You know, if there's ever a unit that makes its way to the Pacific Northwest, let me know and I'll be one of the first customers at that store to try out the freshly milled matcha. I am interested if you guys are going to continue to explore once you kind of find a viable specialty cafe option going smaller and smaller, would you ever want to get to the level where a home enthusiast would be able to, you know, purchase it and get a similar

quality product as to what you could get at the maybe cafe scale.

Ryan Ahn (42:01)
Absolutely.

Pat P (42:02)
Okay, yeah, easy enough. Sounds like you guys are working on it. So that'll come right after the cafe scale one, right? Just a couple of weeks later.

Ryan Ahn (42:10)
A couple of weeks later, product development happens that fast in China. We'll get our people on it. Right, Sam?

Pat P (42:13)
Yeah, perfect.

Perfect, perfect.

Zongjun (42:19)
Yep.

Pat P (42:20)
I did want to ask you guys one last question. So I'm sure as you've been, you know, working on this, just thinking about, you know, when I'm working on like something specific for tea, or when, you know, I'm traveling in a specific area of China or Taiwan for tea, you know, you start to get obsessed with this one specific product and it really snowballs. So I'm interested, you know, Ryan and Zongjun, both of you as you've started to work on Sanko matcha products.

How have your tea drinking habits changed and particularly, you know your matcha consumption? How has that changed?

Zongjun (42:52)
drastically increased. You know, you got to try it out out of the different cultivars in different regions, which it's quite an education journey. But on daily basis, I'm still pretty much a matcha latte drinker. I recently found sparkling water with matcha being very tasty. But drinking straight matcha still is a little bit too sharp to my stomach, especially in the morning. But...

Ryan seems to be more of a straight matchup drinker than I do.

Ryan Ahn (43:22)
Yeah, no, for me, I'm definitely more purist on the team and just like enjoy straight matcha. I've been experimenting a lot more with brewing parameters and how different dilution ratios affect whisking, the way they affect foam formation, how different temperatures express different flavors. It's wild, actually. If you compare matcha to coffee,

and the flavors that you can bring out in coffee by different brew methods or ratios or over versus under extraction. There's like all these parameters you can play with. In matcha, the flavor variance is pretty similar. The universe of possibilities for flavors, even within one can of matcha, is larger than I realized until I started systematically testing it.

Pat P (44:09)
I mean, that's just applying your, your gong fu background, I think, you know, onto matcha as a product. There's, there's certainly a world of possibilities. ⁓ you know, Ryan, I think it's not surprising that you have, jumped off into the deep end on matcha. Cause I think even in the early days of the, tea Institute, when you were, you know, first joining and studying Chinese tea ceremony, I feel like you are always really into matcha. Like anytime we had fresh matcha around, without a doubt, I would walk in to the tea house.

and you would just be guzzling down like a fresh bowl of matcha. So in some ways, none of this is surprising to me. It's kind of like you've just come full circle on your tea journey.

Ryan Ahn (44:44)
Very true.

Pat P (44:46)
Should we wrap up?

Zongjun (44:47)
Let's go.

Ryan Ahn (44:49)
All right.

So thanks for listening. I think that's all we have time for today. So if you like this episode, please give us five stars or consider sharing this with a friend. And thank you so much, Pat, for joining. It was great having you on. And be on the lookout for new content.

Zongjun (45:05)
Woo!

Pat P (45:06)
Recording stopped.