Matcha Labeling (Part 2) Mistruths in Labeling

 

 

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my co -host, Zongjun Hello. And we're the co -founders behind Sanko Matcha products. Yeah, so we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we're going to talk about...

Matcha Labeling Part 2, Mistruths in Labeling. Yeah. So last time we talked about what even is matcha, what is matcha, how can you define that, and sort of the disagreements people have over even agreeing what can we call this beverage. And the next level deeper that we wanted to go in the series is mistruths in labeling, which is a lot to unpack because...

Who can actually define what is true or not?

It's you know, you have objective truth. You have subjective truth or subjective claims That are end up on the label and then you have all of this middle ground which is where there's a lot of debate or toxicity Where people just are not understanding each other because they're using different language or they're using contradictory language Which we want to unpack a little bit just from the consumer market side perspective and then part three in this series in the next podcast that discusses

is

a blog post is all around, OK, why is labeling so important? And what specifically on the label is actually going to make a difference, most likely, for most people's preferences? Like, how long is it shade grown? The type of cultivar used, different cultivation techniques, and how those may or may not appear on a label.

and how you can start to use those things to make informed decisions to develop preferences. And sort of the single thread through this whole series in matcha labeling is how can you grow yourself? How can you learn to appreciate different flavor characteristics of matcha because they came from a certain cultivar?

or from a certain region, or because it was shaded for a certain number of days, or blended in a particular way, or processed in a particular way, so that you can say, you know what? I have seen this before. I've tasted manchas just like this. This new one that I haven't tried has characteristics A, B, C, and D, and therefore, I think I will like it, which is super important if we have any specialty market. Otherwise, everyone's just shooting in the dark.

Well, Ryan, that's a lot of things to unpack right there. Why don't we start from the very beginning? So like the title of this article is mistruths in matcha. So what is truth? What is mistruth? You know, like how do we clarify that? Or like who has the authority to define all of these? Yeah.

That's a great question. And I guess I'll start it with a story. So both before you and I got into matcha, we were really into Chinese, mainland Chinese and Taiwanese tea. And when you're learning a lot about tea in general, especially loose leaf tea, it tends to get repackaged so many times that you learn very early on in your consumer journey that you cannot trust the label, cannot trust the bag.

Some of the best tea in Taiwan, some like very high mountain, you know, Dai Yuling, 101k road marker that costs, you know, over a dollar a gram might be in a shrink wrapped bag that says China best good tea. I've had more than one examples of that and you're taught very on to be very skeptical and what you learn is that you have to have a chain of trust.

Not only do you have to trust the person you're buying from, you have to trust that they know who they're sourcing it from. Well, whoever they sourced it from is also trustworthy. So it's almost like how I've heard the diamond industry is. It's a relationship really based on trust. In the macho world, it seems less and less like that, especially at the, you know, the traditional companies that have been around for hundreds of years, they're reputable. No one thinks that they're putting what's good.

fake matcha into a can or that anything on their label was not true. But you know with the explosion of matcha 10 -15 years ago, I would say that's less and less the case. When you buy a random matcha powder off of Amazon or at your local grocery store, right, I'm not totally sure I can trust the labels that are on that can. Just from what I've seen within the tea industry because there's no verifiable provenance, especially as tea gets repackaged. It's not like wine.

When

it's bottled on site, right, and it says bottled on site, usually in French, if it's from France for example, very few people are faking that. And if they're faking it, they're going to get into a lot of trouble. Yeah, I mean like it's also very difficult especially for people nowadays to try matcha.

off the shelf from a supermarket because they really don't have enough reference that they can trust to start building on this structure to even understand how this trust can work.

You know, unlike, you know, we were buying Taiwanese tea from these vendors that got sealed into very suspicious packaging, we had the experience, like we were in their studio, we were tasting their tea, and we saw them put those teas into the bag, and if they taste differently,

you know, maybe something else is happening. Or it was like very skillful, the magician works going on right there. But you know, like, there is this very in -person interaction to help you build up the trust in the first place, but that doesn't necessarily could happen easily for people buying matcha. Yeah, especially online, or from, you know, a retailer that doesn't have much knowledge on the topic. Right. So what you start to see are these made up classification systems,

And to some degree they're useful, like there's no regulatory body saying, you know, defining what ceremonial grade is or culinary grade. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like we've been talking down on these terms quite a lot, but it can be quite useful. Yeah, there's still some usage about these terms. Like at the end, it's the intention of how these products are made for.

It's for culinary. It's usually, you know, that's implying that it's not really for you to just add water and drink it. yeah. Yeah. And actually, I think Marc from Ooika put it really well. I think he is my favorite working definition.

of culinary versus ceremonial grade. And he recognizes that there are made up marketing terms, but it's about the intention of the producer. Whoever made a ceremonial grade matcha is saying, this is good enough to be just consumed with water because that's what they do in a tea ceremony. But you don't know where that floor is. For some vendors, and we've had a lot from some vendors, where you definitely don't want to just consume it with water, tastes disgusting.

where, you know, in other cases I've heard that like Tsuji -san's culinary grade matcha is like world -class and can, you can probably make koicha and it would still taste good. cause the standards are so high. Yeah. Different people have different standards and you know, these terms are.

getting very abused use and start to lose their meanings. Yeah, and they get abused and used in ways that people try to differentiate themselves. It's like, imagine you're a brand new matcha company. I don't know.

from New York or from California or from wherever and you decide you want to create a matcha brand and you're actually seeing a lot of this now a lot of these celebrity matcha reviewers on Instagram or on YouTube are starting to open their own brands either white label or they do their own sourcing and they put they have to now create their own labels so like what do you do you're definitely let's say you're sourcing better than almost any other ceremonial grade or half of the ceremony

ceremonial

grades that you've reviewed, like you just start adding words, which is what we've been seeing, which is why you get ultra ceremonial grade, premium ceremonial grade, super ceremonial grade, or worse. And, you know, I don't know what those terms mean. They're literally made up classification systems. It's just better and better, Ryan. It just gets better and better. Maybe it is, but maybe it's not. And as a consumer,

I find myself in a position of being highly skeptical. Yeah, it's either a race to the moon or race to the bottom. Yeah, and that's exactly the problem is it's a race to the bottom if you're calling everything ceremonial grade. People are desperate to get away from this term because if you label yourself ceremonial grade, it is a complete crap shoot right now. You might be getting a fantastic product or you might be getting something that's nearly undrinkable even from brands that look premium. Like, you know, these new brands, they only have made

They

only have a few hundred Instagram followers. But according to everyone who's reviewed their products, it just doesn't live up to the expectation. So I would say all of this is a form of mistruth in labeling. Because people are just adding on words to try to differentiate themselves. But for good reason, because what choice do you have? Yeah, there isn't really a alternative system for people to have a very...

equal starting point to compare against each other? Well, actually, I disagree. We can copy something from the specialty coffee playbook. A lot of these new third wave coffee companies, you know, it started about 20 years ago with companies like Blue Bottle, Intelligencia, Counter Culture.

And then how it was involved into, you know, now hundreds of different regional players that source coffee, rose coffee, and then sell it. You know, what they do is some mixture of education, so explaining why a particular processing is special or why a particular region is special. So like Blue Bottle did a whole series on Yemeni coffee and the port of Mocha and all of that history. And there's this big story about this guy who was able to smuggle green coffee out in the middle of their civil war. And the Blue Bottle

paid crazy prices for it and released it as a special product. That type of education is useful. It's providing people context to appreciate something, allowing them to develop preferences for it, and then they have a product to sell to you. It's a form of demand generation, but a form of demand generation where the consumer walks away with more experiences than when they walked in before.

Now you look at the exact opposite of that, I could say, Zongjun, I have very rare matcha. This can of matcha, it's $2 a gram, it's very rare. Only 10 kilograms a year are produced. You should like it. And I don't tell you much else about it. Or I could talk your ear off, but if you're not ready to contextualize it, you're just going off of my words saying, this is special.

It's like when you walk into a luxury store and you kind of feel like a lesser person, kind of like you don't belong there. Very top -down style, which I feel like is another form of mistruth and labeling, calling something super rare or super authentic. If someone who actually values that thing, let's say it's Hanzu -shaded, Asahi cultivar, really old tree, 35 -day shaded tencha that was fresh -milled into matcha.

If I have to tell you that it's good, you're probably not ready to fully appreciate it for the price you're about to pay.

It's very interesting, Ryan. I guess there are a couple things.

We can unwrap right here, but I guess my original point was that, you know, there isn't necessarily a very well established, you know, quality or grading system that you can, you know, like have, you know, this is level one ceremonial grade. This is level two ceremonial grade. Like, you know, there's some kind of a institution out there. You can just send your match up to, and then they give you a grade and, you know, it sounds more objective. That would be easy. Yeah, that would be easy. Right. Well, but that's, that's not necessarily happening or.

to what degree you can trust such institution. Like a Q grader in coffee. Yeah, or even worse, you see all these rankings for US college or work college. Or like a Parker system in mind. 95 point Parker. Oftentimes pay to win. So it will be very hard to really have a grading system.

that's trustworthy to begin with. So that's why I think that transparent labeling is very important because it's not really trying to...

imply the quality or tell you just like your example about walking into a luxury store or jewelry store. It's not someone that pretend or is actually very knowledgeable about certain topic telling you that something is good or giving you their own preference of a matcha or anything that they think is worth a higher quality. So I think moving forward about really the mystification of

Yeah, just like the coffee industry. Yeah, just like the coffee industry, right? It's really just these sheer facts about the product that's really worth people to talk about. Other than that, everything else is just interpretation of our personal preferences. Yeah. Or, like your story about the Yemeni coffee.

You can also argue that it's some way of storytelling that makes you feel that this coffee is special. But if it's really delicious, it's really up to consumers their own preference.

Even if it's a really good story, it can still be a very bad tasting coffee by the end of the day. Well, what I found in these types of industries, like the specialty markets, really good storytelling is like the ultimate education because inside it, you have embedded a lot of things. You have context to appreciate, but you also have all of these things that end up on a label. So like in data science, we would call this metadata.

everything about that product that's sort of objective. So the altitude, the cultivar, these are all types of different metadata. And you can train machine learning systems off of metadata like that to predict whether or not someone would like or dislike something. They're just different labels that are predictive of flavor, usually, or predictive of preference in some way, which can be done algorithmically for like recommendation -based systems, et cetera. But it can also be done in your own mind.

which is why a label is so important because you need to be fed some type of information to know or have an idea of whether or not you are like a certain thing. But even in what information you have available to you or someone chooses to put on the label also has a lot of very interesting connotations. What they choose to share has a lot of power.

And it's interesting because now you're starting to see basically a lot of people have boxes they need to check. And recently a really prominent matcha social media influencer launched their own brand.

And I was looking at their products. They have two new products. And one of them they give the cultivar. But the other one, they have this long list of where it was from, the fact that it was stone ground, et cetera. And then it said single cultivar. And I kept reading and reading and was looking through the description. And it never said what the cultivar was. What's the point of saying single cultivar if you're not going to even tell anyone what it is? And as you said, right?

Transparent labeling is the way for people to develop preferences because if you don't know what the cultivar is you can't start developing a preference for whatever that cultivar is. yeah, absolutely and also like like to what degree a certain attribute that people decided to share or put on a label matters Like that's that can also be very misleading like sometimes, you know, for example

In scotch, especially the eyelid scotch, there is this notion of PPM, like phenol per million. And it's basically a way to measure how peaty a scotch is. But it doesn't necessarily play a linear relationship with how human...

perceive pityness. The more fennel there is in a scotch, it doesn't necessarily give you a stronger pity notes. It's really just a number. But people tend to use that number as an indication of stronger or more powerful scotch or for higher prices. Yeah. But it doesn't necessarily really relate it to what they want you to think.

This is weird made up, same thing with IBUs in beer. International bitterness units in beer. Going to a lot of new craft breweries, it'll say, this beer is 30 IBUs or 60 IBUs. And it comes from a direct chemical measurement. It's the degree of isomerized alpha acids, which determine that number. And I've been to a bunch of different academic beer conferences, brewing conferences, and turns out it's not predictive of how bitterness anything is at all. It's like really.

poor predictor. Yeah, just like all the other chemicals like indole, when it's in lower quantities smells like rose, when it's in higher quantities smells like humathesis. But you know it's really not a linear relationship with you know like certain flavor notes or even sometimes you know or oftentimes the quality of the product. Yeah.

So like what's really important in transparent labeling is that people put on good predictors of what it's going to end up tasting like. Or even worse, just being super vague about it. Who cares that it's single cultivar? If you don't know what cultivar it is, like what? Yeah, that's just crazy. Like it's a weird type of vanity buzzword soup on a label. Yeah.

So what attributes do you think is important to matcha? Yeah, so it really depends. So roughly how many days it was shades matters. Yeah.

But past a certain level, because of the weather, because of other considerations, you might have to do harvest sooner, harvest later. So that can have an impact. And actually, you'll end up getting better quality if you harvest sooner, if the weather is going to be really crappy later on. So there's all those types of decisions that really need to be made by the farmer. So there's also a lot of nuance to the way that we quantify these things that we think are predictive of quality.

You know, region certainly matters in terroir. So, you know, a region like Uji is generally famous for being very umami forward, where somewhere like Yame is much more roasty, toasty profiles in the way that they process their tencha. And then different cultivars have very different flavor characteristics. I'd say that's an important one.

And one of the biggest missing things that's on a can of matcha is the mill date, to have any idea of when that product is milled and therefore know how fresh it was. Now some companies have a guarantee. We guarantee this was milled within three months. That is a crazy standard. That's really good. That's, I'd say, really at the top. Some are 24 hours. That's crazy, too. Those are people who own Ishii Usus or the hardware to do this. Or it's mailed to you within 24 hours. And then some are 24 hours.

mothers, I've seen six months, but in other cases it's just a big mystery. yeah.

I mean, it's understandable that a lot of these manufacturers or merchants would only put on attributes that they are proud of. If it's harvest in a rainy day, if it's harvest not in the right season, if it's a lesser cultivar that it's just not being commonly liked by people, they probably don't want to put that information on the label.

certainly impact the price, it will definitely affect the margin that they're making if they're being totally honest. So it's complicated. I mean, as a consumer, I definitely want to have those information. It really helps. But as a manufacturer, as a merchant, to what degree you are willing to sacrifice for transparent labeling or for the honesty?

that you provide. And you know, having that type of transparency in the supply chain is very tricky. I mean, a lot of these products are blended. Even so -called single origin cultivars can be, or single origin products, single cultivar products can still be a blend, right? Not necessarily all exactly harvested on the same day or shaded the exact same amount of time. There'll be some very complex supply chain issues, which I think one reason why you, if you do see it, oftentimes you see

ranges,

and then the way those things get tracked throughout the production process. And then a lot of cases and then sold. So whether or not how much of that metadata gets generated in process and carried to the end, we just don't know. It would be very interesting to interview some people that are much further down the matcha supply chain than we are.

I mean, like, as a consumer, I just found that, you know, the, the, the weather of the harvest date really matters about the taste. But, you know, like merchants don't like to, you know, put that on the label. Yeah, it won't be on the label. It won't be on the label. Like it's really in the rare times that you really end up knowing the manufacturer or the farmer, and then they will share you the information and you'll probably end up getting a better deal.

frequently, it's very vague. I mean, with enough experience, you can definitely taste the impact of weather on tea. But like...

That's really because you have the formative knowledge of what is a rainy harvest versus what is a sunny harvest. That you can even have the knowledge to be able to discern that. Yeah. And that's a really interesting point. When was the last time you've heard buying matcha or any form of Japanese green tea that this, whatever you're buying is slightly less optimal? Great base material, everything else is great about it, but something went wrong.

You never hear that. Probably just gets blended out.

which is a wonderful reason why you blend anything, any type of food or beverage product, because you can blend up flaws. But it also gives no one the experience to really learn. And I think maybe even subconsciously, it makes people a little skeptical. If everything that they buy, they're being told is good or a special or is rare or is authentic, and then it just doesn't translate in the cup.

Unless these new matcha companies and vendors and matcha people and consumers start demanding it, we're not going to get these transparent labels that can allow all of our pallets to develop.

So we can form a set of complex preferences. Right. You know, it might be a very good or interesting business idea of opening a bad tea company. Just selling you flaw bad tea as an education material. yeah. Well, it's not even education. Actually, so, you know, we're both really into Chinese Pu -erh from Southwest China. A lot of that tea that was harvested on a rainy day from merchants that we know who are very honest.

It's still really good. There's some real value. I bought a lot of tea that was deeply flawed, some of which was picked on a rainy day, and I still really enjoy it. You can taste past those flaws. And, you know, I probably paid one third less than I would have.

And you're still going to consume it anyway. Someone's going to because it's going to be blended in or they're going to ignore that piece of information. This may be why, not just rainy Day, but there's other flaws and defects that can happen. Which one reason why matcha has variable quality. One of the many different reasons actually.

But I love the idea, you know, when we start sourcing tencha and have a mill to mill matcha fresh, having defect batches could be really interesting. So people can start tasting it for themselves. I guess the trick will be to convince Japanese farmers to let that out into the world versus having it being hidden behind the blend. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it is certainly be interesting education journey. I'm curious too. Yeah. So we've talked a lot about the perspective of a matcha consumer, someone who's trying to develop their preferences and their palette and their ability to buy matcha at a very good value. But let's flip it a little bit. What if we're a new matcha company starting a new brand and we want to, we we're now in the position of creating

label. How do we define what truth is and what is the purpose of a label? I mean like to have a transparent label to begin with, to start building up this system with the information that you're willing to share, you are essentially trying to set up your credibility to in front of the consumers.

you are telling them what exactly is going on in this sealed can. That you can't see. That you can't see. They certainly cannot, not only they cannot see what's inside the can, they cannot see what's going on before those matcha gets canned into the package.

But you are setting up this entire system trying to tell your consumer what's going on right there and trying to establish their knowledge system to be able to essentially understand the quality of matcha or understand the things that they are end up buying, paying cash.

And it's exceptionally important because you are not necessarily making decisions for them. You are offering all these information for them to make decisions themselves. Yeah. Well, you're probably trying to get them to buy your product. You're trying to sell something. Yeah. And what's interesting is that matcha knowledge is so scattered at the moment. You have people who know a ton and have really complex preferences for certain things. And there's people who are just entering the category.

Yeah, there's a very very drastic information or knowledge discrepancy in the industry right now. People can easily probably upsell mediocre quality matcha to beginners or people who just get into matcha or start liking matcha very easily because there is such a large information discrepancy. And there are so much varieties and diversities in matcha that there are

a

lot of quote -unquote stories to tell. yeah and everyone has very similar marketing. It's the same stories, wabi -sabi, ichigo -ichie, one moment one time, all the Japanese philosophical, wake -se -jaku, all the things that you learn in tea ceremony that get wrapped in this. Until you've learned the references, you're very vulnerable to this type of marketing. Yeah or like even you know some people start talking about some very obscure culture

of ours, a very obscure tea production region, you know, that are, you know, not necessarily really high quality, but it's just rare, but, you know, upcharge people for a higher price.

I think, you know, like it really this kind of thing would really only happen right now because there's such a large information discrepancy. And we're starting to see, you know, people do different types of labeling. There's a new matcha brand that has also a new type of classification. You know, as much as we hate these classification systems, it's stone milled usacha grade.

And it actually, actually needs a pretty good classification system. As you said, they're saying that, you know, it's not on a ball mill. It's good enough for usucha, which is thin tea. So it's good enough to be just, you know, lightly prepared with water, usually around 60 grams of water, 20, two grams of tea. And...

The implicit message is that it's not quite good enough for koicha, which is thick tea, which is where you double the amount of tea to four grams and you cut the water in half to 30 grams and kind of form this paste that you can drink.

And that's how the really traditional matcha companies designate their products. They say, suitable for usucha, for thin tea, suitable for koicha. So even a new company that's targeting English -speaking consumers with stone ground usucha grade, they're advertising to someone who at least knows what usucha is, most likely. It's not the world's most intuitive word either. People who are just starting their journey probably don't know what usucha is.

Yeah, but it certainly points people a direction to what to search for, what to look for. Yeah, so it's a really nice nudge actually. Yeah, yeah. It's better than super ultra premium ceremonial grade It's just trying to cast way too wide a net. It makes people very skeptical who actually know what good matcha is. And you know...

even consumers that don't know much a lot about matcha, they're not stupid, right? The more superlatives you put on, like it raises some alarm bells. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, like how long would this information discrepancy last is also very, you know, questionable, right? Like you have all these, you know, wonderful people like sharing new matcha information every day, you know, like the discrepancy will be, will disappear one day. Yeah. People are getting more knowledge.

knowledgeable

people are starting to know what to look for. I think it's really beneficial for us in the match industry to start this transparent labeling early, to really be on the right side of the history, so to speak. Because there will be one day that you are going to face a large or the majority portion of your consumer group

knowing a lot about your product. And, you know, like it's really, I think, beneficial even to the brand that, you know, you start to share more knowledge transparently early. Yeah, the whole community will change. And I think of kind of a fine example to conclude on is that, you know, the third wave coffee movement celebrated the fact that coffee came from the seed of a fresh fruit. And to

To

highlight those agricultural differences, those processing differences, you can't roast coffee very heavy. The more you roast coffee, the more homogenous in flavor profile it gets. It just starts tasting like quote unquote roasted coffee. And a lot of those more special characteristics like floral notes or fruity notes or sour and acidic notes, very herby notes, herbal notes, they get lost the more that you roast it. Those volatile aromatics leave or they degrade in some way.

with all that heat treatment. And I feel very similar about the term ceremonial grade. So what happened is all these third wave coffee companies, they didn't necessarily, now you don't see them advertising their products as quote, light roast. They're all light roast. It's all implicitly.

in that label, in the brand, in all of the descriptions, right? The concept of light, medium, and dark is not a specialty thing. It's all light. And I feel like in specialty matcha pretty soon, it's like this ceremonial grade designation should just disappear in the same way that quote light roast did. Well, I mean, there is, you know, certainly a utility for roast your coffee harder, right? Like to cover the flaw.

Or people like those flavors. people like those flavors too. But, you know, frequently you can, you know, very heavily roast some mediocre or even bad quality coffee as to, you know, get a good outcome. there's a very similar heat treatment to, to matcha too, to cover flaws. absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, like the, the, the very reason that people start to use lighter and lighter roasted just, you know, not only to highlight all of the flavors that will be covered by heavy roasted. But.

also

you know it's really a good indicator of higher quality because nothing to hide behind yeah there's nothing to hide behind yeah so yeah it'll be interesting yeah I mean like so you do or do not think that this term will eventually disappear ceremonial grade may or may not but you know like

Roastage and also being transparent about the ingredients. I think it will be a good forcing function for everybody to start, you know Striving into a better quality direction in general

and also have consumers have a more diverse experience of different kinds of flavor profile because you know the heavy the processes are really the less diverse the flavor profile you're going to be able to taste it's going to be more homogenized. sure and with blended. Well actually here's an interesting point before we wrap up and something I had written down in my notes and forgot about was around subjective claims most of the stuff that we're talking about now are either sort of

gray area classification systems or some things that misguide consumers or really objectively true or false things. But what about subjectivity like bitterness? There's so many matcha companies now that claim that their matcha has no bitterness at all. And I've ordered a lot of samples from them or a lot of their products. And I'm like, wow, I don't know how much dark coffee these people have tasted to make those bitter receptors go away. But this product is

Definitely

bitter. Yeah, I mean like people have different perception on

wide variety of flavor profiles. Like what you taste might not be what I taste, might not be what someone else on the other side of the earth tastes, because you know all of these differences in terms of cultural background, in terms of our culinary experience, you know, and the vocabulary that we can understand or be able to have deformative experience to use is essentially different. Yeah, so is it even fair putting a subjective claim?

a matcha label? Is that a form of mistruth if I tell you it's not bitter or it has notes of lilac and fresh cut grass? Yeah, I don't know. I think it's unnecessary. I think what needs to go on... What if you have more than one product and they really are different? You have one that's very bold and chocolaty, you have one that's very refreshing and one that's very umami heavy.

To some degree, there's got to be overlapping perceptions. Am I lying? What if you do or do not taste that? I guess you're just not as credible to certain consumers. They just won't trust you, right? But I think that's really hard to control. And what you can really control is that you tell the facts about where this matcha from, what's the cultivar.

how long it has been shaded. If you're really willing to share the harvest date's weather, it will be very nice. We're a long way from that one. I don't think anyone's done that yet. Only in Bad matcha company, Bad Tea company, which will be my next startup. But I think it's really hard. To what degree...

these flavor notes are meaningful. It's very debatable. Yeah. Well, especially if you're missetting expectations. It's the worst. That type of misstep in expectation management can really destroy credibility. Yeah. I really, you know, that matcha company that is advertising, it is not bitter at all. I've lost a lot. Not only was it not bitter, but in my opinion, compared to other matches I've had, it was just objectively not good.

is claiming to be this special value matcha every day, not very bitter and like, whoop, nope, definitely not. I know how to find something that I like 10 times more and that I think is objectively higher quality based on the standards that we all kind of use. And it's half the price. Yeah, it's, I think it's quite difficult to, like, first of all,

have a widely acceptable flavor profile description and also tell a good story that people will find interesting. One vendor that does something very interesting is looking through his website recently is Johnny Matcha So Johnny Matcha doesn't necessarily give flavor descriptions of his specific products like if his Asahi cultivar

or some of his other cultivars that he offers, but he gives sort of guidance and education. This is what asahi cultivar usually tastes like, and this is what people like about it.

And he breaks it down that way. So it's more of the general case, which is really informative actually It's like sort of taking the general knowledge and just enough to appreciate it, but it's also not a promise either. Yeah. Yeah, that's just useful information That's that's a fresh aspect, you know, that's much less condescending

Yeah, exactly. It's not top down. It's giving you the general opinion, but you know, it's really for you to decide what you like or don't like about it.

Yeah, or people that have like very descriptive tasting notes and they've written it in such a subjective way that they, you know, you kind of get a sense that this is what they taste and this is their personal impression. You know, it's more of almost like a merchant review of that product than it is like a definitive description versus like any of those like really cringy memes or videos that we've seen of someone going to a tea tasting and or wine tasting and say, what do you taste? And then you say, I don't know.

Lemon. Wrong. No lemon flavor in this one. Which is what some of these more definitive tasting notes descriptors read as. And I'd say like not bitter is one of them. And it's really also very abuse and makes people lose trust. And as a form of mistruth. Or, you know, like...

It's people might have different experience over Let's say a very descriptive of flavored notes that hey they have direct reference with like lemon like, you know Butter like oak, you know all these things with tangible existence in the world that you can associate with But what about flavor notes like ooika

Yeah. It's a flavor profile that's, coined with the process, you know, people taste of shade. Yeah. People may or may not, you know, first of all, people may or may not be able to taste it to begin with, but for people who be able to taste it, they would have a very unique mental model of what the tastes, feels like, you know, it might not necessarily match with other people's mental model, but, it's certainly a flavor signature that people can pick up.

So I think I will argue that these are good descriptions that we should point out to consumers.

Yeah, so they can learn them. How else are you going to learn what ooika tastes like unless someone tells you? It's a Japanese word. It's an abstract Japanese word that's tied to a process. A lot of the matcha consumers that we know don't speak Japanese and will never have the opportunity to inculturate themselves or fully grok the word or the flavor attribute ooika.

So I think flavor notes like these are useful and meaningful to educate consumers. But it's also not a good first step either. So how do you create labels so people can self sort themselves out? If you give that to a new matcha drinker, it's very confusing. Even in the name, it's not totally clear that that's a flavor. That's true.

Maybe the first association will be with the company, Ooika It will be extra confusing. Well, in that case, it's a good name for a company. a very great name. It's a cool term in general. Bravo, Marc.

Yeah, so this conversation ran a little bit longer than we wanted, or at least initially thought, which I think is a good thing. yeah, just to give a little background on the next conversation, it's going to be all around.

all about the cause and effect relationships between these variables that we keep talking about. So when we talk about transparent labels and things like number of days shaded, different cultivation techniques, they do lead to certain flavor profile outcomes. So it's going to be a much more in -depth look at things like umami taste and the way that's prized and how umami taste is achieved, how color is achieved.

how all the delicate flavors that make matcha nuanced or interesting beyond just the umami taste or lack of bitterness. We're also going to have a conversation about bitterness and also about flavor profile consistency and sort of speculate even more on what we would consider a lot of opportunity for the future of matcha labeling.

Well, I think that's all we have time for today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider giving us five stars or sharing it with a friend and be on the lookout for new content. Yeah, I'll see you in the next episode. See you in the next one.