Product Development at Sanko

 

 

Ryan Ahn and Zongjun
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, my co -host Zongjun. Hello. And we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, so we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories, and we also interview experts. So today we're going to talk about our first product creation, Obsidian, which is the one -dimensional matcha whisking bowl. Yeah. So, you know, the broader mission of the company is to do a large range of different

products that solve different problems in making matcha in a contemporary way. I would say teaware has largely solved the problems that are required to make tea for tea ceremony, like really long rich traditions of making traditional chasen or tea whisks in Japan, or different types of tea bowls with different functionalities, or different kettles like a kama, etc. And they're beautiful, very traditional arts.

but they're not the way that matcha can be made in a really high quality way at scale. They're really artistic implements. So we got very inspired in the early days by all this innovation we were seeing in the coffee movement. We have tons of different coffee companies using functional design, new materials, new technology, and taking a really scientific lens on how do we create a much better cup of coffee. So why couldn't we take this same philosophy and apply it?

to different matcha products, which is sort of the thread or theme of the whole company itself. So, Zongjun, why did we decide to go with matcha whisking bowls first versus some other product or some other problem space within matcha preparation? Yeah, I guess, well, part of the major reason is frustration.

it was frustration I really dislike whisking matcha in the traditional bowl in a in a traditional Chano -yu bowl takes years of practice to really get to the point that you can easily produce a very thick consistent foam in a round shape traditional Japanese matcha bowl

And not to mention that nowadays you see all these strange retrofitting of using traditional wares in modern cafes. You really couldn't expect any barista with days of trainings to be able to use all these professional ceremonial tool in a modern context. Yeah, for certain. And frustration on my part too, you know, not to disc cafes too much, especially coffee places, making matcha.

But there's a real injustice for upcharging someone by a dollar or two for a matcha latte compared to a real latte, and like, it's bad. It's clumpy, there's no foam, the person who's preparing it doesn't necessarily know what they're doing. It might have been from a gigantic bag of matcha that they're buying by the pound. And there's some real injustice for charging so much extra.

for a product that has been given so little care. So we were like, how can we make products that are designed, form and function are designed to create a really high quality product, in particular, how do we create a vessel to whisk matcha in that's radically easier, where you can get really good foam that doesn't require the lifelong skill of learning how to whisk matcha properly and add in a ton of other improvements to make everyone's lives easier.

Why aren't we using hydrophobic glaze? Why isn't there a spout on most matcha bowls that people are using? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We really started by thinking about, so like in a modern cafe, what is it like? What's the life journey of a bowl in a cafe? How do people interact with it? What would it be used for? And how do people clean it easily? So all of these...

kind of a thought exercise really help us to breathe light into creating this new product. Yeah, and you know, we don't want to stop here. You know, we want to re -examine what whisking looks like. We want to re -examine a tool that can produce fresh ground matcha. We want to make Tencha matcha precursor radically cheaper. And part of the reason why is I don't order matcha lattes at most cafes. 98 % of cafes, I won't do it because I'm not willing to spend the $6.

to buy a drink I know I will not like, does not live up to my standards, in the same way that you can get a random coffee somewhere and have it actually taste good. Like, how can we help the whole specialty cafe industry elevate matcha to where we would want to buy it and where we would want to drink it, where it's not rolling the dice and maybe you get something good, usually you don't. Just like when you normally gamble. Yeah, yeah.

So we came up with the idea of one -dimensional whisking. Ryan, can you talk a little bit about what exactly does it mean? Yeah. So we elongated the shape of the bowl. So matcha is a very fine powder, and it's 5 to 13 microns. And particles that are that small start to have some really non -intuitive forces going on between them. So because the mass is so small, the electrostatic and the surface area is so high.

The electrostatic forces make the particles very sticky. They want to stick to each other. They're very high cohesive forces. And because it's so sticky, you have to be able to separate all these little particles out when it hits water. And to do that, the really the best tool to use, at least right now with the existing tools out there, is a chasen which are anywhere from 80 to 120 times.

piece of splintered bamboo that creates all these mini vortexes and turbulence to have mechanical forces overcome those electrostatic forces. And to do that within the confined geometry of a bowl is very difficult, especially a conical bowl right? You have not only do you have to whisk back and forth in a zigzag pattern to get to all the parts of the bowl, but you also have to worry about variable bowl depth.

where in some areas of the bowls it's very deep and in other parts it's the shallow end. So it's even more technique driven than let's say a flat bottom bowl or a round bottom bowl. So you have all of these different bowl geometries which are pretty difficult to whisk and get your hand moving fast enough within this very confined space to produce a lot of foam and to produce enough turbulence to break apart these particles. So the whole idea was how can you whisk as fast as possible with as little technique as possible?

to incorporate air and to incorporate enough mechanical force to break apart these things. The idea was to elongate the bowl, have it almost hug the shape of the Chasen, to produce a really fantastic product with very little technique. Yeah, so also the surface, the inner surface of the bowl, we kind of choose a very hydrophobic glaze to not only have the bowl

be hydrophobic enough to easily get the matcha out of the bowl, but also create this nice texture so that the turbulence inside the bowl can be increased. ⁓ yeah, as little friction as possible. There's a lot of bowls, so there's a particular style used in some Japanese tea ceremonies called Bizen, or I think it's called Bizen Yaki and it's very coarse.

It's almost like taking sandpaper. And if the surface texture of the bottom of the bowl is too much friction, you'll slowly destroy your very expensive nice tea whisk or chasen. Yeah, that would be very bad. Yeah, very bad. Expensive mistake over time. They don't last that long anyway, let alone having that kind of abuse. Yeah. So...

In a modern cafe, you have your bowl sitting on your counter, you whisk your matcha. We picture that image in our mind and we start to think about, so what else can we make Barista's life easier? So we first come up with one -dimensional whisking, right? Like that greatly reduced the technique required to whisk a bowl of matcha. But then we start thinking about all the other features.

When we are whisking the matcha, we get all these splashy fun time going on in the bowl. Like with some poorly, or not poorly designed, but poorly designed in a way that... Poorly used. Poorly used, exactly. Bowls, you know, you you up having all these splashy matcha getting everywhere, you know, on your hands, on your chasen on the table, on other wares. And what...

when it's not properly cleaned afterwards, we really have these very splash residuals getting around in all the surface on your counter, which is quite a scene that we have been observed in a lot of cafes. So we create this kind of interesting inward indentation or a...

It's like a splash guard, it's a tapered rim. Yeah, yeah, like in the concavity to kind of further hook the chasen and the matcha inside the bowl to prevent any splash during matcha making. And so we thought about that. We also add a sprout. Adding the sprout was very interesting because when we are trying to add that design into the bowl, we were...

talking with our manufacturers, we comparing with existing design, we test on a lot of the existing design bowls with similar features with matcha and inevitably in a lot of the bowls we end up getting what they call dribbling or like a drugs design, drizzling. So like when you pour the matcha out of the bowl,

you have some residual matcha kind of start dripping out from the spout onto the outer surface of the wall, which can be very dirty and not easy to clean. So we add a very glossy surface layer underneath the spout so that we make it easy for the matcha to drip all the way to the end so that you can clean the bowl with an easy wipe.

Yeah, and we designed the angle the best we could so that happened the least possible. It's actually a really difficult problem to solve from teapots to pitchers to carafes to have something that doesn't drip down the sides. So we did the best we possibly could with the angle. And if it does happen, because things happen, life happens, we made it very easy to clean.

Yeah, and also the very reason why we don't make the entire outer surface of the bowl very glossy is that, you know, like bowl can be wet during all the matcha making process and you might not be properly dried throughout. So with a very glossy outer surface, sometimes it can be very slippery. So we make all of the other parts of the bowl kind of has this coarse texture to.

be easily gripped by hand, other than the part that will connect it with the spout of the bowl.

So, Zongjun we talked a lot about the features and the function of those features, but how did we actually go from a list of technical and design requirements to what is this going to look like? I feel like in design or in startup world and in new product development world, it's really not talked about how difficult it is to move forward when you have the universe of possibilities in front of you. We could have gone any color.

and nearly any glaze finish or texture and the way that it reflects light or forms. Like we had a little bit of constraints based on some of the design requirements we had, but like how did we go from essentially a word document to a physical product? And you have a particularly interesting background for anyone who doesn't know that's listening. Like you grew up in an artist family, so you grew up with sort of design as part of your...

your upcoming and philosophies growing up, I'm sure.

Yeah, so I never end up being professionally or academically trained in that sense, but I have certainly observed a lot of the design process either made by my parents or by their friends. One thing that I took a very great inspiration out of is that sometimes you just need to let your imagination flow.

You start by sketching. You start by sketching out everything that you can possibly think of in your mind into a piece of paper. And then you start to kind of consolidate into

certain design feature or certain aesthetic that you would prefer or you would see them fit. And then you narrow it down into a few selections.

And at that point, you know, design is design, but you need to turn the design into a physical reality. So the physical viability of making that design with certain material will be the ultimate constraint. So we end up having five, six different sketches by the end of the design route. And then we bring that to the ceramic factory and they basically vetoed five of them.

and telling us that a lot of these features that with great functionality just cannot be  with the material that we're working with or the technology that we're working with. I remember very clearly that one of the design is kind of like a hallowed skirt all the way around the bowl It looked really cool. It does look very cool.

It was like a double walled or double double like carafe except it was open on the bottom. Yeah, yeah. So what you are doing is that you basically grip the bowl the skirt so that your fingers will never touch the very, you know, hot bow body that hugs the matcha. So that was very cool. But unfortunately, they won't be able to fire it. Collapse and fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very...

Very sad, very disappointing, but you know, it is what it is. So we end up pursuing other options. Yeah. And then it took a couple of like tweaks and designs to get the shape just right and the functionality just right and the glazes that we'd like. Yeah. And one of the feature is we were picturing that, you know, sometimes barista needs to pick up the bowl by using one hand.

and it would be really hard for them to stick their fingers underneath the bowl with hot water inside. So we created this little tiny handle bar in the lower body on the back of the bowl to help baristas to easily lift the bowl a little bit so that they can stick their fingers underneath the bowl to pick it up. And we also made a really rough coarse

exterior glaze so that if your hands are wet and you're busy and you're moving, you can really grab something that's not glossy. Yeah, yeah. So with that design, looks easy, but you know, how to attach that little handlebar onto the bowl, do we use, do we pre -build that into the slurry mode or we attach that later after this fire? Like all of these,

manufacture requirements kind of really becomes the limitation of our imagination. but you know, it's also fun throughout the way that you slowly trying to figure out, you know, you work with compromises, but you know, with still with no compromise on the intentionality, but

with compromise on probably aesthetic or certain designs.

So Zongjun, we've been talking a lot about like, this is an implement with baristas in mind, with cafes in mind, but I mean, do you think this really, the design features could help only baristas or do you like, to what degree is this for someone who is making matcha at home? Like who is the consumer segment that we're targeting in the sense, if it's not just baristas?

⁓ I think this is a product for everybody, maybe except a Chano Yu practitioner. But it is a product for everyone to make matcha daily. It's about efficiency, it's about easy to clean, and it's about durability. It's made with this very firm hard stonewares.

and it's made with the intentionality to produce high quality matcha with minimal technique. Yeah, and you know, we were talking a little bit before we started recording this, what are the most impactful moments of this journey were for us personally, like where we took great personal satisfaction. for me, it was actually...

testing the prototype design and just how much easier it was to produce really fantastic foam and how quick it was to make it. I've actually never really enjoyed whisking matcha. I've always loved consuming it. So I was always willing to go through that process of preheating the bowl, drying the bowl, sifting the tea, blah, blah, blah, blah. And...

By the time I got to the whisking part, it was really the technique -driven part, and probably half the time I would make a mess, which was really just unpleasant to clean up. All of those little touch points of friction in the journey of preparing something really prevents you from doing it very often. I don't know if you've ever... I recently, over the pandemic, decided I wanted to make moussaka, the Greek eggplant and potato dish with bechamel.

And I think it took me like five or sorry, four or five hours because like everything needed to be prepared kind of separately and all of that friction together, not only the time, but like all of those little annoying touch points of cooking the eggplant and then making the bechamel and then this and then this and then this and like getting minced meat lamb cooked. Like the whole process was such a pain and I feel the same about matcha.

⁓ and you know my girlfriend really enjoys drinking matcha and end up drinking it quite often and i'd really she should really like preparing so i'm always the one making it and you know wisking it  i'd this bought this really beautiful bowl in Yugi Kyoto know for the hometown some of the best match in the world beautiful bowls really ⁓ rounds bottom bowl and it's not very big

despite looking very beautiful. It's such a pain making tea in this stupid bowl. I love it to death, but it really, that little bit of friction, that was really the tipping point for me and the annoyance of preparing matcha, was whisking it in this stupid little bowl.

And switching from that, which is what I was traveling with at the time, to the first versions of Obsidian, I was like, wow, this is really pleasant. It was like, back in the days when iPhone came out, where you could just set two iPhones next to each other, and it would transfer all the files automatically. It kind of felt like that. It's like, I'm finally getting the outcome that I want without all this friction. Yeah. I mean, it's...

The frustration is not only towards a product, but further it's a frustration towards oneself. You start to question yourself, am I getting the technique right? Is this my fault or is this the fault of the YouTube? Why isn't it foaming up the way I want it to?

The frustration will be too much maybe by the end of the day after whisking so many matcha but you are not getting the quality that you want. Yeah, exactly. What was your greatest moment of satisfaction? Well, I think I share similar satisfaction as you but also when seeing because we...

A couple months ago, we started to do some testing fires. We started producing some prototypes before our official Kickstarter launch. And throughout the process, we ended up giving off some of the prototypes to some barista friends for them to use and give us feedback. And I think my satisfaction throughout the journey is that we received some pretty awesome feedback from them.

Yeah. I think our design intentionality really solved a lot of their headache as well. It's not just our frustration, but also a shared frustration amongst the community. And seeing this product being appreciated in the way that we want it to be appreciated was very satisfying. Yeah. I was talking about it with a friend of mine that used to work at a matcha cafe in New York City.

And she was like, yeah, it was such a pain. We had this stupid bowl with a spout, but the spout was angled funny and it always dripped. And every single time we made matcha, it made a mess and we had to clean it. And it was such a headache. And she was like, I'm so glad you are working on this problem. Yeah. Emotional damage. Yeah. No, I mean, it really does make a mess and it's not the pleasant type of mess to clean up.

Like this fine powder that gets everywhere and it's wet, it gets even worse because then it really sticks to things. And over time it starts to oxidize. It turns yellow. Or brown. Or worse. It's really a scene to be observed.

So Ryan, with that design intentionality in mind, what do you think will be some of the other products that we can make people's life easier? Yeah, so I think that there is, at least in the contemporary matcha world, you're always going to have the traditional equipment. So that's going to always exist in a particular segment. But I think the more consumer segment, what's called the contemporary...

matcha people, kind of like the specialty coffee who are enjoying it as a specialty product, but don't necessarily care as much about the ceremonial aspects of matcha, will divide into two camps. You're always going to have the people who want the analog way, and these are the people that are going to make a pour -over coffee in the morning. They like taking the time, they like doing things themselves and having the ritual of mechanically making their own stuff. So I think products like Obsidian really

⁓ speak to that crowd ⁓ in the same way that you know someone who's making a pour over would ⁓ and particularly as the prominence of matcha lattes grows right like it really is a device to create matcha lattes at the end of the day that's really its primary use case you can make like usacha, thin tea or americanos type things that's what i personally use it for i don't really like matcha lattes very much i do i do

It's for you. And you're not alone. That's like where most consumers are that are drinking matcha. They drink it in the form of a matcha latte. ⁓ yeah. And it's a little insane that there's like this is really the first purpose -built device to be able to do that in the most easy way and in the most intentional way. You know, it was really built with purpose. It's a purpose -built device to do that. So I see us creating other products that are in the similar camp.

of creating more innovative forms of chasen or tea whisks and making a matcha mill to mill matcha fresh, but it would still need to be prepared. And as the industry grows and as the specialty matcha movement continues to grow, I see greater opportunities for automation, where people really don't wanna deal with the mess, they don't wanna deal with the cleanup, they want a really good matcha.

as quickly as getting an espresso where you put in a pot or a Kurig And there's already one product like that out in the market, which is really cool to see. And I think there's a lot of other room in that category as well to really reduce the inertia of producing a really great cup of matcha. Yeah, reducing inertia is really important, I think.

not only for people that are already drinking matcha, but also for a lot of people that haven't got into the world of matcha. It will be really a nice gateway product for a lot of people to start consuming this wonderful, wonderful drink. And it can also be the end of the consumer gen. When you are, you know, start to get frustrating, spending too much time on making matcha every day, you know.

by the end you might be happy with a machine that can do all the jobs that you want it to do. We reference this cafe quite a lot, this company a lot. One of the most impressive showings I've seen so far of contemporary matcha, or matcha being treated as a specialty product unlike in tea ceremonies, MTCH in Bangkok. And they have this wonderful phrase called matcha for everyone.

It is both a very affordable blend of matcha, but they're also using it in a lot of their other branding. And I just love the sentiment of matcha for everyone. It makes it not this high in the sky thing, and it's very approachable. And if we want to get to a world where there is matcha for everyone, we need to meet everyone where they're at. We can't expect people to come to where the top of matcha is right now.

with all the fancy and expensive equipment or equipment that's only made for the purpose of tea ceremony. We need to create other things for people who aren't interested in tea ceremony, who want to make it a part of their daily lives and make it drastically easier as more and more people consume matcha. So matcha for everyone. Thank you, MTCH, for this wonderful phrase. Yay. We find it deeply inspiring and hope to build on this idea.

Green powder for the working class. That's right. That's free the world.

Yeah, so here in Sanko we really want to be the advocate of that phrase as well. It's not only making matcha significantly cheaper and more accessible, but also with higher quality. So Fresh milled Matcha is part of the company's original vision of getting how do we offer matcha to consumers in its freshest state.

of the matcha at the moment in the world, 90 % of them or more are essentially milled in Japan. Imagine all of the coffees are milled in Ethiopia and gets distributed around the world. We really wanted to treat matcha as a fresh product. So with the new machine, with our next product, which is the mill,

We really want to reduce the distance between fresh matcha to our consumers. Yeah, we want to see a world where every tin of matcha, every bag of matcha has a mill date on it. That's true freshness. When you take a product that's a whole leaf product, it's relatively stable from a degradation standpoint to an extremely fine powder, like where the number of particles,

went from some number to some number times 10 with a pretty large exponent, you're getting tons of oxidation. To pretend that doesn't happen very quickly is to pretend that relatively fresh roasted coffee doesn't matter either. And actually, I'm a little bit disappointed in even the specialty matcha world we see now with a lot of vendors that we look up to don't even have mill dates on the bags.

⁓ you know one of james freeman founder of blue bottles original inspirations ⁓ for founding blue bottle is he realized that coffee should be treated like a fresh food and at the time in the bay area ⁓ in california he couldn't find a single coffee company that put a roast date on the back so he had no way of determining how fresh that is and now when we buy matcha online or on the store ⁓ you like has a best by date

But you don't know when it was milled, which is really when the clock starts from a degradation perspective, not only for flavor, but for nutrition as well from what we've seen from the academic literature. And you really have to wonder why these companies don't want to put a mill date on it. You know, if you're not being transparent, it's, you know, probably because there's something to hide. Now, a lot of companies will say it is fresh ground, it's flown in fresh, and that, you know, it's never more than X number of months old.

And those companies that do say that offer a higher quality product. I've tasted it, it tastes really good. But an even greater level of transparency is what I think is needed for the industry to grow and for products to distinguish themselves from being really world class. You know exactly what you're getting, where it came from and what it was milled. And those that are a little more black box, like this is special, it's rare, you should enjoy it.

That's really coming from top -down style positioning. Yeah. Well, in their defense, milling matcha in the modern days and distributing matcha in the modern days is hard. And expensive. And expensive. And it's outside their control. They're getting it from some other supplier. Absolutely. And also the whole logistics system, the distribution system is usually outside of their control too.

So it's really hard to put a mill date on the label and guarantee its freshness. So we kind of wanted to change the status quo and really offer a foundation for people, for companies, for consumers to have accessible freshly milled matcha outside of Japan. Yeah.

in a highly scalable way, both from a cost perspective and from an availability perspective. Yeah, right now if you really want to do that, you have to import these ginormous, heavy stone mill from Japan into your country. That takes

months

transportation time and also a lot of money. Yeah, it's, you know, we want to get to a world where it's not just matcha for everyone.

It's fresh -milled matcha for everyone.

Think about the percentage of catechins, of polyphenols, of L-theanine It's wasted. Just wasted because it just sits in a warehouse and is degraded. You could probably say it's like who knows how many metric tons of nutrients that people could be consuming to better their lives and their health if you're milling and drinking matcha fresh. Let alone the taste that's going to taste better. Yeah. Healthy and tasty.

And that's all the time we have for you today. We really appreciate your listenership. And if you like this podcast, we'd love if you could share it with a friend or give us five stars. And we'll see you on the next one. Alright, goodbye.