Conditions for Specialty Matcha Preference Acquisition - Opinion
Matcha lies on the cusp of a specialty revolution.
Entering the world of matcha ten years ago was confusing and expensive. Hard to pronounce companies sold vaguely-named blends. It wasn’t obvious what you were drinking or why it was special, nor did you have access to the experience or knowledge to fully appreciate it.
Like many who started learning about matcha in the early 2010s, I began as a student of Japanese Tea Ceremony. Specifically, as an Omotesenke student at Penn State University. At that time it was difficult to learn anything about matcha, even online. Most of the tea we drank in class was from Ippodo, Koyamaen, or Kanbayashi. It turns out studying Japanese Tea Ceremony teaches you remarkably little about matcha itself, which was my primary interest at the time.
The turning point came for me in 2017 when I discovered the brand Matchaful in New York City. I knew matcha came in “ceremonial” and “culinary” grades, and I knew that “ceremonial” grades came in a wide variety of quality and price points, but Matchaful was communicating something different: single-origin matcha. They took a term that was mostly applied to specialty coffee and applied it to matcha.
They say the future already exists, it’s just not equally distributed. The future of matcha hit me dead in the face when I visited MTCH Contemporary Matcha Bar in Bangkok in 2022. Everything looked and felt different. It felt like a specialty coffee shop, but without a coffee bean in sight. I imagine it’s how it felt stepping into a Blue Bottle in the early 2000s before most people had heard of specialty coffee. Single-origin matcha, single-cultivar matcha, and house-made blends with diverse flavor profiles. This was the future.
But where is all the specialty matcha?
As with specialty coffee and the third-wave coffee movement in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a similar set of conditions are aligning to fuel the rise of specialty matcha.
Acquiring preferences
Acquired preferences are preferences you have to “work for” to enjoy. Few individuals wake up one morning and decide to uncork a bottle of Château Lafite having only imbibed Bud Light throughout their life.
Odds are, even if they did get their hands on a perfectly aged bottle of bougie Bordeaux, they probably wouldn’t enjoy it as much as someone who would actually pay for this bottle. Why? They don’t have the formative experiences by which to appreciate it. Put another way, they have no idea why that bottle is good and what’s prized about it, nor do they have the experience to contextualize the sensory pleasures of drinking such a bottle. The good news is that, unlike the upper echelon of wine, the best matcha in the world is radically more affordable at $10-20 a serving. It’s never been a better time to get into matcha, accumulate tasting experience, develop your palate, and research knowledge about what makes different matcha special.
Putting a value on sensory experiences
In food and beverage we pay for the things we value. There’s a price for convenience, there’s a premium for packaging, there’s a discount for bulk, and hundreds of other factors (conscious or subconscious) that make us value the tea we drink or the cheese we snack on.
The sensory experience—how a product tastes, smells, and feels—is by far the most intangible. Your perception of consuming a product is invisible, occurring solely in your mind. So what makes people value the flavors of a wash-processed Panamanian Gesha cultivar coffee more than a delightfully simple cup of instant Nescafe?
Tasting experience and context.
Tasting experience
Different people taste different things in the same product. One person’s delicious, delicate, floral, and fruity Panamanian Gesha coffee might be someone else’s sour, tongue-twisting coffee from hell. Perception adapts as tasting experience accumulates.
Wine, cheese, tea, coffee, there’s a significant amount of flavor variability in any given product category. The more examples you taste in any category, the better you will be at noticing the subtlety and nuance of a product. It’s the difference between tasting “red wine” and tasting french oak, wildflowers, and hazelnuts.
If you can’t perceive the flavors that make a food or beverage product specialty, then why would you value it?
Context to appreciate
Tasting ability and experience are all outcomes of primary perception. However, preferences are so much more than just the raw sensory encounter. For specialty products, it’s understanding why something is special or considered “good” by other people.
The culture developed around specialty products is the context required to fully appreciate them and understand why they are appreciated by others. The dozens of skilled hands that are involved in tea production, from the farmer, to the picker, processor, and preparer. These are all factors we value that are extrinsic to our primary sensory experience.
Look at any wine label, bean-to-bar chocolate tab, or bag of specialty coffee. Origin, processing, vintage, cultivar, and numerous other bits of precious metadata adorn these products. It’s a level of transparency that has not existed since before the Industrial Revolution.
This extends beyond the quantitative: we love to indulge in a good qualitative story. The lost, but re-discovered Gesha cultivar in coffee, or the authentic reed shading practices in the matcha cultivation process.
A specialty product romances not only the senses but the mind.
Fully appreciating a specialty product is having the context to appreciate provenance, cultural significance, and the care that went into its production. It’s no longer just a bottle of wine, a can of coffee, or “ceremonial” matcha.
Conditions for specialty matcha
We are in the early stages of a specialty matcha revolution.
Learning about matcha is easier. With the rise of the internet and global content distribution platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok there is a whole new generation of storytellers. They discuss regional differences in processing, cultivars, shading practices, farming practices, the heritage of local farmers, and so much more, all of which provide the context needed to appreciate specialty matcha.
Matcha has been adopted by the early majority of the mainstream market, offering a variety of products and preparation methods from matcha lattes and frappuccinos to different types of pure matcha prepared with just water and served as thick or thin tea. Almost every specialty and mainstream coffee shop now has a matcha offering. This access offers the tasting experiences necessary to distinguish the flavors inherent to matcha and to acquire preferences for it.
Every ten new matcha latte consumers yields a new specialty matcha consumer that wants to accumulate the tasting experiences and context to enjoy matcha in entirely new dimensions. These consumers will develop a set of complex preferences demanding more and more transparency, higher quality, and more differentiating products. We are on the cusp of a specialty matcha revolution.
The Sanko team recorded an episode about this blog post on their new podcast, the Specialty Matcha Podcast. Links below.
We will expand on these ideas much further in coming blog posts, so subscribe for more:
About the author
Ryan Ahn was the second Executive Director of the Tea Institute at Penn State, an interdisciplinary research institute dedicated to the study and preservation of all tea ceremony. After dropping out of Penn State, Ryan joined the founding team of Gastrograph AI, an artificial intelligence company based in New York City that leveraged cutting-edge machine learning methods in the science of taste, perception, and consumer preferences. During his tenure, Ryan worked with fortune 500 food and beverage manufacturers on new product development on products ranging from tea, coffee, salty snacks, dairy products, and plant-based meat. Over the course of 5 years, Ryan and his team collected the world’s largest consumer sensory dataset, collecting data from tens of thousands of consumers in over 30 countries on every continent. In 2023 Ryan founded Sanko with two friends and former colleagues with the mission of elevating the quality ceiling of matcha through functional design, innovation, and new technologies.
