The future of matcha - Opinion

Specialty matcha is in its infancy. There is a small, but growing, handful of companies, influencers, and innovators that are on the forefront of the specialty matcha movement.

Thanks to the recent explosion of matcha consumers and the institutions that serve them, including Starbucks, Dunkin, specialty coffee shops, grocery stories, and Japanese Tea Ceremony practitioners, a new market is being born: specialty matcha.

Specialty matcha consumers care about and want to explore all of matcha’s nuance and complexity, not unlike fine wine or “3rd-wave” coffee consumers. We already see a new ecosystem of vendors focusing on single origin and single cultivar products, and making distinctions between products on how long the tencha was shaded, the type of shading, whether or not the tea was hand picked, and how freshly the tencha was milled into matcha. Quality and transparency are being redefined and the ceiling is rising.

Change is a double edged sword

One could argue that nothing I’ve written so far is a revelation. Japanese farmers have been discovering and hybridizing new cultivars for decades. Terroir and processing differences between regions like Uji and Yame are well known in Japanese tea circles. Milling matcha fresh is a practice as old as the ceremony itself. All would be valid critiques.

The difference is that many of these variables were behind the scenes, things that could be tweaked in the name of continuous perfection. Most matcha is consumed in blends, a black box, an opaque mix of artistry and mastery.

Learning where the flavors come from, how production or blending decisions were made, and experiencing the natural variation that matcha offers was an exclusive craft, guarded by tradition, gate keepers, language barriers, and quite frankly, a lack of interest from matcha consumers.

This is all changing.

Tea-preparing consumers in Japan are getting older. Remarkably few young consumers in Japan are consuming fresh prepared tea (labeled ”Green tea” on the graph above). Most consume green tea and matcha beverages in RTD (ready-to-drink) formats from bottles or cans. This sentiment is also evident qualitatively. Ask any young Japanese consumer about matcha or green tea preparation and they will admit they know nothing, or say it’s something their grandparents do.

Not only is fresh-prepared tea consumption in Japan skewing older and older, domestic loose leaf tea consumption is declining. Young and working age consumers are opting for more convenient options such as RTD tea, as well as supporting a growing and thriving specialty coffee market. If the Japanese matcha industry wants to survive and thrive, it needs to find new markets.

What’s next?

The good news is that foreign markets are becoming ever-more interested in matcha where it has entered the main stream consumer’s lexicon. These consumers are growing the perceptional ability to make flavor distinctions within matcha and have access to the context to develop preferences. Like other specialty products, this new set of mainly western consumers will demand products that are detailed and transparent in their labeling and that share the compelling context about what makes them special.

To keep the industry alive for the decades to come, some traditions are going to need to be broken. Innovation will need to be accepted to make products better. And products will need to be adapted to meet the preferences of new and different consumers.

The future of matcha is specialty. Matcha isn’t matcha isn’t matcha—there will be a future where consumers from Dubai to Paris and from Bangkok to LA will have acquired preferences for Uji vs. Yame matcha, or Asahi vs. Yabukita cultivar, or fresh vs. preground matcha. As the mystery and mastery of producing matcha becomes better understood by mainstream non-Japanese markets, demand for specialty products will follow.

Specialty Matcha’s Potential

Every new market has a different set of challenges or “problems to solve”. In specialty coffee, hand brewing exploded in popularity resulting in dozens of pour-over systems all claiming to be a little better than the next. You also see significant investment in home coffee grinders to make it possible to brew cafe-quality coffee at home. Farmers started experimenting with different fermentation techniques to make new and innovative flavor profiles. And this is just the tip of the iceberg! But what will the equivalent in matcha?

• Fresh Ground Matcha: matcha’s extreme surface area to volume ratio makes it very susceptible to oxidation. Milling matcha fresh is one of the most obvious ways to radically increase the quality of all matcha and support a thriving ecosystem of specialty matcha brands.
• Innovation in Preparation: just as we have seen an explosion of specialty coffee gear, we will see an explosion of matcha preparation equipment. While there’s a beauty to just using a bowl and a whisk, the reality is that making matcha can be a painful and messy endeavor. The friction of preparing matcha probably steers some very large, but unknown percentage of consumers away from building the habit of drinking matcha every day. There’s many problems that can be innovated on ranging from dosing, to sifting, keeping matcha fresh, and whisking.
• Experimentation: Historically matcha has only been innovated upon by the confines of tradition and ceremonial gatekeepers. However with the birth of a specialty matcha market, existing knowledge structures will be expanded upon through research, experimentation, and the discovery of novel processes that can make some element of matcha radically better.
• New Terroirs: “matcha” or matcha-like products processed outside of Japan in other tea-growing regions such as South Korea, Mainland China, and Taiwan have the ability to greatly expand the flavor variety and price-points of matcha available to both mainstream and specialty consumers.
  
  
  

  Enjoying our content and want more? Check out our podcast links below: