Interview with Founder of Yunomi, Ian Chun
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Ryan (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my co -host Zongjun
Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:04)
Hello
Ryan (00:05)
and we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:08)
Yeah, so we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha share startup stories and interview experts. And today we're happy to have Ian from Yunomi.
Ryan from the future here. There was a slight internet lag when we did this recording. So we accidentally talked over each other a little bit. We tried to cut most of it in editing but some of it was unavoidable. Sorry about that.
Ryan (00:31)
Welcome to the podcast.
Ian / Yunomi.life (00:32)
Thank you for having
Ryan (00:33)
We'd love if you could give like a short introduction to Yunomi for our listeners and the work that you're doing working directly with Japanese tea farmers.
Ian / Yunomi.life (00:42)
Okay, so my name is Ian. am the CEO of the company's name is actually called Matcha Latte Media. And there's a story behind this, but the service that we're currently the service that forms the company is called Yunomi Life. Yunomi dot life. It's the
largest catalog of artisanal Japanese teas in the world. started in the tea industry 14 years ago. I was free for various reasons at the time.
And I just happened to meet a tea farmer from Kyoto. I was introduced to a tea farmer from Kyoto. And they were trying to expand abroad, but really had no success beyond the trips that they would make every year to various places around the world and do like tea events. So I came in and I helped them
launch their international tea business. And I helped through that company, through that farm, I met several other farmers. When I came back to Japan in 2012, I decided to aggregate those farmers into a single umbrella brand, and that became Yunomi Life.
purpose was to help Japanese tea farmers rather than to sell tea. And so what we've done is, what we started to do was try to create a marketplace, first of all. And then we discovered that a marketplace for Japanese tea producers selling abroad was not going to work for many reasons that we could get into. And then so I pivoted.
after that to just buying and sell model, even though our purpose is still to help as many Japanese tea farmers and tea factories as well as we can. So currently we have some 150 small scale tea farmers and I define small scale by number of employees. So if you have 100 employees or fewer, and that actually consumes
Like most of the industry falls under 100 employees or fewer. But those companies are the ones that are allowed to sell on Yunomi. They don't sell on Yunomi, they sell to us and we sell it on their behalf. But as a result, have, unlike most tea companies, we don't really think about our product lineup. We are basically, we think of ourselves as a service that helps connect you
Japanese tea farmers and their products. And so we have something, 150 producers on board, a couple of tea merchants who provide added value in various different ways. And we have maybe close to a thousand products, a thousand Japanese teas, including something like 70 different matcha. So everything from
the very, lowest quality to the very, highest quality. Although the very, very lowest quality, we try to discourage people from buying. Yeah, so that's our business, very basically. I would not do this business if I were anybody else. I would not recommend that anybody try to do this business. It is the surefire way to lose money.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (03:51)
Oh, 1000. That's like a library.
Ian / Yunomi.life (04:05)
And so like the first couple of years, we lost several hundred thousand dollars, I think. Just trying to, you know, just buying up all of the products from all of the different companies. And then when it starts to get old, we just give them away for free. So that was the first couple of years. And so we lost a lot of money during that time. It's a lot of inventory. Yeah. So if you want to take a look at the office, this is the office warehouse.
Ryan (04:20)
That's a lot of inventory. Yeah. Wow.
Ian / Yunomi.life (04:32)
And we've got, you know, tons of tons and tons of inventory. I mean, it's still a small business, but you know, this is the, this is how the scale that we're in.
Ryan (04:33)
No.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (04:33)
wow.
Ian / Yunomi.life (04:46)
So what are you guys doing? I actually didn't really ask besides just selling matcha. Like what's your take on matcha? Curious to know.
Ryan (04:55)
Yeah, actually we're not selling matcha
quite yet, but we're designing teaware to make matcha easier to prepare. So we have this chawan, so it's kind of elongated so you don't have to do a zigzag. So this is our first product. But our main product is we're working on designing a mill that's a countertop mill to mill matcha fresh.
Ian / Yunomi.life (05:05)
Hmm
Ryan (05:20)
that's being designed in the Guangdong
Ian / Yunomi.life (05:21)
So you're trying
to compete with Cuzen
Ryan (05:25)
Definitely not a direct competitor. Ours is going to be much more on the industrial side for specialty coffee shops, and less so on the consumer side. So we think about it like a really nice coffee grinder. So cheaper than an Ishi Usu but perhaps more performant than the existing countertop devices.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (05:40)
Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (05:47)
Okay, so instead of like 30 kilograms, you're not gonna have a 30 kilogram ishi usu
Ryan (05:55)
No, exactly. So yeah, we're those.
Ian / Yunomi.life (05:57)
Okay, well, you there is a company
here in Japan that has, for example, hydraulic press Ishi -usu. So you have two thin slabs of Ishi -usu and you have a hydraulic press that provides the weight pressure. There is a company that does that, I know. I've seen them before.
Ryan (06:12)
Okay.
Interesting.
Ian / Yunomi.life (06:16)
if more cafes carried matcha, I'm sorry, carried and had an issue for them to grind themselves, I would love to sell Tencha rather than matcha.
But matcha itself is a grinding, much longer shelf life. And actually, the longer you age it, if you age it properly, the longer you age it, the better it becomes. So if you ever had matcha that was made from five -year -old tencha it's still quite good. You have to blend it. You have to blend.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (06:26)
Yeah, much longer shelf
Ryan (06:47)
wow, okay.
Ian / Yunomi.life (06:50)
you do have to blend the matcha with some new matcha like 10 % new Tencha and like 90 % old Tencha or something like that. It has to be a, it's a good blending base when you blend it. So I mean, there's a certain level there, it doesn't change that. After a certain level, it doesn't change that much. But aging it is quite nice, right?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (07:18)
does the profile change when you age tencha? What kind of flavor profile differentiation?
Ian / Yunomi.life (07:24)
When you age
any tea, what happens is that the antioxidants break down. And it breaks down by, I mean, you want to age the tea in a way that preserves the flavor as much as possible. So you don't want it to break down completely, but it breaks down a little bit by like a few percentage points. And then that allows
the antioxidants break down faster than the glutamine components, the glutamic acid components. That's the theamine and that's the flavors that form, the umami flavors, right? So there are like 20 different types of glutamic acids or amino acids. those don't break down as fast, especially if you keep it at like minus 20 degrees.
There's, I don't know, like there's science behind it and some people say that you know it should be like minus two degrees or whatnot but if you keep it cold it preserves the flavor if you keep it frozen and therefore you can age it for a very very long time and as it ages the antioxidants, the bitterness of components of the flavor break
And so you're left with something that's more, has a higher concentration of umami. That's why you age things. You want to take off that little slim of bitterness at the top. And it doesn't really matter all that much for lower quality matcha. So, you know, there's no need to age it for lower quality
Zongjun (Sam) Li (08:40)
Mmm.
Mmm.
Ryan (08:53)
Interesting.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:00)
Yeah. For obvious
reasons. Garbage in, garbage out.
Ian / Yunomi.life (09:04)
So, I mean, garbage, it's relative, Like everything that is being sold in the West, everything that is being sold in the West right now, even the highest quality matcha that you could possibly find in the West right now, none of that was considered matcha 10 years ago. None of it. know, like the lowest, basically, know, like the lowest...
Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:10)
That's true, that's true.
Ian / Yunomi.life (09:30)
The lowest price per kilogram at wholesale for anything that's considered matcha would have been like 40 ,000 yen per kilogram. That was 10, 15 years ago, that's what it was. Everything below that, it would be culinary usage.
Ryan (09:48)
Interesting.
Ian / Yunomi.life (09:48)
and
Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:48)
powder.
Ian / Yunomi.life (09:48)
culinary
usage was never considered matcha, never considered real matcha. so, mean, I mean, know all of this, so I'm sure your people know this, right? In the industry.
Ryan (10:05)
What changes have you seen over the past, let's say like 10 years, especially at the small scale of production? We've heard that like a lot of people are retiring. They don't necessarily have a succession plan, that there's a lot of consolidation, but like what's, yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (10:21)
In general.
In general, in the agriculture industry, that's the case. For matcha specifically, everybody's getting into it. So all of the younger farmers, either getting into it because it's selling, or they're getting into it because they're being forced to transform their farms into tencha farms, at the lower grade, particularly. farmers will
Farmers who have their own factories are the ones that are visible to people like, know, industry players, like even like you and me. The ones who are visible to us are farmers who have their own factories or who have bothered to produce their own product so that they're selling their product on their own. Most farmers in the industry, however, they don't have their
factories, so they belong to a co -op. And so they sell their product to a co -op and there's a co -op manager and the co -op managers handle, manage the factories and or, and or, you know, they might belong to a club where they have, they utilize the co -op interns. So like one day one farmer gets to use it, one other day another farmer gets to use it. But most co -ops operate in the way
Ryan (11:36)
Okay.
Ian / Yunomi.life (11:39)
Okay, everybody, gonna, we're gonna, we are going to produce this tea altogether. We're all going to harvest it at this time. And then, you know, we all, you know, everybody starts bringing their leaves to the factory at harvest season to get it processed, and it gets processed and then it gets sold all together all at once. And that's how most of the industry works. So the co -op that belonged to everybody, everybody says, if they are, for example, contracted with
wholesale company like Aya Seicha for example. If they're contracted with Aya, then that co -op will say, well, Aya needs more tencha. They don't need any sensha, they need tencha. They don't need gyokuro, they don't need hojicha, they need tencha. And they need tencha this quality at this price, right? So they'll force everybody in the co -op to say, well, if we're gonna sell
tea leaves, you've got to this type of tea. So everybody has to make it. And so in some cases you get people being forced to make tencha when they actually want to make something else. And in other cases you also get, okay, everybody's got to, in order for us to keep this client, this wholesale client, we've all got to go organic. So everybody has to go organic.
And some people don't want to go organic because that actually lowers the quality of their product, of their leaf. But you know, that's what the market demands, so that's what they're going to do. And in the last 10 years, what I've seen is that as the industry has declined in Japan, and decline is kind of, you need to qualify that. The industry has shifted towards mass production as well as
ready to drink tea in plastic bottles. And since the industry in Japan has shifted there, and the industry abroad has grown, but grown in a way that most of the vast majority of tea that is being exported is being exported from large scale producers to large scale importers. Vast majority of that is being, you know, are between large scale players, right?
And so the large -scale exporters are the large -scale producers. They need to buy in large scale from various different primary producers, the farms and the factories, the primary farms and factories. And for non tencha industry, have, it's pretty easy to buy like, okay, everybody's making Sensha, everybody's making
normal ordinary leaf tea and then they will you know, could buy like a thousand kilograms from this co -op and a thousand kilograms from that co -op 500 kilograms from this co -op and that's pretty easy but for Tencha there was originally, you know, maybe a thousand tons produced prior to this boom now there's more like 4 ,000 tons so where that extra 3 ,000 tons of Tencha is coming from
as primarily larger scale co -ops, larger scale farms. And so the smaller scale farms are kind of being, there's not really much chance for them to take advantage of the global boom. There's not much chance for them to take advantage of the domestic boom in ready to drink teas. And
Though the two different markets shift towards that, the smaller scale farmers or the independent farmers who are trying to produce better tea end up with a smaller market to sell to, basically.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (15:15)
Interesting.
Ryan (15:16)
Would it be a fair summary to say that like there's a lot of development going on in the commodity side and that's where a lot of the money is being poured into and then everyone who's on the specialty side is struggling.
Ian / Yunomi.life (15:29)
no,
everybody on the specialty side is still on the commodity side,
Ryan (15:33)
Okay.
Ian / Yunomi.life (15:34)
Like what do you consider specialty is the question. That's what I like anything.
Ryan (15:37)
We're like single origins,
single cultivar. We've seen a pretty large experience. OK.
Ian / Yunomi.life (15:41)
Yeah, it's still all commodity though.
It's still all commodity. It's primarily commodity coming from, I mean, the way that the market, the way that the agricultural production works is that people produce, even the largest scales companies, they'll produce in batches. And those batches are single cultivars. And the reason why they do it like that, they sell it to the wholesalers. The wholesalers then have like batches of okumidori from a region.
you know 600 kilograms from 600 kilograms of okumidori in times like 50 lots and so they will have they will have you know 3 ,000 kilograms of okumidori or or 30 ,000 kilograms of okumidori you could call it single cultivar of course it might all also come from the same region so you could call it single origin also
But the ones who are producing it are large scale operations. At that level, it's like commodity, basically. At that level, it's commodity. In my opinion, anyway.
Ryan (16:42)
Hmm. Okay.
And that's mostly purchased at auctions
or is it a more direct relationship?
Ian / Yunomi.life (16:58)
It could be at
auctions, could be done, direct relationships between, suppliers and wholesale buyers and the wholesalers are producers as well. The wholesalers will take different batches. They might take different batches for different cultivars as well. And there, they should have tea masters who are able to then take the leaf and then take leaves from several different batches and say, okay, well, if we blend these together, then we'll be able to make
matcha, this quality matcha with these characteristics. And those are the tea masters of the industry. They can be able to take, know, if they want to achieve this specific flavor profile with this color, this aroma, they then you need to get these three, three batches of teas and they tasted all the batches and they're like these three batches of teas will produce this matcha. And that's the, that's the skill of the industry. And if they're not doing
Ryan (17:31)
the
Ian / Yunomi.life (17:53)
then you're just taking it and just making it, then there's no skill involved in that production. Which is probably what happens quite frequently, to be truthful.
Ryan (18:04)
Okay.
To what degree, so like as price increases and you're making quote unquote higher and higher quality product, right? Those products have certain attributes, like they're more umami heavy, maybe there's more subtlety and nuance, less bitterness, and there's some characterization, what gets better and you pay more. But to what degree is that, do you think it's converging or diverging with Western preferences? Because I feel like the quality feedback loop in Japan,
is very much catered towards what Japanese people like and consider good. And to what degree are like Western palettes or other palettes being considered in this quality ladder.
Ian / Yunomi.life (18:47)
Well, first of all, the quality ladder is less, more of a ladder and less of a spectrum. So the more umami you have, there is also a level of like thickness or thinness, like light body or full body, that's creaminess, could say also, creaminess slash fullness of the leaf of the matcha and level of umami and then level of bitterness. And then there's color.
characteristics that can go into quality. The aroma that it has is very like strength of aroma more than like type of aroma mainly unless it's just really bad. And then of course the color of the matcha but after a certain level the color is pretty much just good and then to
above a certain level of umami flavor as well as creaminess, you need to fertilize the soil pretty heavily. And when you fertilize the soil heavily, and then there's other things like in certain regions, at the very, highest level, in certain regions the minerals of that region make for better soil development.
Ryan (19:43)
Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (19:57)
for the plants for matcha or for tencha. And those regions produce better quality.
But the main issue is that the more you fertilize, the more you attract insects, as well as weeds. And therefore, in order to deal with it, you need to use pesticides. And if you use pesticides, that immediately eliminates your product from being compliant in the rest of the world.
So you can get up to maybe a level, like in my opinion, like a six out of a 10, maybe a seven out of 10 at the very, very best quality that can be organic, know, or exportable to the U .S. and Europe. And then above that, it just can't. Like, it wouldn't be compliant with pesticide residue regulation. So you could send
to individuals, but in order for company to claim that they are compliant to their customers for insurance purposes, for example, to be able to provide documentation for it, they would not be able to. we, for example, would not sell those types of products to those types of companies because it's just not compliant with those regulations in other countries. So as the
When you see what I've seen, what I've heard from customers is that for the most part, the quality level outside of Japan, if the quality level in Japan, it raises from one to 10, the quality level outside of Japan is generally one to five. And six or seven is quite rare and is generally the most premium stuff you can get on the market.
Ryan (21:39)
Mm.
Ian / Yunomi.life (21:46)
And then most of it is like at a level three or four. And then at a level three or four, at that level, the color may be okay. It's going to be quite bitter. And so what people are drinking is just this really bitter, bitter matcha, right? But the way that they're drinking it is that they are either diluting it quite a bit or they are putting it into milk.
and making a latte or smoothie. And at that point, the bitterness actually is a benefit because if there's not enough bitterness, it doesn't stand out against the milk, right? As you probably know, like you need a certain level of bitterness for it to stand out against the milk. So that's the big difference in what I see in like what is considered good quality
Zongjun (Sam) Li (22:30)
need a structure.
Ian / Yunomi.life (22:37)
Japan and the rest of the world. And in Japan itself too, like there's no real matcha consumer market, right? Matcha is something that is done primarily as a practice of tea ceremony, which is not something, it's not a daily activity. It's something that you do like you would do ballet, for example. You don't go around dancing ballet down as you walk down the street, right?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (23:00)
Hehehe
Ian / Yunomi.life (23:00)
And matcha is obviously served as matcha latte in cafes a lot. And so you do need that type of matcha for the matcha cafes. And it's very common in sweets and ice cream and chocolates and things like that. So that's where the industry is in Japan. There's no consumer market for matcha here.
So the quality level is thus then judged by the tea ceremony market, which is different, right? So it's not quite apples to apples.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (23:27)
Yeah.
Yeah, how heavy do you see the influence of the current Western market? You know, the preference, the demands of the market has gone back to Japan and influencing purchasing or team making decisions.
Ian / Yunomi.life (23:46)
So, wholesalers, refinement factories who are wholesalers, who are exporting quite a lot. They're going back to their farmers and asking them to produce more Tencha at the lower quality level, at the lower price level. So that has really shifted, and percentage -wise, it's
goes from one to five percent of the industry. So it's a very small percentage of the industry still, but it has increased tremendously in terms of from where it was many years, 10 years ago. So that's changed. So more companies, more farms are making shading their fields, producing wheat for tencha You also
The equipment manufacturer is making a killing by exporting the matcha potential equipment and the matcha equipment to China, to Vietnam. You also see inbound tourism is driving matcha as a drink at restaurants and cafes. Not domestic consumption, but domestic consumption by foreign tourists is driving demand for matcha
know, touristy areas basically. So like in my daily life, I don't go around and I don't see matcha a whole lot. But if you go to Kyoto, if you go to Asakusa where all the tourists are going, there's like matcha everywhere. Like every other restaurant has some matcha thing going on. And then so that has also started to affect prices now.
particularly this year, like prices have started to rise quite a bit. Like double digit percentage grew in terms of wholesale prices. So that, will that affect the prices outside of Japan? I don't know, because the Japanese to the yen rate is so, has weakened so much that anybody selling not in Japanese yen is continually making more and more profit,
Zongjun (Sam) Li (25:25)
what?
Ian / Yunomi.life (25:43)
Should I be talking about this? We actually need to talk about this. We sell in yen, so we're not benefiting, but yeah, mean like prices rise 20%, but the yen has risen, yen has fallen 20%, so it's the same price for you, for importers, but they get to make more money.
Ryan (25:43)
Yeah.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (25:46)
It's fascinating.
Hmm, interesting dynamic.
Ian / Yunomi.life (26:06)
So that's the dynamic that's going on right now. And is it a good thing? Is it a bad thing? It depends on who you are and where you are in the industry. The fact that there is a domestic market that's growing for it, even though it's not among Japanese people, is helpful for the industry because so much of the matcha cannot be exported and
the better much I cannot be exported. So that's helpful. That's helpful. We do want to see more of that. Personally though, I would like to see more of a... When I think about that, don't think about... I'm very concerned. I'm interested and I'm in this business because it's part of Japanese culture. I came to Japan from Hawaii.
I was studying astronomy at Brown University and I switched and I decided to become an expert in Japan and I came to Japan. loved, I fell in love with the country. And then so I got into this industry that is like at the core of Japanese culture. And then all, then like all you see is like, nobody actually drinks tea here. Nobody drinks matcha really. some people do the tea ceremony, but some people do Chanoyu practice Chanoyu but
not a lot of people. It's part of the culture, but it feels like a, almost like an artifact of the past that nobody's really participating in anymore these days. And that has increased from the time I've been here 25 years. And when I first came to Japan, you would go to offices and the women, the secretaries would come out and bring tea for you.
which was, that's a gender problem, of course. So when I thought about it then, was like, there's some heavy gender bias here in this office. On the other hand, now that that is no longer the case, companies have discovered that in order to be more gender equal, it's better to put a vending machine in their office instead of having the women serve tea.
And then there's more variety of beverages and the company employees pay for it themselves. So it's a win -win situation for all, except for the tea industry. The tea industry has lost a huge portion of their market It would have been better if men also learned to serve tea, but that was not the case.
So you see that shift towards away from, I've seen this shift away from making tea to drinking out of the, I mean, it's very convenient to have a ready made drink that you can go to anywhere. There's a vending machine on every corner. There's a convenience store.
Ryan (28:43)
Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (28:50)
everywhere and it's so convenient to get the tea in a bottle, particularly in the summertime when it's you want something really cold, really you want it right now. You're living a busy hectic life, you know, it's nice to have it just ready for you and it tastes decent enough, right? It's
people don't know how to make tea from a teapot these days. Young people have never used a teapot. So that's a sad thing, I
Ryan (29:17)
I heard like teapot
sales rates are like very low. Like no one's buying, like the whole teapot industry. Yeah, like Kyusu, and stuff or... It might have been from you, or maybe it from the Tazumi people in one of their
Ian / Yunomi.life (29:23)
Keypot sales rates.
Where did you hear that from?
Maybe, it's definitely true. It's definitely true. Specialists, ceramic artists who really specialize in making Kyusu, they still make it of course. But more general studios, more general ceramic manufacturers, they've shifted away from making Kyusu to making like Western style teapots because it's more versatile because...
If you're gonna drink tea, if you're gonna drink something special, then it's probably gonna be Western tea from India, Sri Lanka or Britain, you know, or French, French teas are a big thing. so if you're gonna drink tea and it's gonna be Western style, you want to a Western style pot. You could also use it for making Japanese tea if you need to,
Zongjun (Sam) Li (30:01)
No.
Ian / Yunomi.life (30:15)
Western style teapots are more popular. And then you could also make coffee drippers and coffee goods. And that's much bigger industry here in Japan. Coffee is just a much bigger industry in Japan than tea is.
Ryan (30:30)
interested.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (30:33)
You see that happening everywhere in East Asia, like China, Korea. People drink coffee more than tea.
Ryan (30:39)
It's exploding with
coffee.
Ian / Yunomi.life (30:41)
People drink coffee more than tea. I mean... Yeah, so what are you gonna do about it?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (30:47)
the other way, like people drinking more tea than coffee now.
Ian / Yunomi.life (30:51)
there needs to be more... Well, so tea was a big thing in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Then tea, bottled tea, started to become better and better and started to take over. And so you'd see that lots of, there are a lot of people making...
tea, a lot of farmers making tea and it peaked in the 80s when there were like 200 ,000 farms. •• Now there's 12, in the last census of 2020, there was 12 ,000 farms. •• And the reason is because they've mostly consolidated and or just left and stopped farming tea. •• And the number of retailers, • tea retailers, •• specialty tea stores have
disappeared, 50 % of the market share was taken up by specialty tea retailers and now you know that has been replaced by supermarket tea in supermarkets and drugstore chains and so you basically everybody
like the same mass produced tea from the same small handful of larger scale manufacturers. And there's very little innovation as a result of that. There's very little experimentation as a result. And the small amount of experimentation that is done by independent brands are really done primarily by
companies like producers or small scale companies, they don't, you don't see it very, it's not very common. Like you don't see like small scale retailers all over the place the way they used to. And I think that it is, there is a heavy weight in the industry that prevents people from coming in and starting new companies. You know, there's the weight of history and there are companies that
centuries of history behind them. And so people feel that tea is not an industry that you can break into here in Japan, which is not the case outside of Japan. Everybody is trying to start a tea company. Everybody's trying to start a matcha company now. But you don't see that happening very much in Japan. And I like to change that. I'd like to be able to see more and more companies start here in Japan,
You know, we could have more matcha brands here in Japan too, you know. People doing more innovative things with the tea itself. And I would like to see more encouragement of people making tea at home, making tea in the restaurants, making tea as a dish rather than as a side drink that you don't really put much thought or time into.
So I'd like to see that change as well.
Ryan (33:30)
the weight of history and how you have these colossal players that have been doing it for hundreds of years. I imagine that's quite intimidating if you're someone who wants to do something that's different and against the grain and innovative.
Ian / Yunomi.life (33:39)
It is. Yeah.
It is, it is. I do not have any relationships with any of these like Ippodo or Marukyu Koyamaen or Fukujuen Yamamotoyama I don't know if they even know that I exist, for example. But, you know, we would like to change that. We'd like to be able to... So I am, for example, in trying to start a platform.
I'm trying to develop a software platform that would allow us as a small -scale manufacturer to manage a large number of small -scale tea brands. Let anybody who wants to put a matcha or tea product into a package and put their label on
Let them do it and let it be, make it very, very easy to do. And you don't have to deal with discussions and long, you know, what do you have and just come online and do it. So we're trying, you know, kind of like a print on demand platform for, for tea and matcha. Then we could, if it's in Japan, we can drop ship also.
Ryan (34:40)
That's good.
Ian / Yunomi.life (34:46)
we can do that type of drop shipping for service for companies in Japan or for customers in Japan. Outside of Japan, it gets very hard to do drop shipping. We get a lot of inquiries for drop shipping, but we can do it theoretically, but it doesn't really make sense to do it for individuals. It only makes sense if you're helping a company drop ship to one of their clients and they don't care whether
Ryan (34:55)
Okay.
Ian / Yunomi.life (35:12)
we appear as the exporter on the documentation. So that's the key thing.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (35:17)
Very cool idea.
Ian / Yunomi.life (35:18)
Yeah, so that's what I to see happen.
Ryan (35:20)
Interesting.
on a different interview, this is something that really piqued my curiosity, Kenya was getting a tencha processing facility. I was wondering if you
Ian / Yunomi.life (35:26)
different interview.
I think that might have been Sencha.
Ryan (35:36)
Sencha, okay.
Ian / Yunomi.life (35:37)
Here we
So KTDA, Kenya Tea Development Agency, is in the final stages of setting up Africa's first Japanese specialty green tea production factory as part of this long -term product diversification strategy. And they were helped out by JICA, which is the Japan International, what is it called? It's a non -governmental agency in Japan that helped them to help fund
this T processing factory.
Kenya, yes. So what type of tea is it? think it's... I think at that time it was Sencha. But I do know that the the Tencha equipment manufacturers are exporting to India, China, Kenya, Rwanda, Sri Lanka. Like Tencha factories, equipment for Tencha is being exported all over the world.
so would not be surprised.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (36:33)
are they using Japanese cultivar in all those places too? Because, okay, in China, it's a hybrid. Sometimes they use Chinese green tea cultivar, sometimes they even import Japanese cultivar. for other places,
Ian / Yunomi.life (36:39)
I doubt it. I doubt they are. I doubt
The Chinese
government was very... The Japanese government kind of ignored it and the Chinese government was... I don't know whether that was a strategic decision on their part or not, but after 2011, they banned Japanese tea from coming in. First due to radiation contamination, but then afterwards, they were like, oh, this is great that we have it banned.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (37:12)
Yeah,
Ian / Yunomi.life (37:19)
No Japanese company can export tea to Japan. they all like in order to break into the Chinese market, they all set up their own joint ventures and taught the farmers in China how to grow tea in a certain way and like exported the manufacturing equipment and set up their own competitors. Which for better or for worse, know, for better or for worse.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (37:39)
Interesting. Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (37:43)
I mean, like the matcha industry, if it continues to grow, will grow way beyond the capacity of Japan to supply it globally. you know, it's, and it's fine, know, you know, the better as, as much production and quality gets better and better in places like China and Vietnam, you'll see those, those places take over the market for
Even though people want Japanese matcha, at the quality level that makes up most of the market, it probably would not matter whether it's Japanese or Chinese matcha. They won't mention it anywhere. They'll just say it's matcha. And then specialty brands will be focused on Japanese specific matcha.
in for the most part, like the industry will be dominated by, you know, sub $50 kilogram matcha, which is, you know, can be produced in China, I think, from what I remember. And so like, how does that change the industry? I don't know. I think that,
the industry will be much bigger and there will still be enough demand for Japanese matcha, especially at the higher end. And that should be a good thing for the industry if it becomes more of a mainstream flavor throughout the world. And I think it will be. So then the question is, know,
How do, for me at least, question is how does that benefit small scale manufacturers on one hand? How does that benefit the culture, the evolution of the culture surrounding tea? If it's non -Japanese culture, it'll evolve in different ways. In Japan, in Japanese culture, how does culture evolve with that?
If all tea, if tea became a product that you drank from a bottle and only a bottle and you didn't actually ever see the tea leaf, to me that's a little bit sad. Like I would not, I would say that part of the culture of tea is not simply just drinking the tea, but it's also making it. And making it is part of the culture and it's
the part of the culture that is being lost,
I'd to hear more about your, your matcha mill. Like what are your targets?
Ryan (40:05)
Yeah. our goal is basically to change the model from a centralized milling model, and then it's distributed all over the world to where we're pushing the milling or the last manufacturing step as close as we can to the edges to make fresh ground matcha as ubiquitous as fresh ground coffee. So to do that, we're designing this countertop mill and we've studied
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:05)
Wow.
Ian / Yunomi.life (40:07)
What are they?
Ryan (40:31)
to the extent to which we can, sort of the performance metrics for Ishiusus around particle shapes, particle size, low temperature milling, and are putting technologies together to drastically reduce the weight and size. So we're using ceramic millstones, we're very carefully doing the millstone design, and it will have an active cooling system.
So we can remove heat from the system and you can actually control exactly how hot the lid.
Ian / Yunomi.life (40:59)
You know?
You don't want it too cold, right? You want some heat.
Ryan (41:04)
Yeah, some heat. Well, we want to put that into control because depending on the base tencha you could get very different outcomes.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (41:05)
You
Ian / Yunomi.life (41:11)
be able to control the heat level of the the mill. You know like I know some of the I know this like this the Tencha artisanal really experienced millers for example know which mill produces the best matcha and they'll depending on
Ryan (41:15)
to a degree.
Ian / Yunomi.life (41:30)
temperature, the ambient temperature of the day, they will spin the mill for, without any leaf, they'll spin it for, you know, five to ten minutes to warm it up so that they generate, you generate heat. Because you don't want it, you don't want to spin it cold. You don't want cold stone. As you spin it, the warmth of the stone generates heat and heat. People, everyone says that heat degrades the matcha. It does.
but it's also roasting it a little bit. And if you get just that slight roastiness of the matcha that forms part of the flavor. So that's really, at the artisanal level, that's a feature that could be a feature of the meal, to be able to toast the matcha as you're grinding
Zongjun (Sam) Li (42:01)
Yeah, I'm
mean,
Ryan (42:19)
The first
version, the cooling system, was not the greatest. And it definitely needs a cooling system. It got very hot. But it'll be an interesting variable to put in people's hands where it's quantified. There's the direct sensor, and you can say, what does this look like at 40 degrees Celsius versus 70 degrees Celsius?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (42:28)
Hahaha
Ian / Yunomi.life (42:40)
So we don't know, for example, why do some stones produce better tasting matcha than other stones, even though they're supposedly the same stone. We don't know why.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (42:51)
Hmm.
Ian / Yunomi.life (42:51)
There must be something, right? And then, like, how can, how fine of a grain can you get?
Ryan (42:59)
So we're shooting for around 5 to 10.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (43:00)
We're shooting for...
Ian / Yunomi.life (43:02)
Really? That's impressive.
Ryan (43:05)
It's
we're still in prototyping stages. still, it's a, the jury's still out on
Ian / Yunomi.life (43:07)
But so
let me think about this. Like if you're trying to make it like that, then the time that it takes to mill
Zongjun (Sam) Li (43:11)
Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (43:18)
Wouldn't that make it prohibitive or impractical for most purposes?
Ryan (43:24)
So one of the benefits of the cooling system is we can really ramp up the RPM. So it can go much faster.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (43:30)
Yeah, we can make it way faster.
Ian / Yunomi.life (43:32)
so it'll grind faster. And there's a way to return the powder to the grinder so that it grinds multiple times so that you get it to be finer.
Ryan (43:33)
Yeah,
Not on this version yet. Although I see no reason why couldn't be done.
Ian / Yunomi.life (43:49)
That would be nice because I could give it finer, I suppose. Hmm, interesting. Well, would love to, like I said, would love to be able to handle Tencha rather than Matcha. So if this became the new standard, then I would welcome it, personally. We would love to be able to buy Tencha leaf.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (44:08)
Awesome.
Ian / Yunomi.life (44:10)
various different qualities from everybody and then be able to provide that to people but you know like Cuzen and Matcha for example they they say their leaf is proprietary leaf it's not normal tencha I've never actually seen it so I don't know whether it is normal or not normal tencha but you know that doesn't allow that doesn't allow everybody else into the industry to get involved
which I think is a mistake. If all of the Tencha farmers or producers were to come in and say, everybody get a Cuzen matcha thing so that we can sell you Tencha instead of selling you matcha, that doesn't help grinders. Grinders don't want that, of course. And if you've invested a lot of money in grinding machines, you don't want that. You want to use your grinding machine.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (44:40)
definitely.
Ian / Yunomi.life (44:59)
But for everybody else who doesn't have a grinding machine, then they can get involved and capture a greater value of the matcha product if they're selling, if they don't have to sell to a wholesaler who's grinding the matcha for them. So that would, I think that would be better for the industry. I'd also like to be able to see, like if you could take, for example,
what if you could take some dried mint leaves and put it into the tencha, blend it into the tencha, then grind
Zongjun (Sam) Li (45:29)
Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (45:30)
So I would love for you to think about that. I mean, obviously you can't do that with everything because, know, a tencha leaf and a freeze dried bit of mango would not grind together very well. But certain things could grind together possibly. I mean, the thickness of the leaves are different.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (45:33)
Yeah, yeah, different material.
Ian / Yunomi.life (45:52)
Yeah, maybe it's not possible. If
Zongjun (Sam) Li (45:53)
But in the future, we'll probably be developing different grindstone patterns. We can set different customized pressure. And of course, the RPM can be set differently for different kind of tea. So it will be much more of us at all.
Ian / Yunomi.life (45:55)
Maybe it's not public school.
You'd have to grind things separately though. No, it's okay, I guess. More bespoke.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (46:14)
Yeah.
Ian / Yunomi.life (46:15)
Production by individuals in their own homes is I think a very interesting is very interesting I'd like to see more of that happen and I'd like to see that more of that happen both around the world as well as in Japan Like to we return the idea of making and crafting your own tea by yourself Making that crafting part of part of your life
the way that you might get into cooking food. especially here in Tokyo, you could literally spend like every single meal buying food meals from the convenience store. And it could be healthy too, because they sell salads, multiple different types of salads at convenience stores.
But you you don't because you want to cook yourself. You want to be able to have that product, your food freshly cooked. You want to be able to make it for yourself, make it for your family. You want to make a much wider variety of things for yourself. And if we could explore that with, I don't want to say tea drinking. The reason why
The reason why the company is named Yunomi Life and not You Me Tea is that we want to have, encourage this lifestyle of Yunomi is a pun meaning you know me in English, but in Japanese, it's a word that's literally drinking water, drinking warm water, but that is meant to mean drinking tea. But if we think about it as drinking
Zongjun (Sam) Li (47:45)
Mm -hmm.
Ian / Yunomi.life (47:48)
infusions basically and expand the idea from drinking tea to drinking many different types, infusing many different types of things, including tea, and requiring you to have like good tea in order to create a good quality infusion of tea and other things. Then we can recreate a new tea culture that is more vibrant in here in Japan and around the world even.
That's my dream.
Ryan (48:16)
at the Tea Institute at Penn State and it's basically a small student community where everyone was brewing tea all the time. And you would taste, you would critique, we would learn. It was a really interesting community to have. it's where our passion for tea got cultivated. So we deeply resonate with that mission.
Ian / Yunomi.life (48:22)
Institute.
Interesting.
Yeah, we don't focus too much on like matcha producers because truthfully there are not very many independent matcha producers. And the ones who are, like the farms who are matcha producers, the farms who sell their own matcha, very few of them are... So you have the multiple steps of production from farm to cup or the farming of it, the processing of
the refinement of it, which includes blending and toasting or green roasting, I would say, sorting out different parts. You have the grinding of it, you the storage of it. And there are specialists at each stage, right? Particularly at the refinement and the grinding stage. So the farmer comes in and they might, for example, have farming tencha. They might have their own Sensha factory.
or they might have their own refinement equipment, they probably don't have a tencha factory and refinement equipment and grinding equipment. Very few companies do have that, like completely vertically integrated. So at some point they're outsourcing their product to other people to do. And as soon as they outsource it, they lose control and they lose the ability to really like...
produce it as a craft rather than produce it as an OEM manufacturing. And because of that, you can have the same leaf from the same farm and get two different types of qualities of final product from a farm, direct farmers themselves, well as from versus a wholesaler who has more experience in refining something.
Or you might have a farm that saves their best quality for themselves too. So it's really hard to tell like what you're getting from which part of the industry. Unless you just like you have to like really examine and compare and contrast these things.
I wanted to have more you know independent farmers like everybody wants an independent farm independently farmed matcha but matcha is not farmed it's much as produced after several steps after the farm and the better matcha is produced really by the ones who can already have the ability to blend it.
Yeah, like we have a thousand tees but only like a couple dozen
We should go after some of the, we should go after more, I guess we should go after more independent, small scale, grinding, grinding companies.
as possible to be able to provide more options for
I look forward to seeing what your meal looks
Ryan (51:11)
well actually we'll be in Japan in late August, early September. We'll definitely route through Tokyo, hopefully with the machine in
Ian / Yunomi.life (51:11)
And,
You should come
in late, you should come in September rather than August.
Like as far away from August as you can get because it's very hot. Hot and humid. Yeah. If you could come in late September, that actually is better. Late September is much more comfortable. October is very nice because you get, also get the changing of the leaves in late October too. So it's very nice to visit. You could visit Kyoto.
Ryan (51:27)
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (51:42)
⁓ yeah.
Ryan (51:42)
⁓
yeah. I think around Kyoto.
Ian / Yunomi.life (51:47)
In the changing of the leaves, that is very nice. It's a very nice tank when it's at Kyoto. Hard to judge, know, it's either late October or early November, but if you can time it just right, it's very beautiful.
So I recommend that. I don't recommend August.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (51:59)
We'll be there.
Ryan (52:00)
Okay.
Ian / Yunomi.life (52:02)
We will probably have a very nice facility for you to visit when you come by that time. I'm signing the contract soon, hopefully, the lease contract soon. It's not gonna be a cafe, but it'll be kind of like an imitation cafe. Like I don't particularly want to run a but we want to have a space that we can greet people in that do experimentations and have a photo studio.
Ryan (52:08)
cool.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (52:08)
⁓
awesome.
Ian / Yunomi.life (52:29)
And so I'm renting a place that's very nice. Hopefully we can get all of the paperwork done.
So by the time you come, hopefully it'll be available.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (52:38)
Sounds good. Looking forward to
Ian / Yunomi.life (52:39)
Okay.
Ryan (52:41)
And thank you for being so generous with your time.
All right, that's all we have time for. Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider rating this podcast or sharing it with a friend. Thank you Ian from Yunomi for joining and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (52:57)
See in the future.
Ryan (52:57)
See you.
