Interview with Marc from Ooika

 

Ryan and Zongjun (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my cohost, Zongjun Hello, 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 interview experts. And today we are happy to have Marc from Ooika.

So Marc, before we jump into the interview, would you mind just share us and our listener a little bit about your origin story, your tea journey, how you end up getting into matcha, and the decisions to found Ooika.

Marc (00:31)
Okay, first, that was a great intro. It felt so, like, perfected. Okay, great. Anyway, hey guys. Yeah, I'm Marc. And I own Ooika, which is a matcha cafe in America. We specialize in milling matcha fresh in the United States. We've been importing ishi usu's stone mills. And we...

Ryan and Zongjun (00:34)
Yeah.

Hahaha!

Marc (00:55)
Sell online, single origin matcha, but we also have a matcha cafe in person as you can kind of see it's active back here. Where we mill matcha fresh every day and make all of our cafe items with fresh ground daily matcha. So that's Ooika. Me, I got into tea maybe a decade ago, maybe a little more. I lived in China and the person I was seeing at the time, her dad was an owner of a tea house in Shenyang.

So I spent a lot of time at the Tea house and kind of realized,

Ryan and Zongjun (01:25)
Thanks.

That's very far north Shenyang.

Marc (01:29)
Yeah, by North Korea. Good food.

Ryan and Zongjun (01:32)
Yeah, very interesting.

Marc (01:34)
yeah, anyway, I got interested in Chinese tea and eventually I found my way into Japanese tea when I lived in Japan, a little bit after China and kind of fell in love with matcha for a bunch of different reasons. Maybe some of them will come up today, but that's basically who I am and where I'm from, in terms of my, my interest in tea. And eventually during COVID, I decided that I was going to start milling my own matcha.

at home just like someone gets a beer at home and I ended up getting a mill you can see right here and milling matcha. It kind of grew from there.

Ryan and Zongjun (02:08)
But just like us, you got into tea through Chinese tea first and then later Japanese.

Marc (02:13)
Yeah, in fact, when I first got interested in Chinese tea, I really did not like Japanese tea. I had really big objections to it, I guess, which were well -founded, but I just kind of saw Japanese tea as being purely ceremonial. It wasn't about the taste, it wasn't about the tea itself, it was more about the ritual. And it turns out that was wrong, but...

That's why at first I was very hesitant to kind of even looking at Japanese tea.

Ryan and Zongjun (02:43)
Yeah, I actually have a very similar perspective back in the days. Because if you are in a traditional tea ceremony or chanoyu tea is really just an element of that entire ceremony. You have calligraphy, you have Chabana you have the whole etiquette that you need to follow in a tea house, and you have all these considerations in arranging all the utensils that match a certain theme or...

a certain season. Tea is really something that you just drink at the very end and appreciate. But it's not really like that. Like all of the other rituals is not meant for making a better cup of tea. It has its own ceremonial purpose, which I found it very interesting. It's very different from Chinese tea.

Marc (03:34)
Yeah, I'm on the same page. And I think one of the... This isn't always true, obviously, and everything I say today is first off coming from my filter, from my own perspective, but also maybe wrong, or maybe generalized. But a lot of times I've found many teahouses that do traditional Chanoyu they may not have so much interest in the tea itself. The tea is just a metaphor for concepts.

philosophical concepts of peace and care and empathy and self -realization and all these things are wonderful. But what I liked about Chinese tea at the time was there was something, I was more interested in the profane side rather than the sacred side, right? Like I liked the idea of a bunch of old Chinese men sitting outside in the sun with their shirts up over their belly, drinking Gong Fu Cha, sitting sunflower seeds on the ground talking about life.

beautiful young girls. That side of tea was so dirty and fun to me. And I didn't see that in Japanese tea at the time, but I've discovered it is there. There is a profane side, which is the craft of matcha. But there's also appreciating matcha and the textures, the flavors, the aromas, the aftertaste, all of the connoisseurship of matcha. But that part is separate from, in my opinion, the ceremony, Chanoyu

And Chanoyu is so distinct and visually beautiful that it gets all the attention. You don't even realize there is a connoisseur ship around it that maybe the farmers in Japan are paying attention to.

Ryan and Zongjun (05:11)
Interesting. Is there like a certain occasion that led to this transition of perspective? I guess it must be, must happen. Yeah, for you. Must happen when you were in Japan, I guess.

Marc (05:19)
For me?

Yeah, it was in Japan. It was in Japan. Because in Japan, when I was living there and I was in Kyoto and I started tasting the matcha, like you have to understand my experience with matcha was what most Americans experience is, which is Starbucks or was going to the grocery store and seeing a little can of like, you know, super cheap matcha sitting out at room temperature for months on the counter. And that was my experience. I didn't realize there was anything more to it than that.

And it was in Japan that I kind of realized there was and got a taste for matcha. And actually my personal view when it comes to the connoisseurship, matcha for me is significantly more interesting to drink and experience than Gong Fu Cha wine, chocolate, any of the other products that are based in some kind of connoisseurship. I can talk about why, but...

For me it is.

Ryan and Zongjun (06:21)
So like we've seen a pretty interesting trend happening in matcha. Like you have these really old traditional Japanese matcha companies been around for hundreds of years. But in the past five, 10 years, you see this explosion of single origin, single cultivar, now fresh milled, single origin, single cultivar, single farm, single farmer, with all of this increasing level of detail and transparency. Like...

What's your opinion on what's driving that change and how does that impact both the consumer and the people producing the tea?

Marc (06:57)
good question. so the answer to this is fairly simple. And that is it's the West. That's it. It's the West. It's the West getting interested in matcha. So here's something kind of interesting. there's a study I read recently about, it was a meta analysis of all the studies that had been done on green tea versus matcha and published on PubMed. And what you see is the, the, the research.

What they were looking at is how many more studies are done on green tea despite matcha having significantly more health benefits than green tea. This is what it comes down to. And they had a chart that showed that the number of PubMed articles that have been published on green tea has like, it's in the tens of thousands of articles on green tea that have been published about the health benefits. But on matcha, it's like less than a hundred. It's like nothing. There's no studies on it.

But the studies that exist started, actually I have the chart on my computer so I can maybe be a little more granular. Yeah, here we go, okay. So, here we go. I have, you guys can't see it but I do. The number of matcha related studies, there were one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. There were eight published on PubMed from 1965 to 2010. Eight, that's it. And.

Ryan and Zongjun (08:17)
Wow

Marc (08:18)
Green tea from that same period is in the thousands or tens of thousands. But what's interesting is matcha studies at 2015, now they're going up. So 2015 is sort of an interesting year because that's when the West started becoming aware of matcha. And to answer your original question, I am kind of going on a tangent. Matcha is extremely new. It has not really been in the West. And you know, just looking at.

Ryan and Zongjun (08:29)
Interesting.

Marc (08:45)
I mean, it's not like a direct correlation, but it gives you an idea of how little attention is being given to market in the West. Once it came to the West, people are looking at it through the perspective, obviously, as a Westerner, right? So we have single origin coffee. We have a tradition of single origin products, single origin wine. That's how we in the West understand luxury products.

where the blended products, blended scotch, blended wines, typically are seen as...

I don't want to use less precious, but in a way it is. But in matcha, in Japan, it's sort of the opposite, right? Where the base material, you want to have a chashi, a master blender that has the pedigree and the experience and generations of lineage, who has the masterful ability to take these base ingredients that may be rough in some ways.

Ryan and Zongjun (09:21)
Thank you.

Marc (09:40)
and make a harmonious blend that makes it better than the individual parts. And that blend, they want to be the same every year. But that's not what we care about in the West, generally speaking. So because of that, you, of course, not only see an explosion of matcha, but you see an explosion of matcha that is in the format that Westerners most appreciate. And the reason that's going to have a lot of implications is because, as most people here know,

The West is the only thing that is driving the Japanese tea industry away from destruction, I guess, maybe is the best way to put it.

Ryan and Zongjun (10:17)
The statistics are sad when you look at tea consumption in Japan. Yeah. It's a constant decline.

Marc (10:21)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, except for the exportation of logic.

Ryan and Zongjun (10:28)
Makes sense. That's where the growth markets are.

Marc (10:31)
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, and to answer your earlier question too about how that's affecting things, the tea companies and the farmers in Japan, this is radically shaking everything up. Things are, I don't know where things are going to go, but this is a pretty significant problem for the tea blending companies because what do they do? Their expertise, their contribution to the continuation of traditional macha culture,

for hundreds of years, if not a thousand years, has been the blending of these base ingredients and acting as a conduit for the farmer to get their tea to the final consumer. But without the necessity to blend, you have not only people like me who are directly importing tencha unground matcha and then serving it to the consumers in a direct way without the tea companies being involved at all.

but you also have a situation where some farmers are selling directly to end consumers from Japan. And that's really going to shake things up.

Ryan and Zongjun (11:42)
Yeah. Do you see a possibility of the preference of a Western consumer will impact the way how maybe Japanese farmers roti or what kind of cultivar gets grown in the future? Because the Japanese appreciation or their understanding of high quality matcha might not necessarily converge with the preference in the West.

Do you think that's true or do you see that it will be a possible outcome in the future?

Marc (12:14)
Of course. Yeah. There's already farmers that I work with that years ago. There's farmers that I work with now that are talking about making English websites. That would have been absurd a few years ago. There's no reason for a farmer to have an English website whatsoever. Because all their tea is bought by Japanese.

Ryan and Zongjun (12:32)
Yeah, you see them.

See them have Instagram accounts sometimes now. It's crazy.

Marc (12:38)
Yeah.

Yeah. And they're publishing more in English and, I'm sure they're going to find out in the future, what cultivars are more popular in the West and lean more into them. Another thing you see, this is really interesting. So organic matcha, organic, first off right now in Japan, this is sort of a blanket statement, but there is truth behind it. Organic matcha is almost always going to be inferior to conventional and.

With Japanese matcha, that's definitely true. And with most Japanese tea, that's true. However, a lot of the Japanese farmers know that Westerners are interested in organic. So there is at least two farms that I know of in Uji that are exceptional, traditional heritage farms that use handpicking, that use straw shading, these kind of very expensive, very specialized.

production methods that are starting to create organic fields where they're like, for example, one of the farmers, they have an organic field that they're doing traditional reed-shading and handpicking. And that's just, that's totally radical and different in new. And it's only in response to the West that they're doing it.

Ryan and Zongjun (13:53)
That's interesting.

like in the past, these blenders both were the gatekeepers to these blends, which had these brands that consumers knew, liked, and then bought. But they also were the ones setting the prices. So it's a really powerful seat to sit in when you're evaluating this Tencha, deciding what to buy and how much, and then using it and then setting those prices. They're setting prices on both sides.

But now if you can totally skip that, isn't that the more attractive option?

Marc (14:23)
Everything you said is true.

The tea blending companies in Japan, generally speaking, hold a lot of power. And they do set the prices. And there is always going to be some conflict and some strangeness because of that between the farmers and the tea blenders. But it's important to also recognize that the tea blenders are part of the story and the history of

matcha and of Uji and that They are, they're not adversaries. So one of the farmers I worked with, you know, we had conversations about this and you know, he may have his gripes about the tea blenders and the tea companies there, but.

they are both in it together. They're both trying to preserve Uji and matcha and they're both part of a shared history. So it, when we kind of think about it in the West and you say it, like you said, you said it, it does sound somewhat predatory, but it's sort of like family, you know, in a family, there might be one person who kind of, you know, kind of sets more of the rules than the other person, but,

In a healthy family, you know, both sides of the equation care for each other and help each other. And, and of course there's always going to be rivalry and some, some fighting and disagreement between family members. But again, in a healthy family, it's all towards the same goal. So I think in Uji that exists and Hoshino that exists, but you're right. Power is shifting and I don't know.

kind of what the result of that will be. But it is interesting.

Ryan and Zongjun (16:02)
It's interesting. Do you think it will help make the profession more attractive for younger farmers, especially because a lot of the older farmers, from what we understand, don't have really a succession plan? It's very unclear what the future looks like because it's a hard life.

Marc (16:22)
Yeah, it's a really good question. So for us, it's sort of obvious, like, matcha is really great. It tastes amazing. Great for you. It's worth preserving. Why don't they just want to do it? Why don't young people just want to get into it and like become entrepreneurs and figure out how to make it work? Now's a great time, especially to speak English. There's so much opportunity, but kind of a way to think about it, to put it into perspective is...

Ryan and Zongjun (16:47)
Mm -hmm.

Marc (16:51)
Think about like turn of the century, antique American walnut carved furniture. Isn't that worth preserving? Like, shouldn't I like become a woodworker and preserve that art? In China, I know it's actually pretty popular is to get like American style wood and furniture, especially with wealthy people there. So it's just not for a lot of young people attractive at all. Although I think...

Ryan and Zongjun (17:02)
Yeah.

Marc (17:12)
What will change that? I don't know if the shaking up will change it so much, but I think what will change it is Japanese, young Japanese that look at America and look at the West. The reason coffee is big there is because of the West, right? It's trendy. It's cool. It's interesting to drink coffee and be in coffee in Japan. And I think at some point when they see places like Ooika and they see Japanese tea becoming so for lack of, I'm sorry I'm saying this, but like on trend.

I think it's going to be more attractive to them to say like, wait a minute, this thing that we don't care about is now the hottest thing in the West. I want to get into this. I want to build it. And especially as there's more companies like Ooika that are actively supporting heritage farms and actively supporting farmers, there's actually a way for them to.

to do it profitably. That makes sense.

Ryan and Zongjun (18:04)
And also the fact that with internet and all of these platform access, you can actually have a stage for them. They can be recognized. I think that will really bring the charm into this industry and for more young people to get into.

Marc (18:13)
Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Right. And at the end of the day, it's applying demand. So we can kind of worry about this stuff. And I am worried. I think a lot of elements of matcha are in trouble. I don't think matcha is in trouble.

Ooika is doing something very unique by milling the matcha, but even less innovative companies that are just buying pre -ground matcha from Japan and like selling it, these kind of matcha cafes are popping up everywhere. And there's only so much matcha in Japan with the few farmers that are left. There's now less than 12 ,000 tea farms in Japan.

The more opportunity there is, the more money people can make, the more people are going to get into it and supply, right? The bigger problem is what kind of you saw with China, which is some areas got really popular and people who are not from that area and don't know how to process that form of tea, bought off all the farms and fields and make that form of tea, but they don't know the actual, the recipe to make that tea that originally made that region famous. Does that make sense?

Ryan and Zongjun (19:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

actual production of Jin Jun Mei is like a few thousand kilo every year, but every year there are like five million metric ton of tea got sold in China.

Marc (19:32)
Amazing.

So, with matcha it's the same, I think that, you know, if we have younger generations that come in, that's great, and starting something new, that's great, but traditional practices and techniques might be lost if there's not a direct lineage from father to son, for example. So, you know, who knows how long, I don't know,

heritage, reed and straw shaded tea fields are going to exist. But we'll see.

Ryan and Zongjun (20:05)
Interesting. What would you say your sourcing philosophy is? When you go to source tencha, evaluate tencha, what are you picking up on both context -wise? So what are you looking for in theory by asking questions or by looking around, but also by what you taste?

Marc (20:25)
Okay, so let's do concept, that's the easiest. I'm looking for farmers that are engaged primarily with heritage, traditional practices, such as handpicking, straw shading, things of that nature, and or farmers in...

extraordinary terroir

Ryan and Zongjun (20:45)
Mm -hmm.

Marc (20:46)
So.

And I guess the third thing is, is I also want a wide breadth of different regions. So there's an educational component for this. So in other words, like I do want some more affordable teas that are shaded with the direct covering that direct covering results in a, you know, mid tier, so to speak, tea, very affordable, but I want my customers to be able to taste the difference between this region and that region, between.

really expensive straw shading and you know, comparatively inexpensive direct covering the literally put a plastic tarp over a bush. I want contrast. So when I'm sourcing, I'm looking for all kinds of contrast. So my customers can develop a palette and understanding of matcha. I don't want that to be gate kept. I think a lot of that is gate kept. So that's a big component of what I'm doing.

Ryan and Zongjun (21:38)
Yeah. Like

a way to work out and appreciate. Yeah. And also offering the options for, you know, people to pick their own consumer journey. Yeah.

Marc (21:49)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, so like that's something that's on in my mind, I guess. And in terms of taste, that's contingent on a lot of factors. But when you do the tencha examination, you're looking for specific things. First off, there are studies that show in Japan, it's really cool, Japanese studies that show that the price of matcha in Japan typically correlates pretty well.

with the amount of L -theanine content. So it is not an oversimplification to say the more savory your matcha is, the higher quality it is. That is usually pretty well, you know, trending. But with that said, I'm looking for savoriness. I'm looking for sweetness. I'm looking for different cultivars of different characteristics. So I want to make sure that when I'm tasting

the cultivar that I'm tasting that some of those characteristics show through. For example, Uji -Hakari should be like very bright and kind of sunny, for lack of a better word. Gokou should be more deep and rich. saemidori should have a natural sweetness. So if I taste the saemidori cultivar, the tencha, and it doesn't have that sweetness to it, then for me, it's maybe not as interesting. I'm also looking for off -

flavors or too much astringency, too much bitterness, which may signal issues with not long enough shading duration. The shading maybe was not done properly. I shouldn't say that because it's not because the farmers are not doing it properly. It's just that to my preference, what I'm looking for are these characteristics, I guess. Also, some tencha might have too much hika in it. It might be too much

roasty aroma. Okay, just for example, a lot of times, I won't say the name, but there's a coffee shop that I absolutely love. They're actually my favorite coffee shop in the world. But their matcha is really, really bad. And the problem with their matcha is they use a

They use a matcha that they over roast.

And the over -roasting gives it what's called hika It's like a fire aroma, hi -fire -ka aroma. And matcha should have a tiny bit of like, toastiness to it. But what you can do is if you have a matcha that's like, not very good, because it's not shaded well enough or long enough, or it's just a very commercial grade, low quality tea, is you can roast it.

to cover up a lot of the flaws. So if there's too much roastiness, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, and by the way, that coffee company, you know, it makes sense that they over roast this tencha to make matcha because it has a lot of coffee, roasty notes in it. But for me, that would be a flaw. It's not desirable. So anyway, all those kind of features together, kind of paint.

Ryan and Zongjun (24:21)
Hmm.

Marc (24:45)
what I'm looking for when I'm sourcing the potential. And of course, every year it's going to be different. Some, some vintages are going to be better from one farm to another, from one year to another. But, yeah.

Ryan and Zongjun (24:56)
Okay. How does the flavor of the tencha when you're doing that evaluation translate into the taste of the matcha?

How do you make a prediction? Yeah, a predictive taste change. Because like, Tencha is pretty much like Maocha, you know, the concept in Chinese tea. Like, after processing, there's certain flavor is going to change, or either enhance or mask, or, you know, might totally disappear.

Marc (25:13)
Yeah. Yeah.

That's a hard question. So I would say first off, I'm absolutely not an expert at this. So for example, in Japan, you can become an expert in tea blending and tea evaluation on those 10 levels. So like 10th degree black belt, so to speak, of tencha evaluation. So I'm zero. So take everything I say with a pretty big grain of salt. But for me, when you evaluate the tencha,

Ryan and Zongjun (25:39)
out.

Marc (25:49)
The way you evaluate it is actually very similar to how you evaluate tea in China. So you steep the unground matcha, the tea leaves, in boiling water for five minutes.

and you're really looking for the flaws.

So there's a few things you're looking for. One, you smell the aroma. The aroma is pretty close, at least for the final aroma of the matcha when it's brewed with water. The other thing is when you taste it, for me, any flavor notes that you have in there, just multiply by 10. So if you get a little bit of sweetness, multiply it by 10. If you get a little bit of bitterness, multiply it by 10. If you get a little bit of like funkiness, multiply it by 10.

So for me, that's kind of what I think about when I taste it. Also, you can get a lot of information from the look of the leaves, even when they're wet. So this is kind of interesting.

At the Japanese national tea competition, all the teas are evaluated in different categories. The look of the dry leaf, the color of the steep liquid, the aroma and the taste. But matcha or tencha, underground matcha, is the only category in the Japanese tea competition that has an additional category of evaluation that's completely unique only to matcha. And that is the evaluation of the color of the leaf when it's wet. And the reason is...

Ryan and Zongjun (27:06)
⁓

Marc (27:09)
because the color of the wet leaf after it's taken out of the water, you let it sit for about 10 to 15 minutes. The color of the wet leaf after it's been sitting for about 10 to 15 minutes is about the same color as the matcha, which is kind of cool. Yeah. So yeah, we evaluate that. so all these things kind of come together and give you a vague picture. I think the more,

Ryan and Zongjun (27:22)
interesting. interesting.

Marc (27:33)
The more specialized and and you are, the more nuanced you'll get with forming the vague picture into the final matcha. But it is pretty easy to detect certain things like the amount of roastiness, the amount of like sweetness versus vegetal in the tencha the amount of bitterness. Especially when you do, the easiest way to do this is to take a really inexpensive, you know, like second,

seasoned harvested tea, tencha, and then evaluate it next to like a pretty high end, you know, 60 day shaded tea. And you'll see it's a totally different experience. And the more contrast there is, the more sophistication you can get in the evaluation. It's really easy. Even, you know, anyone in this room, anyone listening or watching can tell the difference between like, for example, I don't know, one of our hundred dollars jars of Uji that's been shaded for 60 days.

versus a 20 day shaded second harvest or third harvest even, I'm showing. The smell is totally, totally different.

Ryan and Zongjun (28:37)
Very cool.

Speaking of which, so Marc, you run an ishi usu in your cafe. Can you share a little bit of experience of what's the experience like running an ishi usu in America? And when you mill Tencha, does it taste a little bit different if it's milled in Japan, in an ishi usu in Japan, or in your ishi usu in your cafe shop?

Or do you think that like Tencha travels well, you know, in Japan or in the States?

Marc (29:10)
Alright, well let me attack the questions one at a time and I might ask you to repeat the second question. No, no, it's fine. This is really fun for me. So milling, stone milling is quite difficult. It's hard to scale. It's hard to assign to other people to do. So there's a few things to remind you. First off, the space has to be kept very precisely. So it's pretty hot outside. I'm wearing a big sweatshirt. It's because it's pretty cold in here.

Ryan and Zongjun (29:13)
Yeah, it's a lot of questions at a time. Sorry.

Marc (29:38)
You have to control for humidity, you have to control for temperature, you have to control for light. There's a lot of elements that go into milling matcha in the U .S. that make it challenging, where if you had a giant warehouse in Japan and you can just have the mills all set up, perfectly humidity and temperature controlled, it has some advantages, right? With that said, the other difficulty with the stone mills, the stones are heavy and you have to pick them up and move them. And with Ooika,

many of my staff cannot physically do that. In fact, I think I'm the only member of staff that can physically move the stones, which again is a challenge. So, ⁓ especially if I'm sick or I'm traveling, right? So stones have to be moved once or twice a week. It has to move, be moved every time you change cultivars and you have to clean them. the stones are very, very delicate and can break very easily.

Ryan and Zongjun (30:19)
Yeah.

Marc (30:32)
The machine is very dangerous, so if people put their hands in it, it's not good. And worse yet, at a cafe like ours, where we're milling every single day, the stones wear down. And when the stones wear down, they have to be shipped back to Japan. And the shipping of these stones, which weigh a lot, is very expensive, as you can imagine. So all of these things together make it a headache.

There have been people that ask me to have a cafe and they say, I want to get a ishi usu It's like, okay, be careful. It's challenging. There are a few places that have ishi usu as you guys know. But even with them, they have the smaller countertop model and they're not milling all their matcha latte stuff because to mill enough matcha to service a cafe like this,

Ryan and Zongjun (31:04)
Yeah.

Marc (31:21)
Two mills is not enough. So we actually have another machine that will be here in a week to meet capacity. Just this small cafe in a small town. So, milling in the U .S. is, is, is challenging. It does make a better product, but does the average consumer know the difference? I think so, but maybe not everyone thinks, thinks that way. To answer your second question about what does it taste different?

So, yes, to me it does. I think for a lot of people, matcha is so new that even if you buy fake matcha that was produced in Indonesia and it wasn't shaded at all and it's brown powder, they would say, okay, this is matcha. You know what I mean? It's sort of like Folgers When coffee first came to the US, before third wave,

Ryan and Zongjun (31:51)
⁓ okay.

Yeah.

Marc (32:12)
the first wave of coffee where it was all like Folgers dehydrated coffee. If you ask the average person, is this coffee? They'd say, yeah. You know, and if someone made the first roastery in the US that ground coffee fresh, like people might ask them, well, you know, it's still coffee. It still tastes like coffee. Well, okay. But there's a difference between third wave single origin pour over ground fresh roasted, creamy.

roasted well versus, you know, coffee that's, you know, roasted and ground months ago that's packaged. There's a certain level of freshness that you can detect. And it would be kind of interesting in the future when Ooika do a milling of matcha, keep it for like three months, and then do a milling of the same Tencha and do it side by side of the freshness between the two. I think it would be pretty apparent. But we're so new.

Matcha in the country is so new that this kind of thing probably isn't required, you know, for the average consumer because even just the fact that it's real matcha from Japan is a massive improvement over like the quasi -matcha that kind of sits in shelves for $10 for 100 grams, you know.

Ryan and Zongjun (33:25)
Interesting. Yeah. And I could see, you know, not only is this taste better, but everything I've been reading in the literature is that it's just so much more nutritious. Like if you think of just the amount of EGCG that just disappears from the world by the fact that most matcha sits in a warehouse for like six months to a year, with a number of metric tons of very nutritious things that are just lost.

Marc (33:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan and Zongjun (33:52)
because it's been milled so far away from the consumer's cup.

Marc (33:56)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's fascinating. So to give them very specific numbers, 30 % of the total antioxidant load of matcha is gone within six months, assuming perfect storage, vacuum sealed, oxygen absorber in refrigeration, 30 % in six months. If it's not perfect storage, I don't even know what it would be. But by year, you've lost such a massive, like you said, nutrient load, but

Ryan and Zongjun (34:09)
Hmm.

Marc (34:22)
It's not just that, it also, the flavors change. So I have a reel coming out soon that talks about specifically light and how light changes matcha. But basically,

The everything goes wrong after matches ground everything because you're exposing these five micron particles to massive oxidative stress and you can't prevent it even with perfect storage. You can slow it down. You can't prevent it. Everything happens from the fats that that various flavor right and there's fat in matcha. The fats go rancid, going off flavors. The chlorophyll is broken down.

into I forget the name of the chemical, but a chemical that is responsible for the yellow and brown color, which has off flavors, the volatile chemicals, the volatile compounds, which give matcha the taste and aroma that your brain can process. They just are lost. They evaporate and they break down. So that happens the minute you start breaking it into matcha. And because the particles of matcha are so small,

You know, people understand that if you grind coffee, a lot of the aroma and flavors vanish. They're gone after you grind it, right? We know this. They say we should drink coffee after it's been ground in one month. Matcha is more delicate than coffee because the particles are smaller, significantly, exponentially smaller. So this idea that like the status quo is matcha that's been ground.

six months ago, minimum, and usually not even in very good storage conditions. That to me is absurd. And that's why Ooika exists. Because the mission statement of Ooika is very specific. It's preserving heritage matcha. Like that's it, right? And how can you preserve heritage matcha if it doesn't taste good? Why would anyone want to preserve it?

Like why would you want to preserve these really expensive processes? You know, our matcha, like, you know, a hundred dollar jar for 20 grams, that's a lot. Like why is it worth it if it doesn't taste good? So that's why we have to, we have to know of ourselves, but yeah,

Ryan and Zongjun (36:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's totally right. I've had the great fortune of getting to try some of your highest -end matcha. And I remember writing back to you after trying one of your Uji Hikari samples. It's like, I think this is the best matcha I've ever had. And that's still true. Because even in Japan, fresh -grown matcha isn't really a thing. You go to Tokyo, you go to Kyoto, you even go to Uji. No one's putting mill dates. You don't know.

Marc (36:54)
No.

Ryan and Zongjun (37:01)
Like, it's, it's, you have no idea how long it's been sitting there. And no one talks about it either. It's pretty weird that that doesn't even exist in the culture that it's from and that should appreciate it the most. I have a hard time like squaring that. Yeah. I guess it's a pretty new concept. Even to the West, I guess, cause you don't really see that in coffee until like very recently in third wave coffee to put a mill date on the coffee bag.

Marc (37:01)
Yeah.

Right.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. Mill dates you don't really see. It's coffee, it's becoming more common. And matcha, it's never, like I've never really seen, I don't know if there's any company that puts a mill date on matcha. And,

I mean, to be fair, we don't even put a mill date on it. That's because we just say it's fresh milled, but something, there's two new things, and I guess I'll announce it in this podcast that Ooika is doing. First, Ooika, now we're gonna try to make, the other problem, this is just a bigger kind of topic, which is really authentic, high grade matcha is really expensive. And one of the reasons for that is in order to mill,

You have to have a minimum amount of material you put in the machine.

because you have loss. And loss is significant.

So this is why there's no mill dates on most matcha is because in order to make it really profitable, you need to mill large amounts of matcha. Because again, you have to count for that waste. So when you large mill amounts, then you're gonna have a lot of product and let you can sell it all at once. It doesn't really make a lot of sense. Right? So that's why.

It's really challenging to put mill dates on and really challenging to even think about this kind of concept. So that's one of the challenges.

It's made worse when the matcha, the tencha is heritage, where it's really expensive because then you get like exponentially more expensive jars of matcha. And the average consumer in America is willing to pay about $35 for what they consider to be good matcha. Even though $35 for a jar of matcha is like pretty low.

especially if you want something, you know, terroir specific and heritage produced. So, the good news is that with us, we found a way around this problem. And as of next week, we're introducing 10 gram jars of all of our matcha. So our really expensive jars that no one can afford 20 grams of, we're going to be able to sell it at that around $35 mark with 10 gram jars.

Ryan and Zongjun (39:24)
⁓

Marc (39:34)
And we found a way around the big hairy problem of small milling without having to come to waste and still being able to mill 100 % of online orders to order. So when you place an order with Ooika matcha online, the matcha is milled and shipped within 24 hours. Even not even just our matcha mill club, but all matcha is milled to order. So that's starting next week. And every jar will have the mill date, which is just going to be the day that we ship it to you.

Ryan and Zongjun (40:03)
That's awesome. That's cool.

Marc (40:05)
Yeah, it's exciting, so

Ryan and Zongjun (40:06)
Let's be quite the production challenge, especially like cleaning between like each run. yeah. I can't even imagine. Do you need any help?

Marc (40:12)
Yeah.

it's

a lot, but we found a way to kind of solve the problem. And they let us do everything that I want, which is milling order, milling matcha order, and 10 gram units without having like, without hemorrhaging money and making it impossible to scale. So the big problem is still lifting the stones. So we have another mill coming that will help solve some of the production issues.

But that means more, more lifting for me, unfortunately.

Ryan and Zongjun (40:43)
we have gone through a significant amount of the question list. Yeah. Maybe we do this one to.

Marc (40:48)
What was interesting about

your questions, this isn't really for anything, but your questions, I thought were really astute. They showed a real sensitivity and awareness to sort of the politics and some of the less known aspects, specifically the tea blenders versus the farmers. And I just, I was really impressed by your questions.

Ryan and Zongjun (41:11)
Thank you. Actually a large part of it's seeded from your content. You're talking about matcha in a way that no one else is. We were just complaining earlier that it's crazy. Everyone's content is the exact same thing. It's so boring. Everyone's just saying the same stuff. And Ooika is really the first brand voice that is actually like on the bleeding edge of knowledge in English.

Marc (41:15)
No.

Ryan and Zongjun (41:38)
And probably in Japanese too. Yeah, because no one really cares about and talks about it in a way that you do. And now we are curious too. Yeah.

Marc (41:49)
Thanks, it's really inspiring and great to hear. I love it, I love talking about this and I love matcha. So my hope is to make it more easily understood so people can appreciate it and understand why there's a difference between a matcha that's labeled being Uji Cha that was not made in Uji and the same matcha made in Uji labeled as Uji.

and sort of the differences between them. So, yeah.

Ryan and Zongjun (42:21)
It takes you to the perfect segue to the last question, which is, we're now in the year 2024, and what do you think the attributes of a successful matcha company that would be founded around this era, what attributes would they have? Because I feel like the knowledge gaps are shrinking, it's easier to learn more about matcha. AI is going to make it way easier to communicate.

Marc (42:42)
Yeah.

Ryan and Zongjun (42:48)
language barriers aren't going to be a thing. Japan has amazing infrastructure. It's not like Yunnan, where you have to literally drive eight hours through the mountain and hike, you know, two hour hike. So you can target ads on social media. So the traditional hardest problems to solve to make a successful brand, business, to have a platform are changing. So like what...

Marc (42:57)
Mm -hmm. Yep. Yep.

Ryan and Zongjun (43:17)
What's the new hardest problem?

Marc (43:20)
Ooh, man. Yeah, I read that question before and I was trying to kind of formulate an answer. The knowledge gap is shrinking, which is great.

And really, really, it's fantastic, right? And that's my hope is that that knowledge gap goes as small as possible, so the maximum number of people can understand matcha. And I think that the old way of opening a matcha company was gatekeeping. The old way of having a Western company that does matcha was to steep it, lacking a better pun, in mystery. And that's why you see a lot of matcha brands that are American matcha brands.

that have not really great common descriptors of what you're drinking and have very mysterious photos on their website and don't make things very easy to understand. That way of marketing matcha has worked and has been great for the past 10 years. And it will continue to work in the future. There's a certain level of luxury that comes from that kind of messaging. But I think that to get...

regular people interested in matcha.

look, I get it. It's cringe and it's weird for me to jump on a camera and like talk, you know, and make all these videos but making them really easily digestible and simple and making that knowledge more accessible. I think

increases the client base that that Ooika will have. And I think that anyone who wants to make a matcha business, you're gonna have to find out what approach you want to take to making that knowledge digestible. Because even if the knowledge is out there, which most of it isn't, right, there's so little knowledge about traditional matcha, like the craft of it, the production, the cultivation. But even once it's all out, like how do you make it digestible with content?

with videos. So I don't know if that answers your question, but I think that the future of opening a matcha company here is going to be personality based. It's going to be based on how you take the information that's starting to come out from Japan and make it digestible for people. And also,

Now is a great time to open matcha businesses.

But I think you need to figure out what is your value add? What are you doing that is unique?

How is your matcha, how is what you're doing contributing to matcha better than anyone else? And there's no one answer to that.

So it could be making it more approachable. It could be, for example, making a matcha protein drink, a protein powder, and selling that and focusing on the health aspects of it. So I don't know what it is for you if you want to go into matcha. But I mean, I guess like any business, figuring out what is your unique selling proposition that you leverage that you do better than everyone else. And then how do you market it with content that makes it understandable? I don't know if any of that's specific to matcha. I think it's with any business, but.

Now is a really good time to be in matcha because the industry is growing and the information is becoming more accessible and going to Japan is easy and talking with the farmers is easy and finding the farmers is easy. Everything is easy. It's not again, like, you know,

Ryan and Zongjun (46:26)
Well, that's a great, great time to live. Yeah. Exciting. Cause you've been seeing matcha, you know, make a presence outside of Japan for quite a long time. It was really only recently that you're starting to see all these kinds of new movements going on. to be vendor driven too.

because that's where a lot of that level of education is done and similar to what you were saying. But without this knowledge, no one can develop a set of complex preferences. I can't say that I like Uji Hikari as a cultivar, I've never had it. If I don't know anything about it, I don't know the way it's grown. When you see an Instagram reel or see one of your Instagram reels and you actually show us the physical bush, it's actually the first time I ever saw what those leaves look like.

and like I'm able to do it just for my own personal consumer journey, able to develop preferences. Then we're removing back all of these like filters, all of this mystery, all of these black boxes so that, you know, I would want to spend as a consumer, the price premium for these more specifically products than for, you know, some random blend. I don't really know what's in it. It's supposedly blended by someone famous and knowledgeable, but tastes like.

good matcha versus like wow I'm drinking something with intention and that's really special.

Marc (47:48)
Yeah, actually that gives me an idea. I bet you a lot of these blending companies, if they start promoting their master blenders and make it more about them, that would be kind of interesting to make it about their stories. But anyway, yeah, yeah, it's kind of interesting. But yeah, not just you do, yeah. Yeah, with, you know, whiskies and all that.

Ryan and Zongjun (48:01)
Yeah, it's a celebrity blender.

You see that in other industries too.

Yeah, wine, quiet comment. Yeah.

Marc (48:18)
Yeah, no doubt.

Ryan and Zongjun (48:20)
All right. To wrap up, sort of as a final question, do you have any questions for us?

Marc (48:25)
Yeah, what's the next matcha product you're gonna work on after you finish the Sanko bowl?

Ryan and Zongjun (48:32)
yeah, so we're working on a device to mill matcha fresh. So we're in the prototyping stages of it. So we're actually in the Guangdong, Shenzhen area, where a lot of these consumer hardware is made. And we're in the active process of setting up a big experimental grid to figure out what parameters work, which ones don't work.

Marc (48:32)
that you're allowed to talk about.

Ryan and Zongjun (48:56)
and try to get as close as we can to the quality that would come out of an Ishi Usu to sort of redistribute the ability to mill matcha fresh, to not rely on, you know, what's more of an industrial piece of equipment shrunk to a coffee grinder. And to save Marc's arm from too much Ishi Usu

Marc (49:18)
Awesome.

Great. Well, yeah, I technically knew a little bit about that because I got to talk with you about it a while ago, but I want the listeners to know too. It's really exciting.

Ryan and Zongjun (49:29)
Thanks. Awesome.

Marc (49:31)
Cool.

It was really good talking with you both and it's very exciting to talk about matcha So I hope that you both can come back here again in the future and for any listener, feel free to stop by Ooika. We're in Lawranceville, New Jersey, about maybe 45 minutes to an hour outside New York and maybe worth the detour. So I hope to see you guys soon.

Ryan and Zongjun (49:54)
definitely worth the detour. We've been to this space. It's impressive.

Marc (49:58)
Great. All right. Thanks so much.

Ryan and Zongjun (50:01)
 right.

All right. I think that's all we have time for. So thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend or giving us five stars. And thank you, Marc, for coming. And we'll see you on the next