Matcha Labeling (Part 1) What is Matcha?

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my co -host, Zongjun Hello. And we're the co -founders behind Sanko Matcha products. So we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we're going to talk about matcha labeling, part one, what is matcha? So Ryan, can you give us a short summary of this article? Yeah. So I divided it into two portions.

The first is a brief discussion on why labeling is important in general. And part one of this series is what is matcha and the way it's labeled.

and what the different classifications are, what the different rules are around what can and cannot be labeled as matcha. And spoiler alert, there's really actually not that many rules. So to deep dive a little bit on the first part, why is labeling important? In different industries, you see different conventions for the way that products get labeled. So for example, in a product category like beer,

Typically, something is given a name, and then there's some descriptive subtitle. This product's name is blank, and it is a New England Hazy IPA, for example. And it's a pretty well -understood convention, where every product kind of gets this abstract name. In matcha and in tea more generally, it's a big mess. It's as big of a mess as labeling in wine.

anyone who first walks into a wine store and gets into wine at first, you walk in and you're flooded with names of regions, names of grapes, names of producers, names of blends, and it's very hard to untangle what it is that you're actually buying.

Yeah, without the formative experience of the implication of those regions, what exactly does a Pinot Noir taste like? Or what exactly is the difference between a Syrah and a Syrahs? It's very confusing probably to a lot of beginners. Well, Syrah and Shiraz are actually the same grape, just whether or not it's grown in Australia or grown in the rest of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Extra confusing.

Although they do have very distinctive flavor profile. That's true. It's even more confusing. I was recently following a wine person on Instagram and they were describing that in France, they almost will never label the cultivar on the label. You kind of just have to know, but you'll never see a Cabernet Sauvignon, a Merlot, a Chirac on the label explicitly. You just have to know, ⁓ this region of Elmitage,

is Syrah which just compounds the confusion. It's even worse in matcha because most of these old blends don't have transparent labels, so you don't really know what it is you're drinking. Yeah, it's intentional to hide what exactly is going into your can of matcha that you just purchased for $80.

It's very intentional, the artificial barrier to hide or to shelter the information behind the master blenders. Yeah, and just to illustrate this point, and please excuse my pu-erh Japanese pronunciation, I have pulled up a website where you can buy matcha for multiple different traditional vendors. And I'm going to read off a couple of names from a diverse group of vendors, so we're not picking on any...

particular matcha brand. But imagine you're a consumer, you went to this website and you see things like matcha, Yōyō no Shiro matcha, Hekiun no Mukashi. matcha, roe, hoo hoo, matcha, die, yo -kyu. It's getting painful, Ryan. It is painful. I can't pronounce these as an American.

I've had some Japanese exposure, I still can't pronounce these very well, and I can't even remember them. I do have some Japanese background, so shiro means like white, and mukashi means like nostalgic or nostalgia. But still, what does it mean? I have no idea. And you can keep scrolling down the page and there's around a hundred products with all of these very obscure Japanese names.

And I'm willing to bet that most people are not actually able to develop a set of complex preferences with names like those. Maybe for one or two that they found that happened to be a particularly good value. But for all of these, I don't know. I think it would take me a lifetime to figure out what in the world the difference is. And you click into them and there's no information. I don't know what cultivar it is. And sometimes I don't even know what the intention of the blend is.

Like really for someone like me, I'm looking at the color, the price, and maybe the reviews. And then there's some very long description about the poetic name. And it's really complicated when you start studying macho, when you're trying to find value. Not only are you searching for your own preferences, but you're also trying to find value. It's what most consumers are doing. And the current ecosystem makes it very difficult to do that.

So, Zongjun, why do you think some categories of really good naming conventions, where it's either descriptive or there's usually a little sub -description so you know what you're getting, and why some are so complicated, like in wine or in tea? That's a good question. I mean, for good classification, you really need to have a...

build this structure of categories. And these categories can be subdivided into more detailed categories so that you really have a very structural sense of what exactly you end up deciding or end up going into different routes. What exactly.

is the difference between a highland versus a lowland versus a space -eye versus a eye -lay. And what exactly are you, you know, what's the the mull choice, what's the the pitted level, what's the level of PPM. Like all of these informations help you to make decisions of what to, essentially what to expect by the end of the day. By having those...

information in the label, I think really would help a consumer to have the ability to build up this knowledge base to be able to reference in the future that, okay, I tried this new scotch, I tried this new wine, and it tastes so different or so similar to a wine or a whiskey that I've tried before. And they would be able to have the comparison, have the reference and be able to...

to develop a preference on top of that. Whereas in Matcha, I think it's really hard. Yeah, because even Wine has it a little bit better. A lot of places from the New World, or even now in the back of some labels, you have some sense of what's in these blends. But that really hasn't fully crossed over into Matcha yet. It's still very much this black box blend.

And the only thing that you can cling to as a consumer to develop preferences are some poetic name that I'm just going to use myself as an example that I cannot pronounce. And to be honest, I cannot remember. We've been ordering the same matcha to do all of our marketing videos. I don't know for the past six months. I still don't know what it's called. I have to keep the link in an email to refind it. ⁓ that's hilarious. I mean, ⁓

I think part of the reason is that these master blenders they really need to have create this some sort of almost like a business mode to protect their plan, protect their knowledge and create this artificial difficulty for more people to be able to, you know, outcompete them. Yeah. And also, I guess the historic business model and the way the economics worked for tea, you know, a lot of these

are custom blended for the preferences of certain Iemoto or the grandmasters of Urasenke Omotesenke, other Japanese tea schools, or even certain temples have their own custom blends that you can buy, and they have different price points. But even within just Omotesenke or Urasenke, I mean, you sometimes have 11 or 12 different levels within each, all with different poetic names.

And I'd love to understand what the intention is behind them, but no one's really explaining that. And it's a very expensive thing as a consumer to find. And even if you do learn that, that knowledge is non -transferable. Whereas you buy matcha from some of these newer matcha companies that are doing single cultivar, single origin, right? I know, okay, I have actually a pretty good understanding of what Asahi cultivar matcha tastes like, or Uji -Hakari, or Yabukita, or Okumidori

And I can start developing a real set of preferences, which is so exciting about the new generation of vendors that we're seeing and the labeling and the way that they're changing labels so that people can actually develop a set of complex preferences versus living in this sort of world of mystery. So Ryan, some people might argue that, you know, like there are merits of all these matcha blends. You know, it's just like blend whiskey or blend pu-erh

you know, like blend of certain or different types of cultivars or ingredients can create a more complex flavor or a more consistent flavor for a specific product. Do you agree or disagree about that opinion? And what's your take? Yeah. Well, I mean, it really treats us as a product, right? A product that is replicable, right? Because the new age of vendors, right, they're even giving vintages.

It's not really a replicable product in the same way that Coca -Cola is or Pepsi is or Budweiser beer is. But that is what those old Japanese companies are trying to do. Where these new age specialty matcha companies, they're embracing the seasonal differences. They're not looking for consistency. They're looking for a really good tea with an interesting story to tell.

to highlight the differences of the fact that it's an agricultural product and maybe some years it's better or worse. Maybe if it has a little bit of age on the tencha had a chance to calm down a little bit or playing with all these different parameters to kind of expose what makes it fun. And the weird part is all of that stuff that we as sort of Western minded people who enjoy specialty food and beverage products enjoy is all in the backend.

of these traditional companies. It's like part of the process, part of the manufacturing. They're trying to abstract all of that away from you. now it's being moved straight into the light. And these new companies and even some producers now have a huge megaphone to start talking and promoting these specialty ideals on this inherent differences that we get from the fact that tea and matcha is an agricultural product.

So Ryan, let's look back to the topic. What is matcha? What do you think is matcha? And if we were to create a new label system for matcha, what needs to be on those labels? Yeah. So there's a subcategory in the article that we wrote that's titled The Murky World of Defining Matcha, which I think is a pretty nice visualization of what this actually is, especially because liquid matcha is so opaque.

But it depends. And let's just focus on Japan for a second. In Japan, for something to be sold as matcha, it needs to come from tencha It needs to be milled from tencha. And there's not a whole lot of regulations about what matcha itself needs to be. But one of the biggest ones has to be from tencha. And then there's a little more restriction on what tencha can be. So it needs to be shade grown. It has to be steamed.

for the heat treatment and the reason it needs to be steamed is that's sort of what makes green tea green tea. There's an enzyme in tea called polyphenol oxidase, which is how you get the difference between something like a green tea or an oolong or a black tea, which is also called red tea in Japanese or Chinese. When you need to denature that enzyme and there's two ways to do it, there's mostly two ways to do it, there's the traditional Chinese way, which is basically in a large wok.

But you could also steam it, which is actually an ancient Chinese method that has since been lost in mainland China. So it needs to be steamed to denature the polyphenol oxidase, which keeps it green. Because PPOs the enzyme that turns a leaf from green to brown.

and then it cannot be rolled. So typically something that you see in green tea processing, or in almost all tea processing, is you roll the leaves to break open the cell walls, bring out those all of those flavors, so that when you steep the loose leaf tea, a lot of the...

extraction can happen much faster and not all of these really delicious stuff is locked in these leaves. But in the case of matcha, you're milling it and you're creating such high surface area that you actually want to lock in all of those things until you mill it. Which is one reason why Tencha is much more stable than matcha because you haven't exposed all of that, all of those flavor compounds yet to air.

That was just a very long answer, that it needs to be steamed, it cannot be rolled, and it should be shade -grown in order to be milled into matcha. But from there, to my knowledge, there aren't any other countries that have strict definitions on what can be sold as matcha, at least not at this point. So everything after this is kind of the way you interpret it. And this is where a large amount of disagreement

as this is real matcha or this is fake matcha or we should call this powdered green tea or this is authentic matcha. That's where all of these arguments come in after this point. Yeah, like one of the major points that people really is arguing with each other is where exactly matcha should be from. Doesn't necessarily need to be Japanese or if anything else produced outside of Japan.

can be called matcha. Yeah. I mean, the real question is matcha champagne or is matcha wine? Right? If it's champagne, it's regionally protected. Right? And I think, you know, it's going to require everyone to get on board. In fact, I think it's illegal to sell anything as champagne that is not from champagne in every country except for Russia. They're the only ones that do not recognize that food labeling standard.

and they have their own product, which is actually incredibly sweet and kind of disgusting, that they call champagne, because apparently Stalin loved champagne, and they did some domestic production. But really, the entire world recognizes that standard, right? Or is it wine, which can be grown in any country? That's the question. And that's not only for the Japanese to decide, but for the rest of the world to decide. And it might be too late. The cat's already out of the bag. Like,

A lot of matcha that is being served in the world was not grown in Japan. Or it was only slightly processed in Japan to call it a Japanese product, even though those leaves came from bushes that were planted outside of Japan's borders. So the cat might be already out of the bag. But... Yeah, I don't know. You know, one could argue that matcha is a Japanese word.

it's like champagne is a French term and you know like calling something that's you know a Chinese powder green tea, Chinese matcha will like sound weird to not only the Japanese people but also the Chinese people too. So one will argue that you know like powder green tea should really be called Mocha which is you know the original Chinese name for powder green tea in China.

But what's extra confusing is if you show someone in China, we're gifting, we're doing a lot of product development in China, so we gift a lot of matcha because we're a matcha company. And we gift it to someone, ⁓ this is mocha Ruben, mocha Japanese, ⁓ mocha But I mean, that's what the Chinese would call matcha. So it's, I mean, it's complicated. Yeah. I mean, like to a very large degree, this has been really coined as a...

a product from Japan. It's a cultural element almost. So, you know, it's very hard to decide. By the end of the day, it's probably just a game for, you know, about names. But in nature, right, like there are a lot of tea, a lot of matcha that's produced actually outside of Japan. Yeah. And they have identical infrastructure.

I mean, we were talking with a major agricultural investor the other day who does a lot of investments in China. And she was saying, yeah, you know, China has the perfect set of natural resources for it. And all of these processing companies are importing Japanese equipment. There's really not that much of a difference why you couldn't displace the growing to another location if you're honoring what matcha should be.

I don't think anyone should be selling or labeling something that hasn't been shaded as matcha or something that's already been rolled. You know, tencha should be unrolled, those flavors should be locked in. I don't think anyone should be selling that as matcha because that's not what consumers expect. When people do studies that matcha is healthy or matcha is delicious or matcha has this beautiful green color, there's a set of expectations that come with the fact that someone develops a preference.

for the word matcha in the first place, which the Japanese deserve 100 % credit for. So, you know, it's actually a more complex history all in all, because a lot of the Japanese companies were the ones who set up all of these matcha growing places outside of Japan to increase supply. And in some cases that gets re -exported back to Japan, processed.

and then call the Japanese product. Rebrand it. Or some cases, you know, the skill exists and the technology exists over in mainland China now that they're producing products that they are selling as matcha. And there's even some more interesting secrets behind that that we'll get into the next episode that we've discovered doing business here. That's...

You know, it's not as clear cut as you'd think. And the Japanese are less, it's unclear if it's in even the best interest in Japan to make it a fully protected bio -regional product. Because even you can get more specific with tea labeling like Uji matcha. I think only 50 % of what is in the tea needs to be grown in Uji to be considered Uji matcha.

It could come from some other prefecture and finished. And so long as it's finished, and I think so long as the proportion is at least 50 % of tea grown in Uji, you're allowed to sell it, is Uji Matcha. So there are all of these weird dirty tricks that most consumers just have no idea. Yeah, that's very interesting. And people probably won't be able to taste the difference.

And the people in Uji are probably the ones making the money. So like, yeah, this is all very interesting. And there's this just, you know, physical limitation that exists out there that, you know, we won't have enough land in Japan to sustain the growing demand of matcha in the future. Or labor. Or labor. That's just not physically viable. So...

you know, like whether or not you like it, you know, these tea growing regions outside of Japan are making matcha now and they're making good matcha. Yeah. And you know, we don't think this is an any contradiction to preserving heritage farms, supporting traditional methodologies. That's why people love getting into matcha in the first place. And there are many different sets of consumers that value different things and are willing to pay different amounts for different products.

with different levels of differentiation, which is a lot of differ. But it's true. And someone who is very low income may still want to drink a matcha -like product and doesn't want to drink something watered down. And you can produce something in other countries for way cheaper that yields a similar result using similar set of intentionality and processing. Because let's face it.

the really traditional stuff in Japan is getting more and more scarce. I think Kettle, Zach from Kettle just wrote a blog post saying that they are really trying to increase the number of farmers they're working with because a lot of the people they worked with in the past are all quote unquote getting discovered. And there's this wave of Western tea merchants moving in, trying to find the best of the best. And it's selling out, it's getting very expensive and...

I'd say the dream is starting to happen for a lot of those growers. They've found consumers who love their products and are willing to pay up for what it's worth, for what it costs to make fertilizer from scratch that's not made from chemicals. What it takes to rice straw shade and create these special canopies takes a lot of skill, a lot of labor. I heard that one farmer has his own rice paddies just to create his own rice straw.

and sort of vertically integrating the materials and process. So, I mean, that's really cool and we don't think it's in any contradiction. So long as everything's labeled the right way. Yeah, that's why labeling is important in the first place. Yeah. How do you know what you're getting? I bet some of the names I read off earlier, there's a non -zero probability that some of them contain Tencha that was grown in mainland China that's being used in some of these blends.

Yeah, yeah. It's really like offering consumer the information and offering the choice, the option for them to choose. Like you can develop a preference or if you have the financial capability to sustain a preference that's solely only Uji matcha, best of the best. Or you might find some more water friendly options out there.

that still can taste pretty good. And if they're labeled the right way, you know how to identify them. Otherwise, you have no way of identifying them. Like what do you have to hide behind a very abstract, complex label? And that's why we're such advocates of specialty matcha and taking specialty principles like you're seeing in bean to bar chocolate or in wine or in coffee to bring all of that towards the consumer.

So they can actually say, yes, I prefer this or this or this. It's really powerful actually to have an educated consumer base. Because if you don't, then they're just going to take shots in the dark. The website that I just mentioned, I love them as a vendor. We find a lot of great value there. Which is one reason why that we buy that much in bulk for our videos and for a lot of our testing. We find fantastic value, great color products. But...

You can't develop really a strong set of preferences for a lot of these because they're so mysterious. Yeah. But I guess one of the major difficulty will be the enforcement of these policies or these labeling, right? Like, of course, a product that gets sold as Ujimachai will probably be sold for a higher price. You end up making more money, more margin. So how to enforce transparent labeling?

to the vendors, I think will be a very challenging. Well, I think that's the beauty of it. When you have a large enough consumer base of people with well -developed preferences, they won't want these black box products where they don't know what's inside. An educated consumer base wants a Pinot Noir from California, from some particular vintage, and maybe even they like a particular producer. And if that producer is not available, this other one that they know is.

and they'll like that. I mean, that's the beauty. It's really a bottom -up approach to demanding these types of labels from the market. and the tea companies that embrace that can win out because no one wants to not know what they're buying, which is ultimately what's going on in a lot of these blends, unless you've really developed a personal experience with that product. But there's too many.

to develop personal experiences with. It's a bit of a shame.

Yeah, you're right, Ryan. But I guess my point is that how exactly are you going to prevent essentially people not lying on the label without certain legal establishment? You can simply just tell not telling the truth. Yeah.

No, I mean that comes down to enforcement. So not only defining what can be labeled as what, like what is Uji matcha, what is yame matcha, what is Chinese matcha or mocha, whatever you want to call it, and whether or not that's enforced. And you see that in different ways in different industries. I mean, you see a really interesting set of...

like these wine scandals where people will blend and relabel and stick on a new label, making tens of millions of dollars. Yeah, like a lot of actually, you know, to a certain degree, it's totally legal. Like there are a lot of grapes being transported from countries like Georgia.

into like Germany or other big wine producing regions against what you know processed over there and becomes Italian wine or German wine. we actually experienced this. I was in Bulgaria last year and there was a German guy that owned what was really a very cool vineyard and he has a refrigerated tanker to move grape juice from Bulgaria where there's relatively cheap labor.

to this little town in Germany where he owns a winery processing facility. And he processes it all there as German wine. Apparently there's some tax advantages too. ⁓ that's hilarious. And it's like, we saw it was labeled as a product of Germany. No associations to Bulgaria there. It was fantastic. I really actually don't see anything wrong with that. But I mean, you see it in other industries too. I mean, look at Pu 'er tea There's this great...

photo. I think it was from Glenn from Crimson Lotus Tea, who does a ton of tea sourcing in Yunnan and for Pu 'er. And there's this giant box of stamps from all of the famous Pu 'er houses. Songpinghao, Tongpinghao, the Zhong Cha, Gu Shu Cha, all of these different stamps that kind of are different labels that people who know Pu 'er, what they like to see.

and you can literally take any of these pre -made brand labels and slap it on any piece of paper and put in any tea you want. Well, that's just sheer counterfeits. But, you know, like talking about like green tea industry in China, though, like, you know, Bi Luo Chun and Long Jing, a lot of these...

tea are actually from like places like Sichuan or Guizhou. Not from like Hanzhou in the case of Longjing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like not only, you know, like you have Chinese matcha or Chinese matcha supplying the Japanese matcha industry, but within China, you have like tier three, tier five tea growing regions supplying, you know, like Longjing and Biluochun, which can be easily sold for higher prices. Yeah. No, it's a big problem. And how do you, how do you trust?

Then it's all a trust -based system, which makes it much harder to have any type of consumer confidence, which is actually probably largely where the tea industry is at right now. It's all based on trust, either from companies that have been doing this for hundreds of years or from new vendors. And I think part of the reason why the specialty movement exists within matcha is these new vendors needed to establish trust. If someone's showing you pictures of the farm,

the altitude, how many days it was shaded. You kind of know, you can trust them a little bit more than if someone's just selling you this mysterious green powder, which is kind of what happened 10 years ago. There's tons of matcha that was very undifferentiated that flooded the market because tons of people were interested in it because it was healthy. But it's really hard to trust those brands and the quality was really like a crap shoot, what you were going to get.

And I think that's a lot of these new companies, single origin, single cultivar matcha companies you see now are a reaction to that and finding other ways to build trust through transparency, which is really what we're all about and what we're very excited to see these principles start getting to apply to matcha. Yeah. So moving forward, I think this is really a very beneficial path for

not only the consumers, but also the tea farmers and tea makers. Yeah, not to even mention the economic benefit to the tea farmers. There is a lot of power in these blend houses. There's a lot of history and tradition. We don't want to discredit that, but they're setting the 10 -shot prices for the farmers and they're setting the prices of their products. They have a lot of power. So it's this notion...

of transparency could have the ability to really disrupt that power dynamic.

So, Zongjun, when it comes to matcha labeling, what's one thing that you would like to see happen within the matcha label industry in the future? What's one thing you would like to take away even? What's a change that you would make if you could wave a magic wand? Yeah, definitely not a ceremonial grade matcha, but an ultra ceremonial grade Pro Max matcha. That's what I want. Yeah.

Well, these classification systems really need to be overhauled. It's something we've talked about before on a previous podcast, but it just keeps getting worse as new companies make up new classification systems. That just doesn't make sense. Like it's really a game of who is the more ceremonial or more hyper ultra premium grade.

Like, it doesn't mean anything. They slap on new words to try to separate themselves from average ceremonial -grade matcha. And I think it just makes it even more confusing for people, especially if those products aren't even any good, which they might not be. You just don't know.

So I actually have been compiling a list because we get a lot of targeted Instagram ads now for new matcha products, considering that that's sort of the social media diet that we have to consume now. And I keep getting all of these ads targeted for these different matcha products that are labeled in different ways with these different classification systems. And a lot of them are made up. So.

Here are some of the ones that we've seen in this list I've been compiling. Premium Authentic Matcha, Premium Organic Matcha, the world's first A1 Premium Organic Matcha. That one, I really have no idea what they mean. Premium Grade Matcha, Hyper Premium Grade Matcha, Super Premium Ceremonial Grade, Stone Ground Usacha Grade, Imperial Grade,

Rare ceremonial grade. And the list actually goes on a little further. But I don't want to beat this horse dead. I don't want my A1 grade matcha, Ryan. I want A plus one. I want super premium, organic, rare, imperial grade matcha. That is what I want. So if I could wave a magic wand for labeling, it would be that all these new matcha companies stop making up classification systems.

which are really just confusing consumers. I think it's a real disservice actually to the industry. Or it needs to be some sort of classification system that you can clearly have the expectation of lower tier, middle tier, or a higher tier. It needs to have a...

a tier system with respect to quality, with respect to processing method, I think it will be beneficial. Yeah. But actually, could you... No, no, no. Actually, I disagree with myself. Let's cut this part out. ⁓ let's leave it at that. I mean, could you imagine everyone...

has their own tier -based system based on different requirements? No, that's just bad. We shouldn't have tier system. We shouldn't have quality system at all. You need to have quality system, though. How do you all still distinguish between prices? I mean, even in wine, you see different quality levels. You can't just look at the price. No, not necessarily. And also, transparent labeling, it's really about the information. And you let the consumer decide the quality. Or like,

How much they want to pay. That's true. In a perfectly transparent world, you don't need a classification system saying it's culinary grade or ceremonial grade or ultra ceremonial grade. Yeah, like this really doesn't make any sense. Like, you know, like the sheer, I think one of the very important merits about a transparent label labeling is that you, you.

really toss the ball back to the consumers and let them decide, you know, what do they like? And you set the price, you know, based on, you know, the cost of making these matcha. Yeah, you're not making their preferences for them. Yeah. I feel like a lot of the labels are trying to make the preference for you. Yeah, for people. Right? This is special. This is Koicha grade and it costs three dollars a gram. Or this is Usacha grade.

or all of these different use case scenarios or system is really top down in position about what you should like and what you should value versus the other way around, which is what transparent labeling would mean. All right. Well, I think it's a fine place to stop.

Alright, that's all we have time for today. So if you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us five stars or sharing this podcast with a friend.

And we'll see you on the next one. See you in the next episode.