Matcha Labeling (Part 3) Classifications and Matcha Quality

 

 

Ryan (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Match podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my cohost Zongjun

Zongjun (00:05)
Hello

Ryan (00:06)
and we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products.

Zongjun (00:09)
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 three, classifications and matcha quality.

Ryan (00:20)
Yeah, so this is part three in our series of matcha labeling, which we think is super important. Doesn't sound like the world's most interesting topic, but there's a surprising amount to unpack.

Zongjun (00:30)
Yeah.

yeah, like matcha label is not just the price tag and barcode. It's about all the information that you can learn before you actually try the matcha.

Ryan (00:45)
And then we want to discuss what's the status quo of high quality matcha.

What are those flavors or attributes and how do they get in that matcha and how can that be reflected on a label? So like what are all the different descriptors or measurements that we can use as consumers to then identify, this would probably be a very umami heavy matcha or this matcha might have a lot of nuance, complexity and delicate flavors. So like actually break down what it is we want to see on labels.

and help consumers make associations between, if I see this on a label, then it has these implications, both primary and secondary.

But before we jump into that, let's talk about the extreme. What do we do when products have no label on them? So like Zongjun imagine you walked into a wine store, you saw a bunch of prices, but every single label was obscured. And would you trust it?

Zongjun (01:42)
Hahaha

I don't know, you know, sometimes you do see brands do that. Like the very concept of Muji is to, you know, it literally means no mark, no label. And all you, you sometimes, yeah. Or sometimes you see some of the, you know, third wave coffee brands or some of the more contemporary wine brands, or even some of the tea brands. They intentionally trying to obscure -ify.

Ryan (01:58)
I didn't know that.

Zongjun (02:12)
what exactly is going on in the product and create this sort of, you know, like it's just a image or it's just a name. It doesn't even say where the grapes or where the coffee comes from. But you do see that happen in the market.

Ryan (02:26)
Yeah.

There was a really cool example of this. I think it was from a tea vendor in Singapore. And she was trying to create this hashtag no label tea movement. And the idea was like, you should trust your sourcing. She's not going to tell you what it is and you shouldn't worry about it. Don't worry about whether or not it's like from a great producer or a great whatever, just enjoy it. Tea is tea, you should just enjoy it. And you know, I don't think this movement was very successful. Because you know, you really have to build up some brand credit.

Zongjun (02:38)
Mm -hmm.

Haha

Yeah, to some extent.

Ryan (02:57)
I'm going to go ahead and turn it back on.

Zongjun (02:58)
That's right. I mean, that really is a, I guess, a hard requirement for people to have the trust in the first place, right? Otherwise, you can literally put anything in it and no one's probably going to trust you.

Ryan (03:15)
And I'd say that's where matcha labeling starts. The very basic requirements are the brand. And if you look at the word brand, that goes all the way back to cattle getting literally branded with a hot iron to show their mark. It's someone's maker's mark. It's a brand. And that's kind of where the trust starts. And then everything after that is just more information.

Zongjun (03:22)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan (03:44)
whether or not it's the product name, whether or not it's some classification like culinary versus ceremonial grade, and then even more information about it later on. So I guess in the hierarchy, it all starts with the brand. It is interesting. One notable example that we're consumers of is white two tea, famous for mostly sourcing mainland Chinese tea, puer and oolong and some

green tea as well and some other things and a lot of white tea. And, you know, he's Paul, who's the brand owner behind that brand is super famous for putting out like a $700 poor cake that's 200 grams. And I think it was called This Tea is Fake. It takes a serious brand to be able to pull that off and have people actually want to buy it. And there's no information about it. It was the opposite of a transparent label. And it's kind of, you know, label anarchy.

Zongjun (04:28)
Hahaha

Ryan (04:41)
that he's doing. He's built up such a good brand and such good skill at sourcing that people actually trust that it's going to be good. And it's very hedonistic in nature. You're not doing any learning. You're just enjoying the tea.

Zongjun (04:57)
Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, like this type of, I feel like this type of brand, I mean, I myself is a white 2 tea consumer and I, you know, fully trust their weight and their capability of sourcing. But, you know, like for someone to be able to enjoy their product, you really need to either have no knowledge about the product. You just want to, you know, enjoy the flavor.

or you need to be very knowledgeable. And without the labeling, you can figure it out by yourself out of a lot of the hidden information. So I feel like that brands like this are a perfect starting point or perfect endpoint for a consumer journey. But where do you go? Where do you grow your knowledge in between? I think requires a lot of other paths.

to be able to learn the information, to be able to gain the formative experience.

Ryan (05:58)
Yeah, exactly. And you could argue this, what we're talking about, is where a lot of macha, the traditional macha companies are. Those companies that have been around for 100, 200, 300 years, that have all of these products with these poetic names, they're all just called ceremonial grade and may be suitable for thin tea, usucha, or thick tea, koicha, and they don't really give any, they don't tell you what cultivar they are, they don't tell you what region they were grown in, they don't tell you what proportions they were blended.

when they were milled in or when things were harvested. It's a complete black box blend and it's kind of the same thing. It's our brand, here's the name, maybe we'll give you some poetic description about what our poetic name means, but you know, you're just gonna have to trust us. You're gonna have to trust our brand.

Zongjun (06:43)
Hahaha.

Yeah, that's right. You know, as a beginner, you probably will be served, you know, by someone who's more experienced of that kind of tea. And then, you know, you walk end up walking away, you know, either, you know, thinking that, okay, this is not for me or thinking to yourself that, okay, I like this product. And, you know, this is probably really the starting point of your journey in wanting to know more about matcha and wanted to drink more matcha.

Ryan (07:06)
Yeah.

Zongjun (07:13)
But that's very one directional. You are getting served for a tea that someone else thinks is high quality, and they think that you might like it. You have no choice in this whole experience. You just simply receive. And you end up having some opinions. But how are you going to

analyze your opinions or dissect your opinions into any quantifiable attributes, that's basically impossible.

Ryan (07:47)
Yeah. And that brings down to subjectivity of quality. What is quality? Who can determine what quality is? Is it just the price point on the price ladder as you move from something that costs $15 a can to $60 a can? What's the difference? Why is that one $60? What happened there? And how can I even appreciate it if I don't know anything about it and it doesn't have a transparent label where we know maybe the way it was shaded?

or how many days it was shaded, or the type of farm and the type of fertilizers they were using. All of the decisions that could have been made during the processing that led to something be a higher quality. It doesn't let consumers develop a complex set of preferences in other industries like we see in wine, or we see in other parts of tea, or in chocolate, or even in coffee. We're at this really deep knowledge that's being conveyed by, let's say, specialty coffee brands.

about what made that particular lot of coffee special. Maybe it had something to do with the elevation, maybe it had something to do with the fermentation or the blending. Or I think counterculture is super famous for making sure that all of the green coffee, the unroasted coffee, has almost no moisture content to really reduce what they call the funk factor. Because even a little bit of residual moisture when those coffee bags get put on these container ships and...

shipped off to wherever they're going to be roasted. They have an even more stringent requirement that's ultra low moisture content, so that there's no weird mold or anything growing on that green coffee before it gets there. So it's like these types of stories that are linked to processes or interventions or scarcity that get told to the consumers so that they can say, you know what? I like this counterculture. It is a great example of a washed Ethiopian coffee from Edito.

And not only is it a great expression of this place, but it also feels like it's been processed really well. It unfortunately really doesn't exist in matcha right now. There's like a few companies that are very close to doing it or that are doing it, but it's still like, I don't know, what is it, two or three years old now? Like it's super new.

Zongjun (10:04)
Yeah, it's only in recent years that you start to see people paying attention to matcha with the lens of specialty products. But when we are talking about quality, we are really talking about different kinds of quality. Quality can be qualitative. It can also be quantitative. Quantitative quality would be something like elevation, the name of the cultivar, days of the bushes getting

shaded before harvest or it can be qualitative quality like the story that you have just told. So, Ryan how do we assess quality and how do we balance which part of the quality needs to be focused more on matcha?

Ryan (10:50)
Yeah, it's such a complex topic and you know you can almost segment it into two pieces. So one is like what is quality for a commodity product and then two what is quality for a specialty product and I think those two things are worth separating for a moment. So there's a concept in coffee called Q -grader and Q -graders are typically the people who are buying they could be buying specialty but they're also buying commodity.

I think the system was set up for commodity grade coffee. Coffee trades on futures. It's like a post -colonial crop. Commodity prices, I think, range from anywhere from around a dollar to a dollar fifty a pound green coffee. These Q graders for very, very large companies, food and beverage companies, this Q grading system got set up to sort through quality.

And it was looking for all sorts of defects, largely linked to process. So like there's many different, there's something called potato defect, where I think it's some type of fungus. Please don't quote me on that. Maybe it's caused by something else that results in the coffee tasting weird. I know there's something called Rio defect that largely comes from coffee made in Brazil. And there are people who are trained to go through and sort coffee based on both objective and flavor.

which you could argue is slightly subjective measurements, to give coffee a score, which would then determine its price, and then it would go on to be processed in a commodity -like product. And you can also be Q -grader for specialty coffee as well. So you have systems like this that are set up to... meant to sort of standardize quality and put everything on the exact same page. Now, that said, when you start talking about really excellent coffees,

You move into other realms like competitions, like the cup of excellence, which is in coffee. We're also a group of experts. We'll go around and taste it and cup coffee and determine what are some of the highest performing lots based on some set of also specialty characteristics. And I think the one that was really famous was a coffee farm in Panama called Esmeralda. It has a longer name, but I forget it.

which realized that some of the coffee trees on their farm, on their plantation, tasted very different. And they quote, rediscovered, arguably there's a more complex history there, but to simplify it, they rediscovered Geisha cultivar, which is a cultivar of coffee, separated it out, because usually they blended it into everything else. And it ended up being this ridiculous floral coffee and it set...

records for how much green coffee was sold at auction because it won the Cup of Excellence. And they got everyone re -interested in geisha cultivar, and now it's grown in many other places very intentionally. And then those lots are usually always separated out because they get a higher quality price. So things like Cup of Excellence have the ability to sort of discover and create new trends within the specialty industry. And those are ultimately decided by judges.

who have tons of coffee tasting experience. So at the most basic level, Q -graders can sort out good and bad, roughly, for the commodity market. You have these competitions and other grading systems. I know the SCA, Specialty Coffee Association, has a grading system as well to sort through what they would consider high or low quality, which, by the way, the way those things are structured are also kind of arbitrary -ish, not super arbitrary.

but you're ranking across your preference for acidity. But how can you rank it across preference for acidity, especially in such a multicultural environment that coffee is, across Oceania and Latin America and Africa? Anyway, it's a bigger can of worms. And then, you ultimately, the consumer is making the final decision. So that's how it's viewed in other industries.

Within matcha, there are competitions, which are largely done by experts, and most tencha unground matcha, sold at auction. So that's being evaluated by these blenders that end up setting prices for those products, and then they also set the prices for the blends that tencha gets blended into and then milled into matcha. So a very long and convoluted way of saying that

right now for matcha, it's mostly done by expert evaluators. It may or may not be linked to what you might like in a matcha Zongjun.

Zongjun (15:35)
Yeah, and for all these master blenders, their goal is really to reach a flavor profile consistency across all these years with different tea coming from different terroir in different vintage. So their goal is not necessarily to create a flavor profile that will be liked, especially liked by consumers outside of Japan.

So that's a really interesting contradiction that we are seeing right now in the market.

Ryan (16:09)
Yeah, it's like they almost view different tencha lots as ingredients that go into a larger blend. In kind of a way, it's an interesting metaphor for Japanese society. They say the squeaky wheel gets the grease in America, but they say that the, I think it's the nail that sticks out of the board gets pounded back down in Japanese society. So it's...

Zongjun (16:16)
Yeah, yeah.

No.

Ryan (16:39)
You know, they take the best tencha to help even out the worst tencha in these blends that they create, harmonizing and not honoring the individual component parts.

Zongjun (16:50)
area collectivization kind of mentality.

Ryan (16:54)
hope we didn't make any enemies with that parallel, but... It almost feels true, though.

Zongjun (16:54)
but...

and you see that in a lot of the other tea blendings, it's not just Japanese matcha, but in a lot of the Chinese teas, Pu 'er, white tea, Bai Cha, they are all blends. And I think it's very interesting that a lot of these blenders or these tea houses, their argument about blends is that,

single origin, sometimes the flavor can be very one -dimensional, like single bush or single lot. There is a lack of complexity in their opinion that they would actually prefer to do a blend because it would add more flavor complexity into the final product.

Ryan (17:44)
Yeah, absolutely. Just because something's single origin or single cultivar has no guarantees that it's any good. It's a way of protecting yourself and creating a better product.

Zongjun (17:51)
Yeah, that's.

Yeah, that's very true.

Ryan (17:58)
blenders are doing is they're saying, how do we get 1 plus 1 to equal 3? That's what a really good blender does, especially for something as finicky as agriculture.

Zongjun (18:05)
or like 0

.2 plus 0 .3 plus 1 equals 2. They're trying to use whatever they can and reach a consistent flavor profile, which is very masterful if it's done well and so consistently throughout generations and generations.

Ryan (18:26)
Now the problem is, now let's zoom out and put this back into context because there's an absolutely great argument for why blends are a great thing and why they should exist and should continue to exist in the future. The problem is where you get bad actors. There's very, you know, other than a distinct name, there's not much to go off of other than the trust that these brands have. And you can have, you know, emerging brands that come in.

that try to have a slightly more transparent label, claim that there's something better, but the product inside them is actually much worse because there's very few regulations. And that's how you get into super ceremonial, premium ceremonial, hyper ceremonial, et cetera. And it goes on and gets worse of people just trying to differentiate themselves. And whether or not it's single origin or it's a blend or it's pseudo single origin, because I mean,

everything's a blend ultimately of different tea leaves. Even if it's from yame, people can call it single origin, but if it's single farmer, you get into the weird semantics of what single origin means. The problem is that people are just putting out a lot of crap.

Zongjun (19:25)
haha

I mean, like.

Ryan (19:40)
And it's hiding under these blends and it's being obscured by these labels and that makes everyone's label less interesting. So you can't like triangulate as a consumer why something tasted good or bad because you're not given the information to do it.

Zongjun (19:56)
I mean, whether or not it's single origin or if it's a blend doesn't necessarily contradict with our, you know, advocation of transparent labeling, right? Like you can still have transparent labeling if the matcha is a blend. We want to know how much percentage of Asahi or Yabukita that went into that can of matcha. It's like, you know, the transparent wine label tells you how much percentage of different kinds of grapes in this bottle.

Ryan (20:15)
True.

Zongjun (20:25)
I think that will be actually very helpful too. Although, you know, like some blend house might, you know, see their recipe as trade secret. But, you know, we as a consumer would greatly benefit from, you know, learning, you know, how does the complex flavor profile, you know, where does the flavor profile come from? Like, and how does, you know, like blending different cultivars into one can of matcha can...

drastically change the flavor profile and the texture. Or by tweaking all of the other attributes like days of shade grown or different kind of harvest method can really change the consumer experience. I think that's super important whether or not the can of matcha is a single origin or if it's a blend.

Ryan (21:12)
Yeah. absolutely. And actually it makes me think of a really cool product developed by James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee way back in the days. It was called Three Africans. And it was a blend that always had three different origins of African coffee. And it was actually a flavor profile driven blend. So they're trying to keep it consistent. And depending on when you order it, you could look online and see what was in this.

Zongjun (21:31)
Mmm.

Ryan (21:41)
Maybe it was X % Kenya, X % Ethiopia, X % Tanzania. It was really cool to see that change, actually. And they would give you all sorts of information about it. It'd be cool to see more of that in Matcha.

Zongjun (21:41)
Mm -hmm.

absolutely. And by having more factors, I think it's actually more helpful for you to build up your knowledge structure in understanding how does one cultivar necessarily different from another, like by changing one attribute and by having the other two attributes or the other multiple attributes remain the same. What's the impact of the final product?

I think that would really help consumers to understand the contribution of tweaking certain attributes in a product.

Ryan (22:33)
Yeah, no, that makes sense. And having that level of transparency will allow people to develop a more complex set of preferences. So, speaking of high -quality matcha, we put together a list of different attributes that we would consider are the status quo of high -quality matcha. And we don't want to be the armchair expert. So I would like to pose this as a starting place rather as the finish line.

of what the status quo of high quality matcha is. It's the beginning of a list. And we wanted to go through some of the factors that you could see on a label to help identify this. So after doing tons of research and tasting lots of different matchas and speaking to matcha people and reading a lot online, our compilation of what is generally considered high quality attributes of a good matcha are umami taste,

And this one's also a little debatable depending on what your preferences are. But certainly, if you're paying more for matcha, for quote -unquote, objectively quote -unquote, higher quality matcha, the more money you spend, the more umami the product's gonna be. So it's also heavily correlated with price. So umami taste, number one. Two, radiant color, also really tends to matter. Delicate flavors.

So, you know, the subtlety and nuance and complexity that you're getting other than just like green, grassy, umami you can get a lot of other flavor expressions which people pay for. Reduced bitterness. So, you know, a lack of flaws is another way of putting it and probably the biggest flaws that it tastes bitter. And then last, and we kind of put an asterisk next to this one, is flavor profile consistency.

So we think for the traditional companies, this is highly important for what would be considered a high quality product. But for the new single origin, single cultivar matcha companies that have ultra -transparent labels, I would say flavor or profile consistency doesn't matter at all because they're celebrating the inherent flavor differences that matcha or tencha can have because it's an agricultural product and the weather's a little different every year.

Farming practices might be a little different year to year, producer to producer, and you know, that's something they want to shine a light towards. So, you know, if we zoom in to umami taste, Zongjun, what are some of the attributes that can be done by a farmer to express umami taste? The nurture and nature components towards this expression.

Zongjun (25:12)
Right. So, well, first of all, you know, the endless pursuit of umami taste is very Japanese. You can see that in all kinds of food and beverage products, not just in matcha, but also like dashi and the very, you know, invention of MSG and, you know, in all the ramen's in all the soup based dishes in Japan, they're all into umami. And by having a higher umami notes,

In tea, you can do either hybridization by cross -breeding certain cultivars to reach a higher umami notes. You can add a lot of fertilizers during the growing process, so to really enhance the nitrogen content in the soil to boost up the amino acid content in the tea. And shading, that's to prevent

sunlight from getting to the matcha bush to convert all the excess amino acid into catechins, which are more astringent and bitter. And of course, during the processing procedures, they use steaming to lock in the very green umami fresh notes in the tea leaf from it to degrade or get oxidized.

by oxygen into other compounds that are not umami anymore. So these are usually the ways for tea growers or tea producers in Japan to really boost up the umami taste in their tea.

Ryan (26:52)
Yeah. And you know, one thing to double click on here, and it's one of the reasons why good organic matcha is so rare, is particularly because of the fertilizer. The Japanese tea industry uses an insane amount of fertilizer, particularly because they like this umami taste. To get your levels of amino acids and L -theanine so high, you need very nitrogen -rich soil.

The problem with very nitrogen -rich soil is that it attracts a lot of pests and therefore, you know, you need pests. Bugs like it. Everything likes nitrogen -rich soil. So it's very difficult to have traditional organic farming practices or even non -traditional farming practices that are organic, that end up producing a high quality product.

Zongjun (27:28)
Bucks like it.

Yeah.

Ryan (27:48)
particularly because you just can't get as much nitrogen in the soil. Now, not all fertilizers create an equal. I've heard that there are some tea growers, I think the one I'm thinking of is an Uji, who will not fertilize his plants with anything that he wouldn't eat himself. And I think he imports, I think it's like mackerel or sardines, I don't know, some oily fish from Finland and mixes it with rice. And that is the fertilizer.

not all fertilizer is synthetic, probably very expensive. And one reason to pay for higher prices from a farmer that's doing such practices. I believe that Tsuji -san

Zongjun (28:19)
Just...

Now I can see why the bugs like it so

much. I like it too.

Ryan (28:29)
probably those tea plants might eat better than a lot of people. And then of course there's synthetic fertilizer, which you know honestly we don't have a huge problem with. Without synthetic fertilizer, the world couldn't supply enough food for everyone. Wonderful invention to take nitrogen out of the air and turn it into fertilizer. It saved a lot of people from starving.

Zongjun (28:33)
Hahaha.

Ryan (28:55)
So that's not necessarily a problem inherently, but it is unfortunate that if you do it, you need to compensate usually by using a lot of pesticides. And there's just no way around it. So if you want a lot of umami taste, that's what you get and that's what you see in the vast majority of the Japanese tea industry. So when you're looking on a label and it's being advertised as organic, it's less likely that you're going to get a very umami rich thing, which for some people might be a good thing.

If you don't love umami profiles, you can both reduce the amount of pesticides you're consuming and have less umami taste.

Zongjun (29:33)
Woohoo! You know, like this of a Japanese preference for a lot of consumers that I have talked to. The opinion about umami notes is very polarized. You know, like there are people outside of Japan really like this flavor, but there are also a lot of, you know, consumers out there would describe, you know, the taste being like seaweed soup, like seafood.

Ryan (29:34)
But,

Zongjun (29:59)
It would not remind them or they would not expect this flavor coming from tea necessarily. And that's kind of a put off.

Ryan (30:08)
No, for sure. And just reflecting a bit on some of the things we were talking about earlier, the Japanese tea industry is very well regulated as an agricultural product. So even if it's non -organic, there's all sorts of rules about where you can spray, what you can spray, how long you can spray it for, what the time difference is between when you spray it and when the harvests are.

And then a lot of matcha goes through lab testing. And when we start doing our own sourcing, we'll also go through lab testing to make sure that everything is in spec and doesn't have tons of fertilizer on it. It could pose any risk to human health. So, agriculture in Japan is very modern, very complex, and compliance is very high compared to a lot of other countries.

for such agricultural commodity products and specialty products.

Okay, so another thing that is worth, I guess two more things if you care about umami taste and high quality tea and what to look for in the label. The number of days shaded definitely matters. So the more you shade, the less opportunity that plant gets to convert savory and umami amino acids and L -theanine into bitter and astringent catechins.

So both the type of shading and the degree of how much light penetration gets to those bushes matters, and also how long it was shaded for. But even this, it's a little more complex because you're not in control of the weather and you really don't want to pick tea on a rainy day. So in some cases, you might need to shade it for fewer days because the weather's not cooperating with you and will result in a higher quality product than if you wait, I don't know, 45 days shaded.

but the weather is going to be really bad. So as a general trend, the longer you shade, the more umami you'll make the tea. But the difference between 35 days and 40 days, the 35 -day one might be higher quality, just because of factors that are outside of the control of the farmer.

Zongjun (32:16)
That's interesting. But Ryan, so when we are talking about shade growing tea, it will certainly increase the umami notes for the tea bushes in general. But to begin with, some of the cultivars are just inherently more umami than the others, right?

Ryan (32:35)
Yeah, I mean that's a great comparison between nature and nurture, right? Fertilizer and shading are all nurture. They're all things that the farmer can do actively, some process -driven outcomes to create more umami taste. But there's also nature, genetics of these plants themselves. And different cultivars can be more or less umami than others. And you can get cultivars both by cross -breeding, but also by just selecting what they call a mother tree.

So trees, especially when they go through something called xyri, it's seed propagation. So instead of grafting, which creates identical clones, there is some genetic drift when you graft. But the best way to create new flavor profiles and tea between different bushes is for seed propagation. So like pollination and it's a form of sexual reproduction. And you end up getting different...

types of tea bushes, and you can kind of narrow them down. And there's a really cool story about the discovery of something called Narino cultivar. So for anyone who's never had Narino, it is the most intense umami cultivar, at least that I've ever had. It is kind of insane. The first time I had it,

I almost didn't believe that it was matcha. And Narino contains twice the amount of L -theanine, the source of umami, compared to conventional varieties, and also inherently produces fewer catechins.

Zongjun (34:05)
Well, that's very interesting, Ryan. So how did they discover that cultivar in the first place?

Ryan (34:12)
So I'm actually going to read it directly off of the website of the producers of this. Excuse my pronunciation. And actually, Zongjun let me just send this to you

Zongjun (34:22)
It's Horii Shichimeien

Ryan (34:25)
It's like one too many syllables at the end of that word for me to confidently say. But they invented or discovered or I guess cultivated the Narino and Okunoyama cultivars. And it's apparently took over 20 years to do this. So this is straight from their website. For an individual, not laboratories or large -scale tea plantation, selecting cultivars of the tea plants is a monumental task. The process started...

In 1981,

Since then, Nobuo a fifth -generation owner, has carefully observed all the tea plants in the tea plantation every single year and has handwritten notes preserved over time, not only describing the taste and aroma, but the number of shoots, weight, and harvest yield in great detail.

The initial 2 ,000 plants were gradually narrowed down to 58 cultivars and then 24 varieties and eventually 8 varieties. In 1994, two final candidate varieties were selected. These two varieties were cultivated on an experimental basis before they were finally registered in 2002, a good 20 years after starting to work on these cultivars. One is Narino and the other is Okunoyama.

and they make matcha out of both. So the original Okunuyama tree, the mother tree, is 400 years old. I'm not sure if it says it about the Narino tree, but it's really cool the way that this is done here, where they're literally identifying a single tree as having a good set of characteristics and then cultivating it probably through grafting.

Zongjun (36:06)
Very interesting. Do they do any sea propagation cross breeding with these trees?

Ryan (36:12)
That's a good question. No idea. It took 20 years to go this far, so maybe they are. It's just a very much in process.

Zongjun (36:20)
All right, I'll see them in the next 20 years.

Ryan (36:22)
Do people do specific seed propagation where you can pollinate one bush with another? Actually, I don't know how that works, if that can be done purposefully.

Zongjun (36:33)
yeah, they do that all the time. And at least they do that for Chinese tea too. I'm not sure if that's the practice in Japanese tea.

Ryan (36:35)
Okay, okay.

Okay, interesting. As like one of the methods to create new cultivars.

Zongjun (36:47)
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan (36:48)
But you know, anyway, this is a really great example of nature doing its thing, creating genetic diversity with plants that have different characteristics and produce different degrees of compounds. In this case, l-theanine Narino producing double the amount that conventional cultivars create. You know, most likely they're alluding to Yabukita. It's the most conventional variety. So yeah, the cultivar can play a pretty big impact, has a pretty big impact.

on the degree of umami test.

So that was a lot to unpack just for umami and what you could see on a label. So just to summarize, you could select different cultivars that are naturally more umami than others. You can look at the degree of shade grown, where generally the longer the better, but with some exceptions. And whether or not it was organic has a pretty big impact on how nitrogen rich the soil could be, because it's much more difficult to manage fields with very nitrogenous soil without pesticides.

So next, radiant color. Zongjun do you want to deep dive into this one?

Zongjun (37:50)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, color is one of the most important characteristics that people care about matcha when they descend the quality. So generally, the greener, the brighter, the more vibrant the color, the better the tea. So there are a few ways to achieve that sort of color outcome.

hybridization and cross breeding different cultivars is certainly one of the methods. There are more teas are just naturally brighter, has brighter color than the other teas in general without any other processing or different growing method. And shading can certainly play a huge role in the matcha's color development of the tea leaves. So usually,

the more you shade, the more you prevent the tea leaf from receiving sunlight, the more chlorophyll it wanted to produce to utilize the very limited sunlight that it can get, which means it would turn greener and brighter. And steaming, of course, can denature the oxidized that will break down chlorophyll.

So that will help to preserve the greenness after the tea is being processed. And of course, you can also use blending to blend different color into the final can. And you can intentionally select colors with a brighter and more vibrant color palette and blend it into other less colorful tea powders and make it overall more colorful.

And of course at the end, you know, fresh milling is certainly the best way to present the freshest, most vibrant color matcha that you can get. Oxygen is definitely the largest enemy when it comes to tea powder and oxidation can greatly reduce the vibrancy and also the green color from the tea powder and turn it into a yellowish, duller, grayish color by the end of the day.

Ryan (40:03)
Yeah. I think one reason why color is such a focus for quality is it's one of the most obvious, not only is it the most obvious visual indicator that something's wrong, but also it really shows a matcha's age. As matcha ages, has oxidative stress, heat stress, just general aging, it will make it turn paler and paler as chlorophyll breaks down into its more oxidative products, which are naturally more yellow or gray.

By the way, also it's a flavor change. So, you know, with, you know, at least in the States, you have a market that's flooded with matcha that you have no idea when it was milled, other than a best buy date, which, you know, a lot of best buy dates, you know, tea is a non -perishable product. So, you know, maybe it's two years, maybe it's three years, but really it's not going to go bad from a food safety perspective. But, you know, the color is going to get really horrible. Also really low industrial quality.

ball milled versus a natural stone mill. Ball mills produce a lot of heat, which is usually used to create culinary grade product, which is another reason why culinary grade is usually a dollar more gray color is because it's been heat damaged, which also damages those chlorophyll and makes it less green. So it can be a signal of quality when you really zoom out broad strokes.

between the really low end and the really high end. But as you said, Zongjun, different cultivars naturally express different hues of color. Okumadori, for example, is super famous for being very green. And it's really commonly used in blends to create a much nicer color. But there's great cultivars that are naturally more dull on the high end.

So I would say like the rule around radiant color is very true if you're distinguishing between the lowest of lows and the highest of highs. But if you're just within specialty, color is a less reliable indicator for quality.

Zongjun (42:06)
Yeah, but I guess for the status quo that we have right now, and especially for the non -single origin matcha, this color gradient can actually be a pretty useful spectrum for you to tell the freshness of the matcha, basically.

Ryan (42:26)
Yeah, no, for sure. Even within a single can, even when you open a can, you start to see color changes happening. Especially if you're buying in larger quantities. Yep, very good indicator. That's true. So even amongst the highest end, it does give you some sense of age. Just one thing that we're really pushing for is that more transparent mill dates. Even if it's a range, it's even more helpful.

Zongjun (42:35)
Yeah, that's not going to lie to you.

Ryan (42:51)
to not hide behind obscuring a mill date is super useful so you know how fresh your product is. Because there's so much surface area it's going to oxidize and impact things like color.

Zongjun (43:03)
Yeah,

But this rule doesn't necessarily apply when you go to the super low end or sometimes even just low to medium end products. Because some of them might be color additives, which is actually a thing that people should be careful of. Some gardenia extract can really increase the color vibrancy. Although they're totally safe to consume, but it's not necessarily a good indicator anymore.

Ryan (43:18)
Yeah.

Zongjun (43:33)
when it comes to that kind of products.

Ryan (43:36)
Yeah, so like no additive is something really important to look for on a label, especially if you're working in the lowest end, even if you're like making a cookie, for example, if you want a pure product.

So just to summarize, if color is something that's very interesting and you're very important to you, definitely the number of days it was shaded, definitely the cultivar that it was from, and most importantly probably how fresh that matcha is going to have a huge impact. So looking for things like mill dates or having some sense of how long that tencha has been powdered into matcha are all going to help indicate what that color is going to be.

All right, next is delicate flavors, which is probably one of the more interesting things to double click on. So what are the things other than umami taste and the color that are present, providing a sensory experience? So Zongjun, wanna walk us through what some of those are?

Zongjun (44:29)
this one is exceptionally long. Why don't we dive into each point together? Well, the first one is definitely hybridization of different cultivars, you know, different cultivars. They naturally will have different flavor profile compared to each other. So it's just like, you know, products like wine, like cider, like coffee, you know, you have different grapes that taste different. You have different apple that tastes different. You have different coffee beans that taste different. So same theory applies to tea.

Ryan (44:34)
Okay.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, where something like yabukita is pretty balanced, a little bitter, like a little bit sweet, a little grassy. You know, something like asahi is going to be more creamy and full and very nuanced and subtle. And I've heard that, you know, a lot of people describe okumodori as being very vegetal and having a lot of vegetal undertones. So, you know, it really depends on what you're looking for. But, you know, any cultivar of matcha is going to come with a bunch of other flavors that...

you might like or you might dislike. So learning what those cultivars are and what those flavors are is really important on anyone's learning journey when you're searching for delicate flavors and complexity in matcha.

Zongjun (45:39)
That's right. And the next one is terroir Well, tea bushes grow on soil. So it's naturally going to absorb a lot of the flavor coming from the environment surrounding it. So anything related to altitude, related to soil condition, related to sunlight exposure, and also local flora and fauna, all of those could play a very important role in the final expression of the tea flavor profile.

Ryan (46:08)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, different regions are always going to express different flavors. And it's one of the most interesting thing about specialty products is kind of learning the taste of the land, the taste of the soil and the air around and how that impacts it. some common places might be like, everyone talks about Uji and Kyoto Prefecture, tea, or yame and Fukuoka.

You can go to Shizuoka, which is where a lot more mass -produced tea is, and there's many other regions. There's some pretty interesting matcha coming out of Gifu Prefecture, as well as Kagoshima, as well as many others. So there's a lot to learn. And actually, we're still on our learning journey. Most of the matcha that we've had available to us as consumers has been widely from Yame or from Uji.

Zongjun (47:00)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. This is really, I guess, one of the starting point of consumers starting to fantasize about the tea that they consume and have this romantic or romanticized feeling of the place that the tea is coming from. It's not just tasting the tea, but tasting the environment, the culture, and the people that grows the tea.

Ryan (47:00)
at least on the higher ends.

Zongjun (47:29)
coming from a place that's so far away from you. But it's right now sitting in front of you and you can taste it and you can develop a preference towards it.

Ryan (47:39)
It can just be transformed. When I was living in New York, I don't know, about six or seven years ago, I went to a... There was a tea dealers, 29B, if anyone knows that tea house in the East Village or Alphabet City, hosted three or four national winners of tea competitions. I forget what their exact awards were, but there was a Yame tea tasting. And it was the first time I really had real gokuro.

which is a shade -grown, loose -leaf green tea, and they put on just the right amount of water so you would get one drop of tea, or maybe it was two drops. You get almost nothing. And it was very carefully weighed out. And I took a sip of it and my mind was blown. I've never had anything, any liquid that's ever tasted that way so pure and clean and umami and intensely umami.

Zongjun (48:17)
Yeah.

Ryan (48:34)
and sweet, it was crazy. It was a really cool experience and a very formative sensory experience for me in connecting with the people who had made it. And it got me really interested in Yame tea. So I agree, the romanticization of place in terroir cannot be overlooked. And it'd be really nice to have more storytellers to start telling the story of other places outside of Uji and Yame.

to open this up a little bit. I know Kettle is doing a lot of work and Ooika is doing a lot of work in that as well, but I can't wait till we start to see even more vendors start doing more storytelling and discovery for these regions, other regions.

Zongjun (49:15)
There are so many

other places that grow tea too. And also even within, you know, Uji and Yame, you have all these sub terroir that could be very interesting. You know, like these place are large. You know, the environment and the weather right there cannot be similar to each other.

Ryan (49:27)
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, even down the road, yeah, exactly, you have different things. Make very cool vertical tastings.

Zongjun (49:38)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan (49:39)
That'd be cool. If anyone listening has a cafe, and if we're deep into sourcing, we'd love to do a couple pop -ups of doing some vertical tastings one day of like these micro terroirs, that'd be cool.

Zongjun (49:50)
That would be wonderful.

Ryan (49:51)
Please reach out.

Zongjun (49:52)
right, the next one is harvest method. So this one is also very interesting because different types of machine harvest versus hand picking really can have a large difference in the final flavor profile because the leaf composition will be drastically changed by how you harvest them.

Ryan (50:14)
Yeah, no, drastically changed. And the way to think about this is like precision picking. When basically the machine picked is a glorified lawnmower with a big kind of shoot on the back to catch everything, and you're not precision picking anything. You could argue it's slightly less important in matcha because when tencha on ground matcha gets refined, it's de -stemmed. So like a lot of the thick stems that's associated with that are getting separated out.

But still you're not getting the exact picks that you want, which is where Tezumi or handpicked tea is so important. That said, handpicked tea is getting more and more rare, especially in Japan, and demands insane prices because of all the labor that's associated. And there's a real lack of skilled no one wants to pick tea.

Zongjun (51:04)
No one wants to do it.

It's really a pain. It's not just in Japan. You're seeing tea growing regions in China and Korea suffering, and Taiwan suffering the same thing. No one wants to do this because it's so laborious and tedious during tea harvest season. And for the very few that are willing to do it,

In China, you will see them, this group of elder, older female tea pickers, we call them the tea auntie, they will travel from places to places, all the way from Wuyi to Chaozhou and all the way into Yunnan to follow the harvest season in different regions. And they are the only one would do it. And all of these local regions,

They don't want to pick tea. All of the young people, they don't even want to grow tea. So that's a very, very painful phenomenon that we collectively have to face, not just in Japan, but also in other regions too.

Ryan (52:13)
Yeah, everywhere. My girlfriend's uncle owns a winery in France and he was complaining that no one wants to work anymore during the harvest season. Most of French wine is picked by Romanian or Bulgarian people who come in and work for the season and then leave. In the States too, it's a big problem. No one wants to do this agricultural work. We've both picked tea.

Sam, you've picked more tea than I have, but you know, it's not a glamorous job. There's a lot of bugs, it's hot, it's very uncomfortable.

Zongjun (52:44)
No, it's not.

Yeah, the sunlight, the rain, the freezing coldness up in the mountain or the burning hotness down in the valley. And occasionally torrential, I will say hi to you. From bushes to bushes. It's pretty horrifying.

Ryan (53:02)
Ha ha!

Especially on your special hand -picked organic tea farm. You want to see bugs. Anyway, it just goes to say that on a tea label, if it says it's hand -picked or tezumi, just the word for it, on a matcha label, you should take extra special care to appreciate the moment and all of the hands and labor and skill that went into making them.

Zongjun (53:30)
definitely deserves a higher price compared to some of the other attributes.

Ryan (53:34)
actually what I was just about to say. If you're not paying upwards of $30 a jar for that, you should question whether or not it was actually handpicked. It's one thing that really deserves a higher price based on the labor associated with it.

Zongjun (53:44)
Hahaha!

Ryan (53:49)
Like just imagine like, you know, as a parallel, you could buy lobster at a store and it was a hundred percent taken off the shell and it was $5. Right? You'd be a little skeptical what it is that you're buying and whether or not, what's inside. Similar thing, you know, it's a, you shouldn't want to find a lot of value in a handpicked tea or value as in like cheap budget value.

Zongjun (54:02)
Yeah.

Ryan (54:18)
value t. That should be an alarm bell on a label. Anyway.

Zongjun (54:22)
Next one is processing. So this one definitely plays a pretty large impact in the final flavor profile outcome. Things like duration of steaming and how to tweak the temperature and time, all of that will have a great impact on the flavors.

Ryan (54:44)
Yeah. And this is one area where you typically won't see it on a label. So apparently the art of steaming is very difficult to get right. And it's producer to producer. And if you think about it, I think Zach from Kettle was the one who made this point, was that most tea producers get 50 harvest seasons in their entire life to optimize. 50 shots. That's what they have. And their ability to tweak parameters and to, you know, they don't have endless iterations.

Apparently, one of the things that's really hard to nail is exactly how long it needs to be steamed. The more you steam, the deeper the color it gets, but you also lose a lot of nuance. Something steamed very quickly is like poaching something very quickly. You preserve a lot of what's in that thing and a lot of the flavors, or if you really steam it, it starts breaking down the cellulose, it gets a little more cloudy, and produces a very different product.

Usually it's on the lower end, not exclusively, but even within that range, it's an art to get that right. And that you would not expect to see on the label, but it would be associated with the skill of the producer, just like how some producers in wine are naturally going to demand higher prices because they're just so good at their craft. Similar thing here where a lot of these processing decisions can't.

really make it on the label, be really weird if someone puts steaming time. Maybe that's also kind of considered part of their IP.

Zongjun (56:12)
Hahaha

I spent 50 years to this point and I'm just going to tell you.

Ryan (56:20)
you know, it probably depends too on like other factors, like, you know, if it was raining that day, how many days you had to shade it for, right? The predictive model is probably multivariate, where you need to change the amount of steam time. I mean, it's kind of like noodles. Like, you know, when you go into an Ichiran noodle joint, they change the noodle recipe every day based on the humidity, because I guess the gluten forms a little different.

Zongjun (56:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like

espresso machines.

Ryan (56:48)
Yeah, exactly. You have to dial them in every time, every day, based on, you know, ambient conditions. Yeah. Another big one that relates to labeling with regard to delicate flavors that is very important to everyone listening is harvest season. So you talk about, you know, you always hear first harvest is best, and that is generally true. Second harvest or third harvest going into the summer or autumn is almost always worse. It's too hot and...

Zongjun (56:54)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan (57:15)
And the best tea plants are not harvested that many times. You'll exhaust a plant like that if it can be harvested. The best tea plants are usually harvested once a year and sometimes twice a year.

Alright, and last on this for delicate flavors is fresh milling. Wanna tackle that one, Sam? And how mill dates are so important for preserving delicate flavors.

Zongjun (57:37)
Alright, fresh milling. This one's hard. You know, for most of the commercially available matcha that you can find out in the world, they're milled, centrally milled in Japan. And the tea that you end up getting versus when they are freshly milled in Japan, the time between them can be weeks to even months. The flavor profile can be very different because due to all the oxidation that happens along the way.

And nowadays you are seeing brands like Johnny Matcha and Oika doing really fresh milk that ranging anywhere from a couple of weeks to 24 hours. And we can see how the outcome really changed. The sheer freshness, the sheer abundance and intensity of the flavor profile can be very different from a matcha that comes from the same cultivar.

or even the same garden, but was smelt a couple months or a couple weeks ago.

Ryan (58:38)
Yeah, it's really important if you care about nuance and the definition of the flavor before oxygen has had the chance to start changing those flavors.

Zongjun (58:48)
Yeah, I mean, back in the days, there's really a severe lack of infrastructure to create ultra fresh milled matcha. You know, the mills are just so hard to be procured and transport to places outside of Japan. And it's very, very great that someone has figured this out and end up doing it, be able to do it outside of Japan.

But still, it's very difficult to make it more ubiquitous.

Ryan (59:22)
Yeah. We've been, I mean, we've basically seen two solutions to this problem is one is by compressing the supply chain. So, you know, sourcing direct from farmers or near directly from farmers. Like you see companies like Kettle or like Johnny Matcha doing, and really shortening the supply chains and having more freshness guarantees. Or you have people like Mark, like Rivers, I think River and Stone Tea, or apologies, forget their name, and JagaSilk in British Columbia.

who are milling matcha fresh on their own equipment and taking that on. But it's one of the areas that we're very interested in and have identified is this lack of infrastructure so that people can mill it fresh, even at the point of consumption. And how do we take new technology, new materials, and functional design and kind of shrink what's going on in an ishi usu as best we can into a countertop device to deliver a radically better...

experience with matcha preserving its fresh characteristics and in particular its flavor and nutrition. Our dream would be to have every matcha can to have a mill date on it and we want to have the infrastructure to make that world possible so that can be included on every label.

to summarize for delicate flavors and nuanced and how that can appear on a label, definitely terroir matters in understanding kind of the taste of the place. Cultivar, definitely gonna matter, which is why like single origin, single cultivar or blends that have transparent components so you know what percentage is what in a blend.

Harvest season, also definitely gonna matter. You want first harvest or spring harvest is always the highest quality. And then around mill date. So picking vendors that have either mill date guarantees or have transparent mill dates written on the label. All will definitely matter.

All right, and last section, last main section, reducing bitterness, lack of flaws. So, Zongjun, want to give a high -level overview of that one and how it can appear on the label?

Zongjun (1:01:27)
Yeah, reduced bitterness is definitely a general preference among consumers nowadays. So first of all, hybridization and cultivation selection, some of the cultivars are just naturally less bitter than others. So by intentionally selecting and breeding those cultivars together, you can end up having matcha that's just generally less bitter.

that have more sweet and more creamy notes in general. Shading can also play a very large role. So by covering the tea from sunlight, you are essentially blocking the conversion of amino acid into catechins, which is more bitter and more stringent. And harvest method can definitely play a very large role. So whether or not the tea is handpicked or if it's machine harvest,

you know, by having more stem -y substance introduced into the final product can really increase the bitterness. And, or older leaves, that's right. And the very last one is also fresh milling. So, old and stale matcha can definitely be more bitter and less visually appealing than fresh -milled, green and vibrant matcha.

Ryan (1:02:31)
Or older leaves.

Yeah, and actually we have series coming out on our Instagram, so if you don't follow us there, it's called the Why My Matcha is Bitter series. We break this down into even greater detail. But A lot of the same things matter, where you're looking for shade duration, harvest method, whether or not it was, how fresh it is, and then again, knowing your cultivars.

And I think sort of knowing your cultivars is one of the most important things to the specialty market. Because it can really navigate you to what it is that you want and you're looking for, depending on what's important to you. Like is umami taste the most important thing? Know your cultivars. If color is the most important thing, know your cultivars. If bitterness and avoiding it, or maybe you like it, is very important to you, definitely know your cultivars.

It's one of the easier ones to do with the existing degree of transparency we see on labels. And then of course, just other factors certainly matter around terroir, around fresh milling, around harvest method, shading, and all of the other things that we've mentioned that can appear on a matcha label.

Zongjun (1:04:00)
Yeah, I mean, reduced bitterness is really a general preference at the current stage. Some can argue that a certain level of bitterness is very important, and some might actually like the bitterness in the tea. So I think that this will be a very interesting attribute to add on the label, not necessarily the bitterness level, because you know, like the

The human perception of bitterness really varies by a lot. It's arguably not a good metric to have. So I guess by assessing the bitterness from what kind of cultivar that went into this tea, how many days it has been shaded, or the harvest method, or how long has this tea been milled.

would be good attributes that help you to calculate how bitter this tea will be and if that will fit your preference.

Ryan (1:04:55)
Yeah, absolutely. And all of these things are all around finding and discovering your own preferences and being able to look at all of the information that's on a label to find the best thing. And I think as an industry, whether or not you're a matcha brand or a cafe, bringing this information to the forefront is going to help people find things that they like.

And then, you know, any consumers this thing, you know, learning through and getting all of these different reference samples and tasting so you can build your own predictive model of what you like, just like in any other product, is just, that's the fun. That's the fun of tea in general, is discovering your own preferences and how different processes or nature and nurture components result in very different experiences that we can all experience by this one leaf. It's kind of crazy.

Zongjun (1:05:45)
Yeah, I guess that's really the future of labeling, right? Like to offer as much information as possible with no subjectivity to let consumers decide which consumer path they want to move forward.

Ryan (1:06:00)
Yeah, absolutely. Or even a mix of subjective and objective, like even broad category, like this is approximately how we would suggest to be used, or these are the way these notes typically get expressed. Some people really like chocolatey profiles or umami profiles or refreshing profiles. I think those type of buckets could be very interesting for people, but not necessarily product specific, but like...

You know, label specific. Like, you know, these groups of cultivars generally taste this way, kind of like what we see with wine education. Like if you go to winefolly .com, they have great resources, both going over place and grape type. Like if you're interested in this, then you could eat it with this. It usually expresses these cultivars. If you have a Pinot Noir in California versus France, these are the general differences in flavor expression. And here's why they taste different.

Zongjun (1:06:37)
Mm -hmm.

Ryan (1:06:58)
I think generalizations can still be made, but maybe not by the person selling it, at least in a way that's saying, this is better than this, where it's a lot of top -down imposition.

Zongjun (1:07:10)
Right, right, right. I mean.

Ryan (1:07:12)
Or if they

do say, this is better than this, right, they're really explaining why. I guess the problem is that not enough people explain why. They just say, this is rare, this is authentic.

Zongjun (1:07:21)
Yeah.

Or you can just simply reflect it by selling it more expensive. People will naturally agree with you or not.

Ryan (1:07:31)
True. Quick way to lose that reputation though.

Zongjun (1:07:36)
Or you know, like, you know, some someone or some group of people might just end up discovering that umami is really not their thing. And, you know, by using less pesticide or fertilizer by giving the tea bush, you know, less shade grown period, you know, it naturally will reduce the cost of making those tea, which the tea might be, you know, more friendly to your wallet, you know, compared to the more umami matcha.

Ryan (1:08:04)
Yeah, yeah for sure.

Well, you know, ultimately, you know, it's all going to come down to the decisions of the vendors and the consumers and, you know, who has the power to put pressure on whom. And, you know, we were just passengers on this and, you know, hopefully we can make some impact by, by swaying some people's opinions. But, you know, it's going to be interesting to see how this shapes out compared to other specialty industries like coffee or beer or chocolate. So I'm excited for the future of Mocha Label.

Zongjun (1:08:32)
Me too, me too.

Ryan (1:08:33)
Yeah. And you know, you and I are about to go to Japan for about a month to do some sourcing. So we're going to have a lot of firsthand experience. Like, what is it like to source these teas, talk to these farmers and, you know, understand even more the complexities of why maybe certain things aren't put on the label that we're not even aware of yet. So, you know, we want to share that journey along the way as we go and share our discoveries as we...

We do the hard work. It's really hard to actually create something. It's very easy to comment on someone's match up, if it's good or bad, or critique it because this isn't on the label or that's not on the label. But actually bringing products to market as we are learning is so incredibly difficult. I just...

Zongjun (1:09:17)
Ugh.

It's so easy

to criticize, but you know, it's always, you know, a difficult task to accomplish when you're sitting on the other side of the table.

Ryan (1:09:31)
going to be transparent. If we got something wrong in this, we're going to talk about it later for sure on the podcast. We're very much open to both being proven wrong and changing our opinions on these topics as we go from more observers to doers in bringing matcha products to market. But we'll document that journey and ultimately we want the specialty market to

grow and flourish and that's what we're in service of is really raising the quality ceiling and support the specialty principles that can make this industry incredibly interesting.

Zongjun (1:10:10)
the future is vibrant and green.

Ryan (1:10:13)
and it's gonna taste great.

All right. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a five -star review on whatever platform you're listening on. as well as sharing this podcast with a friend. And please be on the lookout for new content. Thanks.

Zongjun (1:10:30)
All right, see you in the next episode.

Ryan (1:10:32)
Take care.