Notes at origin: IzumoCity and Yame

 

 

Ryan And Zongjun (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan and this is my co -host, Zongjun Hello. And we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we are sharing a little mid -journey update as we just left the beautiful city of Kyoto and the Uji area behind us. And as we are heading towards

Yame, we did a short stopover in Izumo City. Yeah. So this is sort of mid -journey, undigested material that we've learned. So we wanted to sort of walk through some of our notes and what we learned and our initial impressions. And I think, you know, the more you learn about matcha, the more you learn that there's just so many different perspectives to take in, whether or not it's from the farm level or the brand level or the consumer, or if you're just talking about the product itself.

So, you know, we're very open to changing our minds as we make new discoveries and we realize that on a day -to -day basis our perspective is changing with every new conversation that we have. So we're trying to record a bit more frequently during our sourcing trip to sort of capture our undigested thoughts of what we saw, what we heard, who we spoke to, to bring some transparency into what it's like trying to source tea.

and how it was different from our expectations. Yeah, first Izumo, Ryan. So different. So different. So different from Uji. And to put it into context, when we went to Uji, we mostly stayed within Uji city, but we did talk to some people and get to visit and have some meetings and learn and listen about some of the more

industrial agriculture or the larger scale farming that's going on in like Wazuka and other areas. But the ones that we actually got to physically see and meet the farmers, they were all relatively small scale operations from multi -generational families where everything is hand picked. They do rice straw shading and they're all basically in an Uji city. So we had a very unique snapshot of

probably the creme de la creme of matcha production in Japan. And we got to have multiple sensory experiences with farmers preparing tea that they had made themselves and tasting the water that they used to taste it and the materials that they have to brew it and got to have it exactly the way that they intended it, which is a very unique experience. And actually just to share sort of the emotional journey of sourcing.

When we came in, we knew a few people. We had one confirmed meeting and everything was a scramble. We were emailing people, we were doing cold emails, we were able to get a couple of introductions from people. And there was so much unpredictability that it was kind of stressing me out a lot. I think a lot more than it was Zongjun. But the moment we got someone very kindly offered to pick us up and the moment we got in that car and we had the first interaction,

with those producers, I instantly could just feel the weight lift off of my shoulders. Doing business and meeting people in the Japanese tea community is so different than when you're doing business with large companies. Every time I had been to Japan for work, which was maybe six or seven times in my past role, my past job, it was very formal.

You walked in, you needed to be wearing a suit. You did a basically what is kind of a miniature ceremony, handing your business card to someone only with two hands, not with one. And they hand you yours and you look at it. And for me, I can't read it, but you pretend to study it and say, Ooh, and you do that with everyone in the room. And then you have a talk and everyone's kind of poker faced. You don't know what's going on. There's very little emotions exchanged.

And that was just the way that I understood Japanese business was. But when you're interacting with tea farmers, with people in the tea industry, they're tea people. And it's like just the sense of like finding your people, like tea people everywhere, whether or not it's mainland China, Taiwan, Korea that we've interacted with, and now Japan, you just this warmth. They're so warm. Yeah, they all have a very similar vibe that you can instantly just sense it.

even without having started the conversation, you start to feel relaxed. It's quite a magical moment. So it's really an interesting emotional journey too, as things got slowly confirmed and very grateful for a lot of industry friends that were able to open some doors for us to meet some people. it's been an unexpectedly delightful journey so far, where everyone's been so open with their knowledge.

letting us look at the tea, ask nearly any question. We had the opportunity to ask for advice and it's been very helpful in our journey of trying to bring matcha milling closer to the edges, closer to the consumers so that people can have a radically fresh product. And the most surprising part to me is that no one has told us that they think it's a bad idea.

At least from a tea farmer's perspective, everyone seems to be very happy about the idea of selling tencha versus Matcha.

Yeah, that's very true. know, like tencha production and matcha production in Japan has this really strange, like almost weird ecosystem. You know, these farmers, these craftsmen that we have met, they are not necessarily the creator of a lot of the matcha out there. Yeah, completely separate. They're suppliers. They're suppliers. And they're actually, I a lot of times,

deeply exploited suppliers. have very little leverage in pricing negotiation with these larger firms that actually produce matcha or have the retail distribution resources to essentially clean the market. are very much in a very sub position.

interacting with all these big firms. So as we are talking about our idea of pushing matcha production to the closest level to consumers. By being able to mill it fresh anywhere and everywhere. Everywhere and everywhere. This is really giving them a chance to be able to stand in the stage and having a spotlight and shine.

instead of getting blends straight into those poetic named blends made by bigger firms. Yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting too, right? Because the reason why, one, these large buyers, as we're learning, are regular consumers. So it's a great form of predictable revenue for these farmers. But on the other hand, these farmers are naturally bound with constraints.

And some farmers have more resources than others. And some farmers have more education than others, more global experience, more language skills. And the ability to bring a product to market is its own unique value creation. But what's interesting is if matcha as a product is no longer a powder you buy in a can, but something closer like coffee beans, which then you prepare to yourself, it really changes the sense of what a matcha product.

is and the way it's manufactured and the types of relationships and the supply chain that matcha currently is dependent on, which by the way, we give it a hard time all the time. People don't put mill dates. By the time most matcha gets to the end consumer, it's three months, six months, one year old. but actually it's more accessible than it has ever been.

back in the past, know, matcha was not totally accessible, right? You had to have your own ishi usu so it wasn't until industrial milling and better packaging technology and the ability to nitrogen flush and put in these little oxygen absorbers. Was it possible that you could get decent tasting matcha anywhere in the world? So like the state that we're in now is actually a very good thing, but it could be even better by

fresh milling by preserving the taste and nutrition and having the product be more of the Tencha than the ground can of matcha itself.

And Tencha is really a very interesting product in a sense that it's almost the last bit of the process that these farmers are able to get to. Anything after that frequently requires a larger organization to allocate the resources to mill the Tencha into Macha and package them into finished product. Yeah, and that's not even all farmers. mean, some don't even have the ability to make Tencha. It stops at Aracha.

or the more unrefined tea because they don't have the ability or the equipment to do the de -stemming and de -veining. Yeah, to do the Shiage process. usually that gets allocated into a locally larger farm or larger farm. And then people will consolidate all of their unfinished tea into that one place and it will get finished into the final product. Yeah. as tencha

So really excited by the fact that no one's given us any major pushback on this idea. And we've shown them photos of our prototype and our progress so far and how fine we're able to mill it. And everyone seems very excited. So that's very positive. It's very, if you would have asked me two weeks ago what my best case scenario would have been, I would have said that everyone didn't communicate any emotion in their face.

Or in their words, which is absolutely has not been the case. People have been quite explicit, not implicit in their support for this idea. And we've also visited much larger industrial firms that have the ability to go from leaf to the end, and of matcha including all the fancy packaging equipment. So we really, the story has been quite consistent from these incredibly artisanal, multi -generational.

Tezumi hand -picked, honzu shaded farms all the way through places that have much larger degrees of automation and the capital equipment to do many tons or hundreds of tons of tea a year to be processed to their facilities. Yeah, that was very interesting to see the contrast between very industrialized production and very artisanal productions. absolutely. They're almost two different products. I don't even think you can

them. It's the difference between like agriculture to feed the world or like your locals farmers market like a very like or like a family -run donut shop versus Krispy Kreme. Like just the levels of capital investment in this equipment and the sheer scale is almost unfathomably large in terms of its difference. Yeah and that was just you know

actually in comparison probably a medium to smaller size farm if you are comparing them to Kagoshima. We have heard that these harvesters in Kagoshima are equipped with automatic GPS navigators that they can harvest tea by themselves. autonomous tea harvesting. It's almost like a scene from Interstellar.

And I mean, just to give another sense of like when they know how to fertilize the tea, for example, or when to apply either natural or chemical fertilizer, right? On one, they actually have someone measure the amino acid content of the leaves to know how much fertilizer to add, right? On a large scale. No one's doing that at these smaller plantations.

They smell the bush, they look, they're really intimately connected to their gardens and what's going on in the garden management.

Yeah, every season before harvest, we learned that the owner would frequently fly in experts from Shizuoka and do all sorts of testings on the tea leaves to really like study and engineer the maturity of the leaves and decide which day is the best harvest day.

chlorophyll content. They're quite sophisticated operations. chloroplast measurement. Modern technology, modern analytical chemistry techniques. Pretty interesting to see because if you view it from a food science perspective, the replicability from year to year, from season to season, and their ability to make very precision adjustments based on science and based on measurement, right, if it's going to happen at scale, I'm very happy it's happening at scale this way.

There's no other way to manage it when you have 50 times the land area to manage. It actually makes a lot of sense. people there are, by there I mean Izumo city, very flexible or flex -minded. They're not really attached to any of the multi -generation. I mean like...

One of the farmer we met right there is also a multi -generation tea farming heritor. But they're not necessarily very attached to the generational heritage or guideline, unlike people in Uji They don't have the traditional background. Some people might call it baggage, but they don't have all these traditional things. Newer tea production area in general. progressive and innovative minded.

And they're not shy about their teas not only coming from Izumo City, but also elsewhere too. People sending tea to them to get processed. Yeah, that was very interesting too, because they clearly made a very large investment in capital equipment. And when you're buying all this capital equipment, it's just sitting there. It's a huge asset on your balance sheet. So you use it. It's actually a big thing in the food industry around innovations that get made for

anything from a potato chip to a soda factory to a beer brewery, you use your capital equipment. Whether or not you're doing white label for a different product, that is an asset that needs to be used as frequently as possible. Otherwise, it's just sitting there depreciating, losing money, you have revenue potential loss. So it's very interesting having Aracha or the unrefined tea getting imported from other prefectures and then finished on that equipment, which makes a lot of sense.

And what's really cool and what we got to see firsthand are these refrigeration units. My word, they're gigantic. It's really literally a warehouse inside a giant refrigerator to keep all of this Aracha fresh. So it can be basically finished whenever it needs to be. And it's not only a warehouse, it's also a milling center. have millers inside the refrigerator. That was very interesting. Very interesting.

In that case, was a ball mill. So was also our first time seeing what a ball mill looked like. So apparently for most tencha, when it's run through a ball mill, it takes about 24 hours. But I mean, you're getting many, many, many kilos, depending on the size of the ball mill. But for hojicha, or very stem -y hojicha that gets run through a ball mill to make hojicha powder, that was not from tencha, it was, I think he said 40 hours? hours, 40 hours of continuous milling.

It's basically a bunch of... It's a big tumbler. Basically a big tumbler. Yeah. And with a lot of beads inside. It's basically creating powder from collision. Yeah, basically. And then at the end it results in a very spherical particle shape. And apparently some of them are much better than others at reducing the heat. And I think that was one reason why we saw it the refrigerator as well.

It was very interesting. So, Zongjun if you were to compare and contrast these two producers, what were some of the big highlights in their mentality, or the things that they talked and worry about, or in the things that they told us? I mean, so far you have been saying a lot of the difference between these two regions, but what...

I have seen that I would say similarity is the mind of pursuing natural farming. although this is such a large farm, it's farms really. They have a lot of farms scattering around Izumo city and they are into natural farming. We see spiders, all kinds of insects. everywhere.

big spiders. not like spiders just, you know, pop out in spring this year. Very well. They clearly lived there for a long time. And, you know, and they are very proud of it. And they say that this is good for the environment. This is good for the tea. And for some of the gardens, they were not natural farming before, and they are slowly facing everything out and moving to natural farming. Well, it's not exactly natural farming. It's not no intervention.

As even under JAS organic certification rules, you have to keep your pesticide residue super low, but you're still allowed to use some pesticides. And in that case, I don't think they're using natural fertilizers. But still, I mean, they're still in a very similar spirit. And I think that is the only way you can make that kind of tea at this kind of scale, right? It's really probably the best time to be doing this type of more ecological farming practices. The technology finally exists.

where we can do this, where it can end up being at a price that most people can actually afford. Yeah, although it's my suspicion is, is that, you know, like, it's far easier to get a certification from Japan. But, you know, I think a large, a very large reason for them to convert to, you know, less synthetic fertilizer, less pesticides practice is to pass the FDA approved.

I wonder if the foreign market actually has anything to do with this transition. Yeah, that's we keep hearing that the EU and the US restrictions for pesticide residue are really strict. But I've also heard that the JAS certifications also really strict and slow process too, with really good enforcement from everything I've heard. think Ian from Yunomi mentioned that too. But it definitely seems like that the acceptable and

pesticide residue requirements are less stringent in Japan for normal matcha. Yeah. But I don't know about labeled as organic. Yeah. Be interesting to double click on.

So, Zongjun in matcha marketing and in tea marketing in general, especially when talking about Japanese tea, you can have several different ways of framing marketing to get someone to appreciate and to buy something. On the race to the top, you can have people talking about honzu shading, traditional farming practices, everything being handpicked, Tezumi.

And all of these great and wonderful things that result in a product that is mind -blowing. And it's easy to demonize these very large, more industrialized agriculture, matcha producers.

But on the other hand, these large industrial matcha producers are capable of producing enough tea for the entire world to drink. The reason that we can go to any vending machine nearly anywhere in Japan and get what is actually a pretty well -crafted, pretty well -formulated, very tasty bottle, green tea, hot or cold, 24 hours a day for less than $1 or sometimes about $1 is because of this type of farming.

Right? So, you know, we're consumers of both of both of those things, but how can we hold that in our head? And how can other companies sourcing the best of the best frame why this is special in a way that doesn't completely hate on this mass industrial agriculture? People like to make that contrast all the time. And it doesn't sit with me very well. And I've been trying to digest how like some different ways.

people can highlight these differences.

That is a very interesting question, Ryan. I don't think I have a really good answer to that. It's like you can enjoy a multi -barreled 30 -year -aged whiskey and also really enjoy a highball made by Gaku. A simple, nice, consistent product and a very complex, non -predictable artisanal product.

they coexist and they don't necessarily contradict each other. It's almost like two kinds of product that gets enjoyed in two different scenarios. Yeah, all context dependent. Yeah, so I don't know. Do you cast judgment on anyone that makes this contrast? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, by the end of the day, after seeing the industry from both sides,

I would say, you know, like probably similar amount of technology and effort both went into two sides of these industry just in different ways. That's interesting. know, similar amount of effort got put into the development of honzu shading, the practice of honzu shading, the creation of all of these artisanal matcha takes time and sweat.

And probably it took similar amount of time and sweat for a bunch of scientists sitting in the office pounding their heads on computer screen, trying to figure out all of these automated harvester machines and all of these technology to streamline how to create a consistent product with so many different materials coming from different gardens and different areas. Yeah, absolutely. And they have two very different buyers too, right?

Especially when it comes to something like the artisanal side, handpicked, et cetera. The expectations for consistency are very different than when someone like the large beverage group in Japan, Asahi is your buyer or Suntory is your buyer or Coca -Cola is your buyer. You have very different quality requirements when you have these types of wholesale accounts or wholesale accounts for like

that are moving hundreds or thousands of kilos per order. Yeah, they are worried about a very different problem space than these artisanal small -scale family farmers in Uji. Yeah. It's interesting too that you say it's a similar amount of work. I had that feeling too. When we met them, all they talked about was quality.

everything they talked about when they talked about the harvesting machines, the sorting machines, the roasting machines, all the analytical measurements that they have done, the fact that it's refrigerated, it's all quality minded. And it's clearly getting better and better and better and better. And they said, yeah, we stopped doing this process because this piece of equipment was invented. Like it was really, really interesting. You're right. It's a, they're both two things that should be done.

And when it comes to to, you know, a vendor comparing and contrasting these things, I think you're right. It's just two completely different things. And I don't know if that comparison should be made. Yeah, it's not fair. It's helpful to make the comparison to teach someone why something is special in that sense. Like it's closer to a specialty product. But it's not so helpful in punching down. Like I don't like.

Promoting something by punching down onto something else and that being the industrial product Unless it's objectively bad. Yeah, that's fair or subjectively disliked by enough people Just like or it's just not good and no one can understand it. Yeah, but Yeah, I don't know if there's a good answer to my question or if there's better alternatives

Yeah, mean like, you know, importing tea powder or like materials outside of Japan and gets processed, you know, doing all these tea laundry, I would say it's objectively bad. But, you know, like, like, if you compare a standardized process versus a artisanal process, I think that's just unfair. You know, people in two different processes, they care about different things. Yeah. And they're solving very different problems. Yeah.

Absolutely. And actually this led to a very interesting realization when we're taking a train yesterday coming to Yame. And you know, way we define when someone pressures us to say, what do you consider to be specialty matcha? And I need to give a very quick answer. My first answer is well, a single origin, single culture. Right? Just stuff that's not blended and you know where it is and where it came from. Now this has caused me to rethink that a little bit. I don't know if that's you can literally call matcha from

anywhere, single origin or single cultivar. So long as you've intercepted it at the right point in its production, it was able to stay that way. And that is like, what does, like, if you just pull off some really industrial okumidori from Kagoshima, where they're doing a ton and ton and ton, and you compare that to handpicked tezumi okumidori, very carefully and expertly crafted.

We're talking about the difference between like boxed wine and very small producer in Jura doing something interesting. Yeah, they can both be single cultivar. And single origin. And single origin. So this whole definition I think is a little bit reevaluated. Yeah, and also like it's very messy. I would say it's as messy as Chinese tea that all of these regions are so

poorly defined. can like we were talking about Uji tea and tea from Uji. Like Uji tea is really just a nonsensical word. Like people can import tea leaves from all the other regions, not just, you know, regions nearby. As Aracha. But like regions far away from like Kagoshima and gets imported into Uji and gets laundry there and it's

out of a sudden, Uji tea. And you can have tea in Uji, which is actually a tiny, teeny portion of what made up Uji tea today. So it's a very, very interesting and sad reality that we are facing right now is that all of these regions are very poorly defined. And I'm not saying that other regions doesn't necessarily produce high quality tea, they do.

I think one of the sheer reason that why this is happening is because you can sell the tea for a higher price tag, that's all. And people recognize the quality of Uji as they got advertised through all kinds of resources online. And this is probably why the reason that this phenomenon is happening. But...

like other places like Yame, even in Kagoshima, they can produce very good quality tea. And what we need to do is that to let transparent label happening in all levels and tell people exactly as fine as possible where their tea is coming from. Yeah, and the harvest method and some sense of place and production and the people behind it. Without that,

you don't really know what you're drinking. Or you can just simply say, which I think this is what we have encountered in Izumo City, that totally transparent about how your tea is getting blended from different regions and getting processed through a ball mill. if you think it still tastes good, it tastes good. It's lower price tag and is friendly for your wallet. And it's still a good quality tea.

The beauty of this system, which also has a bunch of negative consequences, is that the very industrial tea, very industrial and the semi -industrial tea, matcha, tencha that's being produced in Japan, is actually very suitable for being mixed with milk or sugar or some process where you're losing some subtlety and nuance. So they're basically able to meet people where consumers are at.

Once you go above a certain quality level, the subtlety and nuance is going to be lost and your mind as well have used something a little cheaper, whether or not it be a later harvest or a different cultivar, slightly older, et cetera. So in that sense, it's incredibly good. The bad part is that there's not much space left in the foreign demand export market.

for the really high -end stuff because the culture of drinking usacha or koicha, thin or thick tea, is much less. Or having it as what MTCH would call a light brew, or sort of a more Americano style, where you're really getting to taste the place. And in third wave coffee or in specialty coffee, you see them get around this problem a little bit because the blenders.

And the roasters have so much skill around terroir and identifying different lots of green coffee and blend it together to create unique blends that can be for milk. But they're the ones doing that optimization. But here, know, in the case of matcha, that knowledge of what these different places taste like just doesn't exist. Even now, if you wanted to go through and really learn the taste of Kagoshima.

versus Yamei versus Shizuoka versus Kyoto Prefecture and even within Kyoto Prefecture there's a bunch of little micro regions which we're learning more and more about that are super interesting. Yeah, we mentioned about Wazuka but also places like Ide. Yeah, they all produce very different tea. Yeah, and Uji Taewara, different levels of automation, pretty interesting and as complex as wine. The only way you could do that is you have to try all of these teas. You don't know when they're milled on.

And the problem is there's too many variables that aren't controlled for. You need to have controlled variables to learn these things. And this stuff has been so abstracted up the supply chain before it even gets to you. And that's why we make the case for transparent milling. So it's interesting to see how this will evolve because my suspicion is that a large number of these really good, very reputable

matcha companies in the states or in other countries, non -Japanese countries that are sourcing from some of these best farms and who are really trailblazers in the industry of finding, writing about, and telling the story of these farmers. I would wager that the majority of their volume is through more industrial tea or slightly more industrial tea because that's just where the bulk of the consumption is at. When you're a cool new matcha brand that everyone likes and is super hip, right? That's great.

The fanatics and the really true tea lovers that are really into this stuff, that are willing to pay $30, $40, $50, $60, $70, $80 a can or a jar are going to tell everyone else about it. And then you need something for everyone else. You need something for people who want to mix it with milk and sugar. So another way of putting that or another way of viewing it is that these artisanal farmers are really marketing for what is probably the cash cow

of these businesses selling these more industrial products. So it's an interesting situation that we're in. And the place that I've been the most inspired by, at least as a consumer that I've experienced many times repeatedly, we talk about them all the time on this podcast, is MTCH. It really embraces the flavor variation, both as a light brew,

And when mixed with milk or even in a frappe, some of their frappes that they have, you close your eyes, you swear it's dark chocolate. Like you would have no idea that that product was green. And exploring the flavor variation that way. And they tell you, it's a blend and we created it to taste like this. Or no, this this is okumidori from Yame. And if you really want to have a conversation about that, they'll tell you about what's special about Yame and what's special about that cultivar.

and why they chose it in this particular context. They say that the future is already here, but the future is unequally distributed. Where some people don't even have a cell phone, and some people, like who is it? The CEO of Huawei was spotted with a tri -folding phone. it's commercially available now. OK. They just launched it. they just launched it, but they leaked it.

So they had a customer of one. He was really living in the future in the present before it was launched. Apparently that was a big marketing stunt. We don't know. But the same is true in the case of matcha. I think as industry people, we need to look to see where this is being done, where people are celebrating the variance of flavors from very high quality producers and showing that and presenting that to people who

want to learn about it and get to taste it. But this whole thing of race to the top and race to the bottom really creates a interesting position for a lot of the middle tier farmers. As we learned from multiple farmers in different regions telling us similar stories, is that, you know, where do they go? you, it becoming a very good farmer is

Risky you need to very expensive very expensive You need to risk a lot of these capitals into develop new technology like develop home to shading acquiring new farming skill and You know, can really screwed up even just one factor of these new process and Your entire, you know, yearly yield is basically damaged or not good quality and you know, that's

that's just gone. If you want to try, have to try it next year. How many years do you have ahead of you? Like for a lot of these farmers, they don't necessarily have a very large cash repository to sustain them, to do more innovations. Or the other way is that you can really just go down. You can really adopt the way to manufacture more industrial, you know, matcha and really just wholesale them at a very cheap price.

to these larger wholesalers for lower grade matcha. And if you are in the middle, like it's a very like sad decision sometimes for you to make like your garden probably last for generations and generations. Now for today, you know, you are carrying this weight from generations to make a decision for the future. And the future is very unclear.

And the future is very much lying outside of Japan. And a lot of these farmers don't even, you know, like have a smartphone or speak English. Yeah. It's a huge awareness problem. And they're really stuck with very limited buyers and probably stuck to around fluctuations in the commodities market. My girlfriend has a cousin whose husband is a farmer in Normandy in north of France, and he cultivates a lot of wheat.

along with a couple other cereals. And this farm is pretty well capitalized and they have a very large barn where they store all of the wheat and he actually won't sell it until the commodity price is good. A lot of his friends in a similar area don't have that choice to just sit on all of that grain waiting for a better price. And they're stuck with like one or two buyers.

Now imagine you don't have the capital resources to even store your product. Very well may even just be something as simple as a storage issue or refrigeration. Let's say you can process it to aracha off. You don't have enough refrigeration. It's going to start to go bad. No one's going to want it. There's all these capital equipments involved in these types of businesses, and it really apparently is squeezing out people in the middle. And we really need to find some people like this.

But it's even very hard. Every single person that we've met was either completely dumb luck because we walked in somewhere, started chatting with someone and the president and fourth generation of this tea company just walked in the door. Or it was a direct introduction or a cold outreach. It was just all people that we were able to discover through Instagram or through their website or through Google Maps or through other people. But I mean, there's still 12 ,000 tea farmers in Japan.

A lot of them. lot of them. And it's a discovery issue. not that they should be dependent on us coming to knock on their door, but the people that know that they exist and that buy from them already have no incentive at all to give them more choices. I mean, these are farmers. They have very limited bandwidth. That's what we keep hearing over and over and over and over. I mean, they're a real value in these buyers taking this tea and turning it into a finished product and selling it to a customer.

Yeah, very real value add but you know, it's It's interesting that a lot of people I guess in agriculture just don't have a lot of control over their own fate Yeah, it's very very sad. I mean like matcha is Really not that scarce and you know, Japanese tea is not that scarce It's you know, Marc from Ooika at at some point was talking about this is that you know, like

all of these tea that you see in the tea field like Sencha, gyokuro they can at some point all be converted to making Tencha. It's really not a resources constraint problem. It's a people constraint problem. It's a market constraint problem. And a lot of these people, don't necessarily have the choice to climb up the ladder and make better and more tasty products.

They are stuck into this already exist revenue strength that they have to attach on. Otherwise, they might get tossed away and really just losing their business. So that's all very interesting problem space that we are seeing here. And we're hoping that the ability to mill match or fresh and have these systems distributed where Tencha is going to be the end product might be able to start to help change this. We don't know.

We don't think that we're the golden parachute to come in and save anything. We are just merely players and would love it when incentives are aligned. I would say as a company, we're a very consumer focused company. We care a lot about the end consumer and that's basically the main filter that everything goes through. But without great suppliers and all of these hard work of all of these farmers and blood, sweat and tears, there is no such thing as a good product and a good product.

makes happy customers. you know, everything upstream matters so much too. So it's, we're hoping that this tech might be able to help. And we, think our next big mission in our next sourcing trip and the sourcing trip after might take us a little while. We want to meet some of these people and find them and see if we can set up something where we can become a good and reliable buyer.

of what is probably great product and then allowing them to, in the fact that we're a reliable buyer, make infrastructure investments to improve quality of their product. Yeah. Well, what I have learned from this trip so far that's very important is that we're going to need a car for the next trip. Yes. A lot of these places are just not really accessible through public transportation.

Yeah, you can get close you can get yeah close You get off the bus and then you walk under the Sun for like another half or one hour To get to the garden. We're doing this on a very shoestring budget So anyone listening that's ever interested in sourcing their own tea? No, Japan is amazing infrastructure to get to point a to point B But I guess this is kind of obvious. These farms are not exactly in the city center

But if you do come to Japan to do any sourcing, especially if you're in Yame rent a car. Or if you don't want to rent a car, I don't know how expensive it is. Probably expensive to hire a driver. So come with a large wallet. And interpreters and translators are very expensive. And I guess that's one other thing that we should mention. This is a piece of very practical advice to anyone wanting to source tea in the future in Japan. Language skills are very, very important. Yep. Mine are...

almost don't exist in Japanese. Zongjun had one year in college. Yeah and I know kanji so that has been incredibly helpful. Some of the pronunciation in Japanese for certain kanji's are kind of similar to Chinese so I can do some guessing but you know without those skills it will be very difficult to get around. Yeah.

Some places you'll get lucky and people speak English and between Sam's Japanese and their English, communication does happen. Not great communication, decently efficient. But when you have an interpreter, so back when we did consumer testing in all these different countries, I think I've had translators for

probably 20 different languages and dialects. We have a frustrating amount of experience working with translators. my God. Some are absolutely incredible. One of the best ones was in Dubai. It was a lady from Syria. She was so nice and she did such a great job encompassing what I wanted to say. Yeah. We kind of became friends over the course of a few days and at the end she had a friend who had a camel milk

farm and she had it brought in of camel milk milked that day. same day. It was driven into Dubai and she had it delivered to my hotel. I got to try fresh unpasteurized raw camel milk. That was amazing. Very incredibly kind of her. So you work with people like that and sometimes you work, I think a lot of the people we worked with in India really

you would say one sentence and they would just blah blah blah blah blah. And then you're like, I don't think I said that. And he was like, I know, know, I know, I'm explaining this other thing. I'm like, no. What kind of things are you explaining? I have a flow. Or one of our translators we end up getting in Portugal. It's just - my God, Alfredo. That was his name. That was his name. Alfredo. It's just like he doesn't translate. That guy was very arrogant. That was - Yeah.

I he's more interested in flirting with the respondents. That was painful. Yeah, yeah. Well, so you, you know, you get all sorts of color through translators. but the most important thing is that translators are not translators, really. They're interpreters. It's really, interpretation happens both ways. Yes. It's a good translator or interpreter is

actively trying to understand exactly what you mean and actively understand the confusions between, you know, different words because especially, you know, in a conversation that's more technological, the correct definition of words really really matter. Yeah, and also there's explicit communication and there's implicit communication.

And a bad translator can be like a blunt trying to do surgery with the blunt or a doll instrument, right? They're just crudely like, hey, what did you say? Tell me, tell me what. then he said this, it's really a crude instrument. There's really very little interpretation being done there. What you really need to understand is the context and the semantics and also when to not translate and let the conversation flow and just let some threads drop.

And that's totally fine. Yeah, that really needs some serious skill. Yes. Sometimes one dialogue can become long and a good translator will at this time would probably start, you know, taking notes and writing a lot of things on the notebook. But, you know, really like not to maintain a float of the translation. I mean, a dialogue really matters. Yes.

Absolutely and being able to communicate intentions and emotions and this is especially Important to Japan where people are not really willing to show their emotion at least not before They've had a couple of drinks Right, need to really communicate intention and that like what we mean and that we're very passionate about tea and we really care about this industry and we really want to learn and That cannot be expressed through just words

And then the opposite is true. We want to know the intention of the person that we're talking to. Yeah, Japanese people can be very, very implicit. Like for them to tell you a decision has been made in their mind can go like a large loop. At some point we were getting confirmation of being able to receive tencha from one of the farmers.

that went really, really implicit. Yes. It was framed as a question and then a hypothetical. A hypothetical, we started by talking about traditional Tencha wrap or cases in the past. Packaging. Packaging. That, you know, how Tencha was historically being exported and how it was protected. And then the conversation start drifted.

into how it's being done nowadays. And then there was followed by a hypothetical scenario of how exactly do we want to receive Tencha and what services do we prefer and what's the time frame and all that. It's a long way of saying that they are willing to sell Tencha to us. Probably. Probably. We both like our...

Everyone's ears perked up when they heard that. But imagine you have a translator or an interpreter that does not really exactly communicate that. Or makes their own interpretation and just gives it to you. Like being able, the art of the way that that was delivered was so impressive. Anyway, long way of saying we had the world's greatest translator. Thank you, Ryan. Thank you, Ryan. No, thank you. I won't thank you who gave us the...

the introduction, but thank you very much to one of our dear industry friends for giving us her contact. That was beyond helpful and I don't think that meeting would have even become remotely successful had we just hired some random person to interpret for the day. So that's very important when you're in Japan. So definitely if you're going to work with an interpreter, vet them, take them to

to launch, get a sense of what they're like, really explain what your intentions are, and then you'll probably much more successful sourcing tea. Or start learning Japanese today. Duolingo. Yeah, start download. You can see our affiliate link for so many free months. I'm kidding. Anyway, a lot of learnings, a lot of adventures along the way.

It's been a fun trip so far. Very fun trip so far. Very stressful at first, but now everything's planned and we can just enjoy the ride. And we're probably going to record tomorrow. We have a whole new fresh perspective. Yeah, every day is so different. So different. So much learning. This is the highest density of recording that we've ever done recently. Yeah, and also very inspired recordings.

not being forced by Ryan in the middle of the night trying to push another new recording to the world. Usually it's because I'm in the States and you're in China. Yeah, I gotta wake up. Wow, good thing you're a night owl. But yeah, we're gonna share more along the way and our perspectives will change. So please don't expect any conclusive anything from us as we're mid -trip.

And then probably maybe a week or two after, we'll do a big session where we have some more digested thoughts and some conclusions that we've come to. Or if you have some questions along the way that you feel unclear or we just didn't touch upon, DM us or comment under our recordings and we can ask for you and we can do some more contents upon your curiosity.

Absolutely. And if anyone is interested in sourcing matcha or sourcing tencha, we would be happy to hop on a call with you to give some basic mechanics of what we did, how we did it. what not to do. What to do, what not to do. you know, not that we're exactly the experts yet, but we're more than happy to share our knowledge. If you reach out, we can do that over a call.

We want to see more matcha companies, want to see more transparency, cooler sourcing, all of this stuff. There's such a huge world to explore. Honestly, even within Kyoto prefecture, in the Uji area and all of these sub -regions just south of Kyoto, you could probably start a whole matcha company just focused on one of those regions and one of those producers. There's such a huge world and all we hear about are just a couple names, which is the perfect way to start.

but there's so much more as this industry is gonna grow. So thank you so much for bearing with us on this long episode. And if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend or giving us a rating and we won't read the rest of the script. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.