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Ryan Ahn (00:00)
Hello, this is the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my co-host, Zongjun
Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:04)
Hello, hello.
Ryan Ahn (00:05)
and we're the co-founders of Sanko Matcha Products.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:08)
Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today's podcast is going to be more conversational. But we really want to get to the bottom of why do we and so many others out there dislike poetic matcha names so much.
I guess for you, Ryan, this taste really started from the very early days of your experience with matcha.
Ryan Ahn (00:31)
Yeah, no, I've hated poetic names for a long time. To be honest, I still personally hate them. I totally respect where they came from and the companies that make them. And a lot of the products taste very good, but I hate the poetic matcha naming convention. So we're titling this piece, Are Poetic Matcha Names Harmful, and it's an opinion piece. And we're gonna try to, you know, highlight both sides.
But I have an argument that there's a lot of consumer harm by this naming convention and there's also lot of harm to farmers.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (01:04)
Yeah, so why do you dislike these names so much, Ryan?
Ryan Ahn (01:08)
Oh, it's so confusing
to me. It's been confusing to me since the very beginning of my matcha journey. When I first got into matcha, I was an Omotesenke student, which is a type of Japanese tea ceremony school. And I remember we would arrange trips to New York. We would go to Ippodo, one of the more traditional matcha blending houses. They had a retail store in New York. And they had all of these matchas lined up by price. And they all had these very funny, hard to pronounce names.
very vivid memory of one of my friends ordering one and just stumbling through pronouncing the name. I'll have the hot sumukashi. And I thought, wow, this is so confusing. And there were very, there's very little guidance other than price. We didn't know what they tasted like. We vaguely knew what usucha and koicha was at the time. But most people, I mean, I imagine you're not a tea ceremony student. You have no idea what that means.
And we didn't know what we were buying. So we literally were just guessing based on price, hoping that the more money we spent, the more we would like it. And then we would go back and taste some and some people had bougier preferences and budgets than others. And we would try it and like, you know, the person who bought the most expensive one, wasn't always the best. So it's been a real source of consumer pain. But now that we're in the industry, we're learning a lot more context.
And
I really have come to the current belief that there is more harm than good in this current system.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (02:39)
You know, like calling it a poetic name or poetic naming scheme is almost a stretch for a non-Japanese speaker, because honestly, doesn't mean anything if you don't understand Japanese.
Ryan Ahn (02:51)
Yeah, Hatsu Mukashi or Uji no Shiro. It's so confusing. Sometimes you hear names of regions like Uji's in these names. Sometimes you hear cultivar names like Asahi in these names. And then like you go and ask someone and half the time the person you're buying it from, whether or not it's in the United States or even in Japanese retail stores, you go to Uji and ask, what is this? They don't know.
Other than, yeah, there's no Asahi in this Asahi no Shiro. And
Zongjun (Sam) Li (03:21)
Hahaha!
Ryan Ahn (03:24)
it's just mind-blowingly confusing for someone who doesn't speak Japanese. It's really completely arbitrary. And we're writing a couple of blog posts about this topic, and I came up with this really nice line. The current landscape of traditional matcha products is a chaotic green sea of hundreds of arbitrary, hard-to-pronounce poetic names with remarkably little transparency.
That's how I feel the current traditional matcha industry is for these 100, 200, 300 year old blend houses that have now blown up, right? They're all over Instagram. They're all over TikTok, YouTube reviews, right? It is where consumers have gone to find incredible value and they're going to the places that have been doing it the longest. And now...
Like, I'm sure the CEOs of these companies or the blenders of these large companies that have been around for so long could have never envisioned that so quickly the consumer base changed and how global it is, how non-Japanese it is, and how people aren't doing anything related to Japanese tea ceremony, which is how all of these products have been traditionally framed and named.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (04:37)
Yeah, so we were really curious about like, is there a mechanism or implication out there behind these poetic names? So we were actually asking the same question to a lot of people when we were visiting Japan. And it was really disappointed. There isn't any logical mechanism. It is entirely or mostly entirely arbitrary.
which was very desperate for us to understand the reality.
Ryan Ahn (05:10)
And
we're going to double click on that quite a bit more later on about how confusing poetic themes are, because this is one of those things where you can go learn a little bit about it, think that you've learned something, and then realize that there's lots of exceptions. And then you realize, again, that it's basically arbitrary. As far
Zongjun (Sam) Li (05:30)
Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (05:30)
as any non-advanced tea ceremony practitioner is concerned.
I have done quite a bit of research before this episode and put myself through a very unique form of torture. I decided to write out in an Excel file across, I think it was five different traditional blending houses. Every single poetic name, it was over a hundred rows long. I think had I spent more time on this, I could have done even more. And I put them all into one slide and
for the life of me, I cannot possibly believe that anyone in the world has any clue what's going on with all of these named products. Where, you know, I
Zongjun (Sam) Li (06:13)
No.
Ryan Ahn (06:14)
say I bought, I don't know, let me pick one, Fuji no Shiro, right? Where someone's gonna be, yeah, I know exactly what that should taste like. And then I moved to Uji no Mukashi. Yeah, someone knows exactly what that tastes like and what company it's from and what the profile is. And you compound this across a hundred.
Matsu no Midori. And then there's also Matsu no Shiro. Do those two things have anything to do with each other? I don't know. Like, Matsu means pine. But like, you know, it's such a mess. And it's so confusing. And we think it does a lot of consumer harm. So that's the first argument around harm. And, you know, we're not arguing that it's good or bad, right? These poetic names are not going anywhere. And they shouldn't go anywhere. They're actually a very interesting
cultural artifact of Japanese society and of a traditional art. And we think that's actually a very good thing and that needs to live on and be promoted and there needs to be new tea ceremony practitioners. That's where all of this came from. But now that the consumer base has shifted so drastically to non-tea ceremony practitioners, which are doing the vast majority of consumption.
We think there's a lot of consumer harm for the people that actually drink it, who comprise that majority. And then having spent a lot of time now with Japanese tea farmers and people who have interacted with Japanese tea farmers, we think that there's quite a bit of farmer harm as well, which leaves us to question, who does the current system benefit? And then at the very end of this, as a conclusion, we want to do like a cost benefit analysis.
Just to, you know, it's in the matcha industry people tend to over romanticize everything, especially for these very traditional crafts. And we want to just really re examine the assumption that everything traditional should be revered and what the primary and secondary effects are of the current systems that are in place. So that's the intention of this podcast. We're not trying to expose traditional matcha companies or
criticize
them, we're happy that they exist. Without them there would be no match industry.
it doesn't make them immune from the fact that there could be potential harm in the existing system to somebody, especially as
Zongjun (Sam) Li (08:37)
Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (08:37)
it's changing.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (08:38)
Yeah. Well, Ryan, going back to your original question, what does this system, like, who does this system benefit towards? I guess a more reasonable question will be, like, who does this system serve? You know, the target has changed. Originally, you know, like, it served the monarch.
the nobles of back in days. And I think that's essentially why this poetic matcha naming scheme has such a strong roots because, you know, it was not for people to understand matcha. It's for people to use matcha in a coherent way with tea ceremony with Chanoyu to coin a theme in Chanoyu to pinpoint a conversation topic.
It's usually why this chanoyu gets summoned in the first place. It's for the samurai and for the ruling class to have a safe space to have conversations. So that's, I guess, the original reason why these names are created. You have a lot of reference of these names coming from...
Genji no Monogatari, that's a very traditional Japanese literature, and many others. So for people to actually understand the meaning behind these poetic names, you need a lot of deep understanding of traditional Japanese culture. But that's no longer the case, right? In modern days, the target of service has changed.
from monarch to regular day-to-day consumers, us. And we don't necessarily have the contacts and we don't necessarily need the contacts to appreciate matcha. And the matcha is not going into a 100-year-old tenmoku bowl and instead it's going to a paper cup and probably going to be mixed with oat milk or milk.
And it still tastes good. And that's the point of us enjoying or buying these matcha in the first place. And that's problematic, right? Like still using these names would not give consumer an opportunity to understand the usage that they care. They care about the flavor. They care about how
Can I better pair a matcha with either milk or with either things that they are going to eat or drink along with? And that's the usage of modern days matcha. The usage has changed and the content has changed.
Ryan Ahn (11:04)
Yeah,
the context that you need to appreciate something has radically changed from being this very, what I'll call exclusive beverage. The average person, the amount of labor that it took to make matcha 100 years ago is almost unthinkable. I there are literally people sorting out leaves with chopsticks. This is what matcha production looked like.
And that was just one very narrow, tiny little step in that production process. This was not an every man's tea. And the context to appreciate is completely changed. And these older companies are adapting. I mean, you'll see traditional blend houses make a matcha latte blend, but the vast majority of their offering is still has one foot or maybe two feet very much firmly planted in the old world where now
the people who are very interested in matcha and have a lot of purchasing power are interested in contextualizing and building preferences on a very different set of things. It's around where it was grown. Who grew it? What processing steps made that thing unique? Was it a particular cultivar that expresses certain flavors? Was there some type of intervention like Honzu shading where they use rice straw canopies versus the synthetic ones?
Was it the fact that they use natural fertilizer versus chemical fertilizer? Was it in regional production styles where you have the very umami expressive tea in Kyoto Prefecture and in Fukuoka and especially in Yame, you have the more roasty toasty profiles? We contextualize and appreciate things very differently and it's much less abstract and it's much more real as all of us want to know where our food comes from.
But if you contrast that with poetic names, if you're a traditional Japanese tea ceremony student like we used to be and you were hosting a tea gathering, typically there's a theme. In the spring, it might be springtime. In the summer, it might be dedicated to that season. I've been to tea ceremonies in New York that the theme is New York. And
there's
Zongjun (Sam) Li (13:14)
You
Ryan Ahn (13:14)
various little references.
whether or not it's a New York Chawan or tea-bowl or Mizusashi or all sorts of things, kind of fun. And you usually match the poetic name to the occasion. It's kind of part of this appreciation and hospitality and hosting someone and creating themes.
It's just so far from what most people actually care about in today's use case scenario. And you know, there's this interesting cultural trend, both in the United States, but also all over the world of going to, of trying to not get a watered down experience, trying to find the most traditional and authentic thing possible. I had a very awkward moment. I remember there's this Chinese takeaway place in my hometown growing up.
and you know it's Americanized Chinese food and I remember standing there waiting for my food and this middle-aged older gentleman comes in and he's a little ill-mannered and he asks the owner in very condescending tone, is this authentic? Are you serving
Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:18)
That's all.
Ryan Ahn (14:19)
authentic Chinese food? And the poor
Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:21)
my god.
Ryan Ahn (14:23)
owner who is like clearly like I believe he's mainland Chinese and more recent immigrants, yes.
How do you approach that conversation?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:32)
You
Ryan Ahn (14:34)
I mean, for anyone like else who's like a little more culturally aware, I mean, it's just an absurd question. There's no such thing as Chinese cuisine. Chinese, there's like 50 to a hundred different styles of Chinese cuisine that are as different as what you'll find, you know, in the Midwest, in Ohio versus down in Arizona. I mean, we're talking about radically different.
cuisine styles across China. But you know, there's this weird romanticization or fetishization of the real thing. And I think that as much as boom, that's why everyone's going to these traditional companies. And that's kind of now that they're there, this current system is resulting in quite a bit of consumer harm. And I think could really harm matcha more broadly for more.
consumers wanting to adopt it based on frustrating experiences.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (15:25)
Yeah, mean, like, you know, for these, there's no problem for me, like for these, you know, traditional houses and poetic matcha name to exist. I, you know, like I see the problem being the lack of, you know, the transparent labeling out there to content balance or to, you know, guide
consumers from beginner to a more educated and more experienced consumer. Like the path is so vague. for a lot of people, the entry point is the poetic matcha name, which is not really a good starting point to begin with.
Ryan Ahn (16:05)
Absolutely.
You cannot draw a straight line from the poetic name to what is inside at all. And we're going to go into that pretty soon here about why poetic names are so bad.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (16:16)
Yeah, why don't we start from there, Ryan?
Ryan Ahn (16:19)
Okay,
the first thing to understand about matcha is that there is very little standardization behind matcha names and there are very little rules so long as you're not committing fraud. So you can basically call anything anything. You could get the bottom of the barrel matcha and advertise it as super ceremonial grade, single origin, single cultivar, technically in theory, you could do that.
or give it any of these poetic names. So there's very little standardization and the matcha names are... you can basically consider relatively arbitrary. They don't give any descriptive detail other than giving this feeling or sense. So something like white pine is one of the translation of these. It's much more abstract. it's for people, especially people who don't speak Japanese, it's arbitrary.
in the sense that it gives no descriptive detail. And some of you might be thinking, if you're a little more experienced in matcha names, is, no, there actually is a naming convention where you can add Mukashi at the end of a name or Shiro at the end of a name.
If you go to one of these traditional houses in Japan and you ask them to explain their matcha offerings, they'll say that mukashi, anything that ends in mukashi is generally meant for koicha and can be consumed as thick tea, so much more concentrated. So if it's very bitter, it's gonna taste disgusting. So usually it's a less bitter tea, usually more umami. And anything with the name shiro is generally lighter and more suitable for usucha. The problem with this rule
is that it's completely inaccurate.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (17:47)
Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (17:48)
There are exceptions left, right, and center. We've been to places where the cheapest tea on the menu had Mukashi in the name. And even more confusing is that some of the same names are used between vendors. So Hatsu Mukashi is the really famous example where there's
many examples of different traditional blend houses using this name. Some of them recommend that it's used for usucha or thin tea and they price it very low. I think Ippodo prices there's around six US dollars. And then you have other companies using the term Hatsu Mukashi and you know they're pricing it 30 to 40 dollars and recommending it for koicha. So I mean imagine you're just a random consumer in, I don't know, pick your country, let's say Germany.
And you're getting into matcha, you're looking through these houses, you're trying to build preferences and learn what's good, what's bad. And you get this can and a Hatsu Mukashi, you really love it. And then you go buy it from a different company and you realize that this is not the same product at all. So from a consumer standpoint, the name of the matcha between vendors is a, it's a fozami, it's a false friend. You cannot use it to predict whether or not you'll like something else.
So unless you're learning and memorizing both the name and the producer together and the flavor profile that came along with it, that's the only way you can build preference. So you have to go across all of these hundreds of products if you want to build a set of complex preferences about what you like and dislike. And there's very little predictors and additional information on any of these products to go off of other than the name. So it makes it really hard to form
preferences like you can in something like wine. For example, you might know that you love the Pinot Noir grape, right? And if you have one in California, you might want to try one from France, or you might want to try one from, you know, I don't know, you know, the
Zongjun (Sam) Li (19:46)
Zilla
Ryan Ahn (19:46)
Finger Lakes or New Zealand, right? Or you might know that you don't like Cabernet Franc, like me. I don't like Cabernet Franc. I've tried it for many different countries. And the reason that I'm able to develop that preference is because I'm aware that that
is in the product. But in matcha, you're not aware of anything when something is just called Hatsu Mukashi They don't tell you anything about it. I cannot form... It's not helping me become a more educated consumer where I'm able to buy something that I know I will like, other than arbitrarily memorizing all of these very foreign sounding names to me that are hard for me to pronounce.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (20:24)
Yeah, guess one of ways that you can kind of solve the problem is to stick with one vendor. So you just keep buying, you know, Hatsu Mukashi from, you know, let's say Horii Shichimeien And, you know, then you might be able to have a more predictable experience in the future. But I recently learned that it's not necessarily the case either. Same matcha plant from the same house can change name too.
throughout history and that's very you know it's really not good.
Ryan Ahn (20:55)
There's a very interesting cultural artifact that we wanted to talk about on this. So a lot of these poetic names are actually because it's a blend favored by a grand master of some institution. So you have the large tea ceremony schools like Omotesenke and Urasenke You also have some temples as well where, you know, they work with these blend houses to have these preferred
blends that are, it's the Urasenke Omotesenke blend, Mushanokōjisenke blend, excuse me if I mispronounce that. And they encourage all of their students to buy it. And they were the traditional consumers, right? It's like being a really big buyer of some company and you can work with them for some customization. So it's a similar thing, but it turns out between generations of Iemoto or grandmasters,
of these institutions, the same blend can change poetic names. So if there's a leadership change, the poetic name might change. And there's some examples of that that will post an article that we found. It's really informative to read through more about the confusing aspects of understanding poetic names. You know, the barriers to entry just to even understanding poetic names.
are super high, even on
Zongjun (Sam) Li (22:13)
Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (22:13)
a single product basis. It's like
Zongjun (Sam) Li (22:16)
You have
to be a Chanoyu student to follow the news, essentially, and know
Ryan Ahn (22:20)
Yeah.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (22:21)
the information and have to taste reference of all of these products. It's certainly an obviously a gated art. It's artificially created information barrier. And it's Chanoyu, right?
That's how you demonstrate this exclusivity and separate you from regular date consumers, essentially.
So that's the point of why these barriers are created in the first place. And for us, the reality has definitely changed. We are not coming from that side of the world anymore. And we and a lot of the regular-day consumers, we are buying matcha not for
not for chanoyu you, not for going to study tea ceremony, but for consuming the matcha itself. That's a special problem.
Ryan Ahn (23:17)
as a specialty product. want to learn
what is the inherent variation between regions and between cultivars and really discover the same world as like craft and specialty coffee or bean to bar chocolate or wine or anything else in the world. Matcha has such a rich and interesting specialty component to it that's completely obscured by these poetic names and traditional houses.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (23:41)
Yeah, so I guess the change really needs to happen not by eliminating the current naming scheme, but create a new one. I think that that will be a much healthier future for matcha as a whole.
Ryan Ahn (23:55)
And you know, it already exists. I mean, you see a lot of companies now where they tell you that what, there are descriptive names for the product, like the product is named after the region or named after the cultivar. And then they'll tell you exactly what's in it. Right. This is blank and blank farmers blend, which is 80 % Yabukita, 20 % Samidori And it was from, you know, the last year's harvest and they only did a single harvest that year.
and it was not handpicked and it was shaded for 30 days. Like that, thankfully that does exist and we have these two naming systems alongside one another. But what makes it even more confusing. So let's talk about consumers now that are in the middle of their journey. And I guess there's no end point, but let's say someone who's not a beginner, someone who's heard of a few cultivars or cultivated varieties, you know, just like.
Apples and grapes can have different expressions like a Granny Smith versus a Red Delicious. Same thing in matcha. So one of the first things you learn when you really want to get into matcha are a few cultivar names. So Yabukita is the most common, Asahi is like super ultra lux premium. You also have things like Saemidori okumidori, Samidori There's a lot of others. And it gets even more confusing. So this is another...
point about why poetic names are harmful to consumers. They sometimes will put the cultivar, word, into a poetic name. So we were in Uji a couple of months ago and we saw Asahi no Shiro. Like, that's cool. Right? It's a blend that has Asahi in it. Nope.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (25:33)
Hahaha
Ryan Ahn (25:34)
Zero percent Asahi. And we had to ask and the person we asked didn't know. They had to ask someone else.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (25:42)
Well, I
mean, like in their defense, Asahi is a very common name in Japan. means the morning sun, basically. you have a very, I guess, iconic imagery coming from the name that you see that in beer, you see that in tea, you see that in many other things that they will call it Asahi. So maybe for Japanese people, this is just like a very ordinary name that
as a very broad and general cultural association. For us, we know it's the name of a cultivar. And in this tea or matcha context, we obviously would associate that back to something that we learned or something that we're familiar with. And that's a very different thinking mechanism
because of this cultural difference or the lack of certain cultural knowledge or exposure.
Ryan Ahn (26:40)
No, it's a form of cultural exclusivity for those that are in the know. But I even bet that those who are in the know might not be too sure and they might still have to ask or confirm whether or not that has anything to do with the cult of our Asahi. I mean,
Zongjun (Sam) Li (26:56)
Yeah, yeah. Very likely.
Ryan Ahn (26:59)
the next level of consumer harm is it just adds to the jargon.
The vast majority of matcha consumers in the world are not Japanese speakers. They don't know all these Japanese references. And there is so much jargon to learn to be a reasonably educated consumer. And I remember very early on in my matcha journey, I remember talking with you, Sam, and I was looking through a bunch of, I bought like, I don't know, 20 poetically named products, thinking that I would learn something, only to figure out that
I looked back on all of my notes and tasting notes and I tried to capture all the detail of all the products. I didn't learn anything. I
Zongjun (Sam) Li (27:39)
Hmm.
Ryan Ahn (27:40)
learned a little bit more about what flavors I liked and disliked, but I didn't learn to taste for cultivars or for regions or for anything like this. And there's just so much jargon. I remember looking at one of these names, was like, Sam, is this name a cultivar? And like, you didn't know, you had to look it up, but think.
Thank goodness you can mostly read Japanese and you could quickly reference whether or not it was. So, you know, as a new consumer, a word like okumidori could just as easily be a poetic name as it could be a cultivar. And you compound this across all of the terminology you need to know to be a regionally competent buyer, like tezumi or handpicked or honzu, like the rice straw shading.
or chawan, or even really, or chanoyu basic, basic terminology. It's really hard to pin down what is what, just to wrap your mind around, what am I buying?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (28:35)
Yeah, I mean, as you progress in this journey of learning matcha, like all of these become, you know, interesting, you know, like they're, always history and story behind all of these jargon and, and culture. But it made it very hard for beginners, almost intimidating for beginners to, to, to progress forward. So I think that, you know, like,
And also, for us, we keep advocating for transparent and more detailed labeling for matcha It doesn't really necessarily contradict with the traditional naming scheme. Both things can exist very peacefully together in harmony. So I can definitely see a future of both culture living very peacefully together and everybody being very happy.
There's no, you know, it doesn't, like these two naming scheme doesn't exclude each other. And for me, I think it will be healthier for them to live together. You know, they each represent a very, very interesting segment of consumer and consumer culture behind.
which I think, you know, it's very interesting. It's almost, you can see a bridge between the past and the present and the future.
Ryan Ahn (29:48)
Yeah, it's just a shame that it's the entry point for so many new consumers, which is where this harm comes from. But I agree
Zongjun (Sam) Li (29:57)
Certainly agree. Certainly.
Ryan Ahn (29:59)
with you, but I think it's going to hurt the industry in the long run if more companies do not start adopting descriptive machin names and transparent labels. Because as a consumer, you're only willing to get burned so many times. I mean, at the end of the day.
I mean, people are cost conscious and people want to spend as little money as possible for the best product possible. Right? And if you get burned on a 30, $40 can of matcha enough times, right? You're going to fall off that pan wagon.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (30:31)
Yeah, the tuition is certainly high for matcha.
Ryan Ahn (30:34)
It's extremely high at the moment. But like any of these new blossoming specialty industries, you see that same curve where that awareness and education, right, is just so insanely high. We are still learning it. And we've been doing this full time for two years now. It's really difficult to... That learning curve is just so high where you're separating poetic names.
from different regions, from different processes, from different cultivars, all in an effort to figure out what will I like? And what will this taste like based on all of those criteria? Because ultimately taste is what wins. And it actually have a very good segue here. So what do consumers do in this current paradigm? Very few people could go through any of the traditional matcha houses, entire portfolio.
They can't afford to do that. And even if you did buy every single one in one order, they're going to age at different rates as you consume all of them. So then you don't even know, was it just too old or, you know, was it the tea itself? Because, you know, it's product that needs to be consumed fresh. So what do consumers do? They use price as a proxy for quality. So ultimately, price
is what people are really making these purchasing decisions on because there's literally nothing else to go off of but the poetic name. It's a form of top-down positioning where the companies are deciding this is good and these flavor profiles are worth paying for and these are the value products where maybe it's a more industrial process but you don't even know. You don't know how it was milled
You don't know where it came from. You don't know what harvest season it was, whether it was first, second, third, maybe even fourth, let alone the cultivar or any of the other aspects that are really important to quality.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (32:30)
Yeah, there's no point of reference. mean, like most of these mystery powder seal in the can are blend too. And you don't know. Like sometimes, you know, it's good quality matcha, but you just don't like the taste profile of that specific blend. That's very likely to happen actually.
Ryan Ahn (32:50)
Yeah, people need to stop talking about good or bad tasting matcha. That's like such a reductive framework, right? There is a large variation of what people would consider, quote, good quality matcha. And some of those flavor profiles you might really like and some of them you might really hate for reasons that have nothing to do with this very arbitrary concept around quality, which leads me to the next point that we have written here.
is that there's a preference quality and price misalignment in traditional matcha. So what do I mean by that? When you look at this price lineup of different arbitrarily named matcha products, and in some cases it's 30, 40, 50 different products, all different blends of matcha, when you look across that whole range, who is the end customer?
In a large percentage of them, it's the Iyamoto, or the grand master of the institution that it was made for, who in nearly all cases, and I think it's 100%, it could be wrong, there might be a few exceptions, it's all old Japanese men, almost exclusively men, who are deciding what these blends should taste like, and then dictating down, which...
to their students or to the institution that they should buy these things. So you have tea blenders who are also, by the way, almost entirely men, old men, old Japanese men, nothing against old Japanese men, but you have old Japanese men making things for old Japanese men that now have decided what this quality standard is. And that's creating this price lineup that everyone else in the world is now using
as a proxy for quality. And that also, you know, harming consumers.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (34:40)
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a long talked about, you know, historic legacy of Japanese society, very patriotic social structure that you can find the origin from, you know, hundreds, thousands of years ago. And, you know, this is really a piece of living fossil that we are experiencing right now.
Ryan Ahn (35:02)
Yeah,
with the good and the bad of the past. And typically people really romanticize the good, but it's really worth thinking for a moment, you know, about how that fits into a modern context. I mean, try discussing your pronouns with one of the Iemoto of these large houses. I don't think you're going to go very far. I was listening
Zongjun (Sam) Li (35:22)
you
Ryan Ahn (35:23)
to a very interesting podcast, I think it's called Tea Life, of a bunch of students who did in the Midorikai
which is a program put on by Urasenke that you can go live and breathe and study chanoyu for a whole year. And it takes in a lot of foreigners. And they were saying that, and typically the people who go to this Midorikai have been studying for quite a while. Sometimes it's a few years, sometimes it's a few decades. And typically they're studying somewhere else in the world and then you can apply and then get invited to come study at headquarters in Urasenke in Kyoto.
And they were saying that during the lessons, if you were a man, even if you had decade, two decades less experience than some of your peers, they would be seated as first guests, always. It is a very patriarchal, top-down institution whose values do not necessarily fit into modern-day society.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (36:17)
Yeah, but unfortunately, for still a very large portion of the matcha industry, they are still in charge, being a point of authority and also a predictive buyer. And much of these industries still relying on them, which makes it very difficult for people to make a change.
because they don't necessarily, like much of the industry is still serving them, not serving other people who care about different things. But luckily we're seeing a change right now. The dynamic has been shifted a little bit, but for the current days and for the near future, we will...
still unfortunately see this as the status quo.
Ryan Ahn (37:03)
Yeah, absolutely. And there are change makers within this institution. In that same episode, it was very interesting. There was a, I think it was in UCLA, there's an Urasenke program. And in chanoyu there's gendered movements. So the way you walk and there's some other things where you're supposed to act and behave and make certain gestures in a particular way, whether or not you're a man or a woman. And the one teacher allows her students when they start to pick their gender.
So a woman can pick masculine gestures or a man can pick feminine gestures. And they cannot switch once they've made it because you have to learn in a particular way and there's so much muscle memory. But they let their students pick their gendered gestures in. So it will probably change. And apparently there was almost a woman, Iemoto and Urasenke, but that didn't end up happening. There was a woman in the line.
I guess the world wasn't quite ready for that yet. I know a lot of tea ceremony practitioners were rooting for that. It didn't happen.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (38:05)
The world has ready, maybe Japan has not.
Ryan Ahn (38:08)
Yeah.
So it is getting better, but it is still a very old world system. And I think a lot of consumers don't realize that. just a
Zongjun (Sam) Li (38:17)
Yeah, it's
very interesting to see the whole structure being almost a manifestation of the society in Japan.
Ryan Ahn (38:25)
Yeah.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (38:26)
For the matcha industry, you have the farmers and you have the processors, the processing factories, and you have the blend houses, essentially the buyers of all of these products. And then you have the Iemoto.
the ultra buyer of the finished product being sitting on the very top And they dictate based on their own preference and their own usage of what this matcha, what of these matchas needs to be, needs to be looked like, needs to be packaged, needs to be named. And nowadays,
You have consumers like us outside of Japan that doesn't care about that original usage or the chanoyu usage of these tea. Essentially, on the other hand, we care about where it's coming from, how it was made and processed. We care about the farmers. We care about the other end of the spectrum, which has historically been the very bottom of the Japanese society.
Ryan Ahn (39:27)
Yeah, the
Western value system is so different. We
Zongjun (Sam) Li (39:30)
very interesting.
Ryan Ahn (39:31)
care much more about farmers and where the food came from and how it was grown. That's our value system, not
Zongjun (Sam) Li (39:37)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Ahn (39:37)
the poetic gesture around how well it meets the theme and that the grandmaster told us that this is good, so this is what we're buying.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (39:47)
Yeah, well, I'm not talking about which one is better or than which, this is a difference that we are seeing right now.
Ryan Ahn (39:54)
True, true. It just so happens that the majority who represents the consumers has shifted.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:00)
Yeah, and as you were talking about, Urasenke almost had a female Yamamoto. They are changing too, but they're changing much slower than our consumers outside of Japan. Consumers change very fast in general. The adaptation will finally meet together, but one is certainly faster than the other.
Ryan Ahn (40:19)
Hmm, that's a great point. Yeah, that makes sense. And that I think is why so many people idolize this traditional aspect. Change is intentionally slow. They're not rushing into
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:31)
Mm. Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (40:32)
things. There's probably a lot of collective wisdom there around
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:35)
Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (40:36)
the pace of change and the process of change. And I think that's why so many people
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:39)
I mean, like,
Chanoyu is not anti-change, right? Like each Iemoto has the freedom of making one change in the culture, in their tradition,
Ryan Ahn (40:48)
in their life.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:50)
in their life. So they are not anti-change. They are changing, certainly.
Ryan Ahn (40:54)
Slowly.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (40:54)
Holy.
Ryan Ahn (40:55)
Alright, so just to summarize the case for consumer harm for behind poetic matcha names. The first for non-Japanese speaking matcha consumers, poetic matcha names are basically arbitrary. There are rules that people try to educate consumers on how to buy, like the Mukashi and Shiro naming conventions, which are not true.
different companies will use the same name to have complete, and the products inside are completely different. You sometimes have cultivar names that are embedded inside the poetic name that have nothing to do with the cultivars used in the product. There is a cultural exclusivity around poetic naming intentions about what you're supposed to gather from that flavor profile of that matcha.
that if you don't have the cultural reference, which is I'd say 99 % of consumers, you will not appreciate it, which is a form of cultural exclusion. And to add to the confusion poetic names can change between Iemotos when they're custom blends for these large traditional institutions. And last but not least, adds... sorry, there's two more. One, and next, it adds to the jargon that you have to learn and to navigate.
and really just exponentially increases the amount of terminology that you need to wrap your brain around as a non-Japanese speaker. And last is that what ends up happening is that people use, there's an over-reliance of price as a proxy for quality when these people, those buyers, whether or not they're in California, Ohio, Arizona, France, Germany, UK, the Philippines, pick your country,
It is not made for them. The person who's clicking buy on the other side and they're using price as a proxy for quality, which sometimes it is, but really these products are not intended for them. So there's this top-down positioning of being told what is good and what is bad, which is dictated by price, which is ultimately old Japanese men doing things for other old Japanese men. This is a reductive argument, but...
It is largely the case. That is just the reality of it. And that's my case for consumer harm of the current naming scheme.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (43:09)
Yeah, very true. But we are seeing changes. let's stay tuned and be hopeful.
Ryan Ahn (43:17)
the harm to farmers as well in the fact that it totally commodifies their production. When they're farming tea and it gets put into this nameless blend, these blend houses are very secretive. So say you're laboring all year to make the best Honzu shaded Asahi cultivar tea you can.
You're trying so hard and you have to sell it to the blend house because you're only buyer for X percentage of the crop of that tea. You have no clue where it goes. Does it go into the highest end product that they offer? Is it a blend component? You're just a nameless supplier where it completely commodifies what could be a specialty product.
that has interesting provenance and process and descriptive detail about it is now being completely washed out and you're basically an interchangeable part in service to all of this poetic blend system.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (44:14)
Yeah, the problem
about Japanese matcha industry is that each segment is very, very segmentized. They are a very different group of people that are essentially not related to each other at all. And for us, sometimes we make the correlation between a matcha farmer to
a wine farmer or a wine grower in the West. But it's essentially not the case, right? Like for a lot of these winemakers in the West, they would essentially produce the finished product. They own the vineyards, they own the chateau that makes the wine, and they have the freedom to control what they will be. But that's not the case in Japan. For a lot of the tea farmers in Japan,
they do not own the processing factory. They didn't sometimes even own the refinement factory. They'd have to send their aracha for a local refiner to get processed. So they have very little control of their creation. They have almost no power to make a narrative at all, which is very
Ryan Ahn (45:24)
no power
to create any narrative. Their voice is completely lost. I mean, imagine you're a young person in Japan who grew up in a rural area where there's tea farming and you see how hard your parents work or, you know, all these people working on all this tea production. What is the incentive for them to have that lifestyle versus moving to Tokyo and getting an interesting job in tech, for example?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (45:49)
Yeah.
Ryan Ahn (45:50)
Who wants to be a nameless interchangeable supplier? The incentive system is also a little perverse. another thing is that if you are exclusively selling to these blend houses, which is a large percentage of Japanese tea farmers, then you have very little incentive to do anything innovative or anything interesting.
purely trying to optimize across the buying criteria, which is flaw minimization. So there's scores for bitterness, astringency, for umami, for color, for uniformity of color, all of these things. And you're only optimizing what is measured. And what's measured is what these blend houses care about.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (46:33)
Yeah,
you creating an ingredient, essentially.
Ryan Ahn (46:36)
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy that there will be a homogenized taste because if you look at the economic incentives of the system, there's a secondary outcome of this is that it results in very little innovation. There's not really a targeted demographic of, we heard that people in...
Europe loved these very nutty profiles of matcha when it tasted like roasted hazelnuts or walnuts. No one's optimizing for that on the scale that they could be because of this existing system, resulting in less innovation and resulting in over optimization for an incredibly narrow target demographic, which are all Japanese men.
And there's probably all sorts of assumptions around what people will like and dislike in this industry. And there's actually a lot of very interesting examples, if you look at other industries, around assumptions that are made that turned out to be completely wrong about what people will like and dislike. There's this really cool new olive oil company called Graza that sources a special cultivar of olive oil, of olive, to make olive oil in Spain. And apparently in Spain,
all of these olive farmers believed that Americans would not like the taste of that cultivar of olive. And I guess it wasn't based on much. And they ordered some samples, started having people taste it. Everyone loved it. Another very successful company. And you could make the same case for like the specialty coffee movement and these more acidic coffees. There's probably lots of old grandpas, you know, in the States thinking, who would ever like this? Who are the head of some old
you know, traditional coffee house that burns their coffee to ash. Thinking who is ever going to like this? Turns out now it's like a 10, 20 billion dollar industry specialty coffee, largely serving what are more acidic profiles or kombucha. There's probably a lot of people before the kombucha boom across the world that could not possibly understand how anyone would like the taste of kombucha and very
Zongjun (Sam) Li (48:45)
Mm.
Ryan Ahn (48:47)
likely
There's some matcha, you know, tea plant cultivars in Japan that could be turned into matcha where people assume that people wouldn't like it or certain processing steps that people assume people didn't like or certain flavor profile blends. There is such a lack of innovation by the fact that the craft of creating the product is centralized and it's centralized and trapped inside this traditional conformist Japanese society versus
letting innovation happen and having the craft of producing that product fall into a much more diverse set of hands. could be a much more interesting industry.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (49:27)
Yeah, certainly would. And right now we are seeing changes too outside of Japan. We have people like Marc from Ooika trying to matcha in America. And we have Brian from Matsu Matcha and trying to make their own blends in Singapore. These people out there are starting to...
gather agencies to make a change. And I think the, right now the problem is that acquiring such agency is so expensive outside of Japan. And it has been expensive even inside of Japan too. That's so one of the core reasons why a lot of these farmers or smaller scale producers do not necessarily have the capacity.
to do more innovation because it's just so expensive. It's expensive to buy the machine, expensive to acquire lands, expensive to construct the plants. It's...
Ryan Ahn (50:23)
Even the
knowledge barrier is expensive. Just being educated to ask
Zongjun (Sam) Li (50:26)
And that's it.
Ryan Ahn (50:27)
the right questions.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (50:29)
And it's a very good example of Matthew effect because it has not been expensive in the past. And the winners happens to be able to accomplish all of these back in the past. And right now, it has gotten so expensive that the later comers just do not have the resources to compete.
Ryan Ahn (50:49)
Yeah, it's, but you know, there's hope. We're starting to see more and more value added steps of craft, the craft of producing the product, leaving Japan's borders. Whether or not it's people like Brian who are blending their own matcha and listening to their customers in Singapore about what they like and dislike and trying to create flavor profiles to better match the preferences of his consumers. Or people like Marc who are doing radical
transparent sourcing and then milling it fresh, offering a radically different product to consumers and not giving it a poetic name, but incredible descriptive detail. there's really, it's changing, it will change. We would like to be part of that change into the future with our mill that we're currently working on that can mill matcha fresh. We think the ability...
for people to source different tencha, blend it themselves and create new products or keep it a single origin, single cultivar and keep all the transparency and then milling it fresh much closer to the consumption point of the consumer can provide some infrastructure to lower the barriers of being a contributor to crafting products that people will like.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (52:02)
Yeah, I guess we need to solve the problem one by one. For a very important part of these obstacles is the infrastructure, as you say, the machineries that required to do all of these jobs. And we're starting from the mill. And in the future, we will be working on other things to lower the bar even further.
Ryan Ahn (52:25)
Absolutely, that's our goal. So, Zongjun Sam, as we wrap up, If we were to do a very quick cost-benefit analysis around poetic matcha names, who does it help and who does it hurt?
Zongjun (Sam) Li (52:37)
Well,
as we were talking about the origin of these poetic matcha names, it helped to preserve a living culture, certainly. It was rooted upon that living culture, is Chanoyu, or tea ceremony, in Japan. And it's
It's created to demonstrate exclusivity and power within that system, So there's no pros and cons within that culture. But for us outside of the system, it certainly confuses us. It's not helping people outside of Japan, people not studying Chanoyu to enjoy and appreciate.
learn more about matcha. So I think there are essentially two groups of consumers out there that coexist together right now and will still coexist together in the future. And these two naming system will also coexist in the future.
But one system doesn't really necessarily serve the other one. So that's my take from today's conversation.
Ryan Ahn (53:40)
I mean, it's just old world and new world type thinking. And we have all the respect in the world for these traditional blend houses. I they were the original logic companies. None of these transparent sourcing companies existed. And there would be no foundation to work on had they not existed. But the pace of change is very different. And consumers are going to them because they don't want a watered down experience.
So we thought it was very worthwhile and we're a very consumer minded company and we thought it was worthwhile to dig into the negative externalities of this existing system. So anyone that's listening knows more about this topic than us or has a very different perspective. We would love to hear from you. We'd love to record even an updated version of this. Maybe we'll do that in a year from now. As we learn, as we grow and as we...
even better understand these systems. So you can take this very much as a snapshot in time reflection of the current system as we understand it. But we really like to get this dialogue started around, especially as new matcha companies enter the fold. It always kills me a little bit when I see a new matcha company come out with a few different products and they're all poetically named and I'm like, no, come on.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (54:51)
No!
Ryan Ahn (54:53)
Like we don't need to continue this tradition, Let's put on modern value development.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (54:58)
They picked the dark side, right? And they picked
the dark side.
Ryan Ahn (55:02)
It's, you know, everyone's going to do their own positioning. You know, you need companies. We need a diversity of new companies. But, you know, I think a lot of people just do it, you know, because they want to sound cool or traditional or, you know, have a frame their value out in positioning of making traditional Japanese society and crafts like this more accessible to other people.
But we should re-examine what the externalities are and if there's any harm in that, which is what this was an attempt of doing.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (55:33)
Yeah, guess, know, essentially we need to clarify, you know, who are we selling these monster to eventually, right? Like for, for, you know, traditional chanoyu users, we already have a very large group of, you know, blend houses serving them. And for all of these new consumers outside of Japan, or sometimes even inside of Japan to newer generation Japanese consumers.
They want to learn more about matcha. They want to study matcha from a very different aspect. using a different naming scheme, using a transparent labeling naming scheme, will certainly help all of these new beginners to learn more, to stay tuned, to enjoy matcha in the future. And they will essentially be a very large group of people in the future. And people,
you have more people, you have more money and cascading down, you have more power to craft a new narrative of matcha. And I think that's very important.
Ryan Ahn (56:31)
Absolutely, that couldn't have been better put and anything that gets in the way of consumers predicting whether or not they'll like something is a barrier that's going to destroy the potential future for matcha as a specialty product. the future of specialty matcha really depends on people being able to determine, am I going to like this? Which,
Zongjun (Sam) Li (56:53)
Hmm.
Ryan Ahn (56:55)
when you have a sea of arbitrary names is almost impossible other than using price as proxy, which has all these other negative externalities. Just like any other industry, if you're flying blind, you can't develop a very interesting set of consumers with interesting preferences. It's just this weird world of poetic names that we don't want to see that continue.
in new matcha companies. We want to see a new thriving industry of transparency that's human focused about the farmers and the product and where it came from and that whole and celebrating the fact that there's natural variation and what that is and being able to pinpoint what you like and don't like. That's what we get excited about.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (57:44)
Yeah, well, changes are happening and they're happening fast. So
Ryan Ahn (57:48)
Yes.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (57:48)
we might end up doing another episode of this way earlier than we think,
Ryan Ahn (57:55)
I hope so. I hope so. And, you know, we hope to find more like-minded people and invite them on and really turn this into a community-based conversation.
Alright, I think that's all we have time for, so thanks so much for listening and we'll see you on the next one.
Zongjun (Sam) Li (58:10)
See you in the next episode.
Ryan Ahn (58:11)
Bye.
