What is a Specialty Product?

 

 

 

Ryan and Sam
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my cohost Zongjun Hello, hello. And we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products. We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we're going to talk about what is specialty products? What is specialty products, Ryan? Yeah, very complex question and one that's really hard to answer in a concise way.

Maybe by the end of this episode, we'll be able to give a more concise definition than we can at the beginning. But, a large theme of this podcast is we want to explore the ambiguity of terms and, and celebrate the variance of answers that you can get when you ask someone, what is a specialty product? What is good matcha? What is high quality tea? What is authenticity? Will be another future topic.

Yeah, that's right. Like it's really all these terms that have been used by the community with a lot of different interpretations. And, you know, and I would argue that a lot of these interpretations are legit. It just coming from different perspectives. Yeah. When you ask what is high quality matcha or high quality product to a farmer, to a producer, to a manufacturer, retailer.

or to a consumer, you probably will get five different answers. Yeah. And you know, we don't want to be the determination of what the correct or wrong answer is. We're just here as observers watching and learning all of these perspectives and just sort of digesting it. And, you know, we want to talk about all the different perspectives we've heard because, you know, there is never going to be one right answer to a lot of these questions. They're really thorny issues.

that you start seeing talked about in other like food and beverage scenes, especially around authenticity. What is authentic and who are the gatekeepers that get to define it? It's a whole can of worms. Yeah. Yeah. So back to the topic, Ryan, can you offer your own interpretation of what's specialty product? Because I mean, I know you for almost a decade and you are a regular consumer of a lot of these, what people will call specialty products, craft beer.

fine wine, Scotch whiskey, and specialty matcha. So like what is your own personal journey, consumer journey throughout your life consuming all these products and what's your understanding of how and why they're different from other products that are not specialty? Yeah, it's a great question. I've always been fascinated with food and beverage products and I've always wanted to put myself on a natural upgrade cycle. Understanding...

why something is good, what's good about it, and then exploring the variation within those things. And I think that's a very similar consumer journey to a lot of people. And usually you start with one thing. For me, it actually started with tea. I tried Genmaicha for the first time and just had this aha moment of, wow, this tastes so different. For those of you who don't know, it has toasted rice with Japanese green tea. Really unique flavor profile.

And it was my mind was so blown by that. I wanted to explore tea further. Genmaicha is your first gateway. Interesting. I actually usually don't talk about that. I just learned about it. You've been hiding it very well. I was young too. Maybe I was like 12 or 13 years old. It's a very formative memory for me and my flavor journey. And then over the years, learn more and more and more about tea.

got obsessed with Chinese tea and the Japanese tea, et cetera. But once you develop that type of fascination, you start to realize that there's a lot of parallel knowledge structures, something we've talked a lot about. There's this concept of terroir, or the taste of the way things grow, based on the ways of the different soils, the different climate, the different microclimates, the different flora and fauna of a particular region.

And then how things are processed, so sort of the nature versus nurture component and how things like genetics and different cultivars can lead to very different flavors, right? A Johnny Gold apple is very different than a Red Delicious, very different than Granny Smith. And then all of the nurture components, the way those things are processed and treated on the farm or even afterwards have a great impact on that flavor.

And it's not until you learn about all those things that you can start to develop a set of complex preferences and, you know, find the best products for you. And it's just sort of an endless journey. And the specialty industry, I think, allows all of that to come to life. If you're just drinking a random can of pre -ground coffee all of your life, you're not connected in any way to where it came from, how it was made, how it was roasted.

how the way it was roasted is good or bad. there's a really great story from James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle. And we talk about him a lot, but he has a lot of really good stories. He was really young, maybe four or five years old, and he loved the smell of coffee. He used to beg to be the one to open the can of coffee when his parents had a new can.

And he opened it and he would take a big whiff and it would smell so good. And he kept asking, can I try some? Can I try some? I want to try some. He was so romanticized and entrenched by this smell of freshly, not even freshly, of roasted coffee. And he tasted a sip. I think his parents let him at the age of like four or five, probably get tired of his complaining. And he...

thought it was absolutely disgusting. You know, this is very close to my first experience of smoking a cigarette. It's like this very like beautiful caramelized red dates kind of smelled from a from a from an unburned cigarette that I used to smell from my dad's packs. And the first time I try it, you know, I lit it up. I take a big puff. It doesn't taste like anything.

from the unburned one. It's quite a difference. And that sensory memory of him, that dissonance and expectation was such a powerful memory. He was like, like later in life, he was like, like there has to be better coffee out there. Like, what is it? And actually, I went through a similar journey with coffee. I really wanted to get into it in high school. And there was this local roaster who really burns their coffee to death.

And I remember walking in there, the guy roasts his own beans and it's all out in the floor in five gallon buckets. And, you know, I tried their coffee. I think it's like a dollar 50. And at the time I really wanted to get into it. He had different origins. He had different blends. There was the smell, the whole coffee shop is kind of filled up with smoke in the morning as it's roasting. And usually there's a couple like off duty police officers down there drinking coffee, eating a donut. It's really like an interesting scene. And I remember taking a sip and I was like,

Okay, there's gotta be something here. Why do people like this? Like, what am I not tasting? And it wasn't until years later that I got introduced to the third wave coffee movement, specialty coffee, learning that when you over -roast coffee, you basically kill everything that was great about it. Just like you don't take a ridiculously great steak and you burn it to a crisp, right? You can take any steak and burn it to a crisp and it's gonna taste the same. But...

you know, when you lightly roast it, you get to explore the different flavor profiles in a way that you couldn't otherwise. So I think the specialty products really allow consumers to have that journey to connect with that agricultural product, that food or beverage as a plant and the way it was processed and all the hands that were able to touch it along its journey to get it to you. Yeah, I think that's really, I think the key difference between specialty product and a commodity product.

specialty product is probably a mixture of everything that you just talked about, you know, terroir different processing method, different varietals, different genetics, and they are allowing the freedom of all of these attributes to express themselves. Whereas in a commodity product, it's doing the exact opposite. They don't want anything to present themselves. They want a very homogeneous,

very consistent flavor profile across time. And they want to essentially create a profile so consistent and so ununique that you won't be able to find any association with all those attributes. And all the supplies that go into it are interchangeable. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think that's the whole purpose. You can change your supplier at any time without hurting your business.

In my past life, I've been working on a lot of research and development on food and beverage products. And dairy was part of my focus at the time. And we've been working on a lot of dairy products. And one thing that I learned very interesting throughout the way is that a lot of these larger dairy companies, they collect dairy, they collect milk from a lot of just individual farmers out there.

And what they do is that they would collect all these milks from the region or different regions, and they would blend it together in a way that they would first separate all the fat, all the water, all the salt, and all the sugar content of the milk into its separate category, and then re -blend them together as some sort of a synthetic process.

This is really a very mature technique for some of the large mass market box milk that you can purchase from supermarkets. And in this way, you can really be able to homogenize a product coming from different source, coming from different supplier, and to really reach a very consistent, very homogeneous end product by the end of the day. Yeah.

And from a commodity product, you know, those suppliers are completely interchangeable. And it's really each, all the suppliers are in service to the product, to the blend, to that brand, to that flavor profile versus the other way around, which is these companies, these specialty tea companies, specialty coffee companies

where these specialty producers are all about celebrating that difference and more in service to the category or to the farmer or to the heritage of a specific way of processing or a blend and celebrating the innate differences that can happen by the fact that these things come from plants with different genetics, they're processed in different ways, grown in different environments.

And it's not just a commodity product going into a big brand where there's no transparency. And there's no way to develop a set of preferences around that.

So, Zongjun there's a lot of talk about commodity versus specialty products in general and sort of the post -colonial history with a lot of commodities, whether or not it be wheat, tea, corn, chocolate, sugar cane, right? There's a really nasty history for a lot of commodity products. And, you know, it's a two -sided coin or it's a two -sided sword, really. You know, on one side, the result of commodity products,

produce remarkably affordable things for the entire world to buy. What are we, eight billion people now? If we're going to get tea to everyone or coffee to everyone, we need to have things that everyone can afford. A teabag of commodity grade tea is how the majority of the world's consumers enjoy tea or the instant coffee that comes from these large commodity companies.

is the reason that most people can afford to drink coffee. On the other side, you know, people debate that there's a non -transparent supply chain, there's abusive pricing schemes, in some cases there could be child or slave labor, right? And they're really against that and much more for the specialty product. So how do you, how can you be in support of commodity products in the same breadth of...

recognizing all of the evils that can be behind some of these supply chains.

Yeah, this is a very difficult question to answer, Ryan. First, I don't think the rights of specialty product will be the remedy or the cure for all of the terrible things that are happening in a lot of the production regions. But I would argue that the very existence of commodity product really

form or act as a foundation of specialty product to exist. If without a large commodity product consumer base, specialty product will really be just a niche product. It will not be a specialty product without a larger population to consume and to think about all of these connections with geographic, with processing method, with genetics.

It will just be some very esoteric drink or food that people consume very regionally, like mulberry leaf tea in South Korea. It's a thing in some regions, but not a lot of people really consume it outside of those places. And I bet there are, terroir you know, know, there are genetic influence to the final flavor profile of different mulberry leaf tea.

But you know, it's a niche product. No one's thinking about it. And for the very few people that are drinking it, I don't think they care. The commodity market will make the specialty market. The specialty market will arise out of that commodity market. And you know, there's nothing that most people can do about the existence of commodity. And you could say a lot of the specialty products that we see now are a result of all the problems with commodity markets.

The lack of diversity and innovation, the problems in the supply chains and the ethics around that. And this backlash against these big food companies, like if you look at the rise of craft beer movement in the United States, a large reaction to that was big beer. And some loosening regulations that made it much easier to open a brewery.

You know led to this explosion of all these small businesses some of which didn't stay small for very long But we see that in chocolate right chocolates really predominantly dominated at least the supply chains dominated by Barry Calibo She's a Belgian based company and Cargill they control the vast majority of the world's chocolate supply chain and Now you started in the 90s to see all these bean to bar chocolate companies react to that for flavor reasons

for reasons to explore different origins, different cultivars, different processing methodologies, also to help those farmers live a better life and not be beholden to commodity grade pricing and only having one buyer that would buy their products and have a ton of control over their lives. And, you know, enforcing better ethics programs in the way that these products get made.

And also to preserve biodiversity. One of the very nowadays, very famous cacao varieties called Criollo. You know, back in a few decades ago, it was close to extinction. Now it only still sort of make up like below, I think, zero one percent of the entire

⁓ cacao, ⁓ output, ⁓ but it really has this very, very smooth, not astringent fruity, fruity taste. Yeah. So like it's wonderful. And I think the very reason why it gets preserved is because of the specialty product movement in chocolate. Yeah. The bean to bar chocolate movements done a lot of very good work. There's actually a very large Dutch based company. ⁓ now that's,

they exclusively do product where they can confirm in the supply chain whether or not there's been any child or slave labor. And they report every incident that they find in that supply chain. And I think they've reported like a thousand cases, which gives you a sense of how big of a problem that is, especially for a producer that's like trying to avoid this, they still get that many cases of it. So, you know, it's, it's the whole world is a work in progress, but the rise of the specialty movement,

is certainly helping give farmers options, give consumers options, creating innovation in the amount of flavor profiles and allowing us to celebrate the different cultures, the different methodologies, these different products that are beloved. Yeah, it's really giving a stage or a spotlight to people like the farmers or the producers that were used to be just hidden from the entire production process.

you would only recognize the consumer facing brand by the end of the day. But now the very fact that we are offering these people a stage to let them express themselves and for the society to have the access to learn the story of them, I think really helped both ways. Yeah. And some of the earliest successful examples of the specialty tea movement in general,

in the United States, at least that I'm aware of, were companies like teavana which provided that stage. It was a sensory experience when you walked into one of those stores. Someone who knew a decent amount about tea would be telling you about it, guiding you through their preferences. They opened this big can, they waft it in your face so you can smell it. It was really like a really interesting retail experience. And I remember very vividly that this is where I learned about matcha for the first time.

I was watching a teavana YouTube video and the head blender at teavana said that her favorite tea was matcha. And they talked a little bit about the history of it. And then I remember I got a can and that was my very first matcha experience ever was through the teavana brand. And it's companies like that that are providing a stage to these different products, these different cultures, these different traditions, and bringing it in an approachable way.

making it easy to brew, making it easy to consume, making it easy to buy, all lead to the rise of specialty. And you could say now that the teavana brand label is not as specialty, specialty is always evolving as people go deeper and deeper. At that time, I'm pretty sure you couldn't buy single origin, single cultivar.

matcha outside of Japan. And maybe even in Japan, it would have been really hard to find. And now people are getting better at sourcing, they're getting better at storytelling. Those stories can reach people now through social media. And it's allowed this ecosystem to exist both online and offline that allow an even greater celebration of these products in much greater detail, where it's no longer just a can of matcha, it's a can of

This matcha produced by this person milled on this day. It's a can of story, Ryan. It's a story. Yeah.

And I think the very reason why these stories can be so relatable and are so tangible to the specialty product movement is that essentially these stories can be taste. It's, we are what we eat. Yeah, exactly. And, it's, you know, all these, tea farmers, all of these tea regions, all of these different tea processing methods, if you tweak.

one of these attributes, you will end up having a very different flavor profile. It's the very fact that we can change the flavor profile by tweaking all these stories that we can find ourselves so relatable to them. Yeah, no, absolutely. Like storytelling is so important in the specialty movement, but it's also got to translate in the cup, right? If it doesn't taste good or if it's something that doesn't resonate with people's preferences, which is why this progression and evolution.

of specialty is so important. And there's a really nice story that we can bring in from Chanoyu from traditional Japanese tea ceremony. There was a wonderful lecture that was given many years ago now, I think it was eight or nine years ago by Dr. Drew Sodo Hansen, who is an Urasenke tea practitioner based around Philadelphia. And he gave a lecture talking about how if tea ceremony doesn't change and evolve, then it's dead.

It's an artifact. It is no longer a living art. And baked into both Urasenke and Omotesenke and other traditional Japanese tea ceremony traditions is built -in change. Every generation can make a change to one of the temais, to one of the ways that the tea is served. And without that, it just becomes this dead artifact, kind of like Song dynasty, Mocha.

or Chinese matcha preparation, right? That is no longer a living art. It is literally an artifact that people are trying to revitalize, but that is a dead art. There is no continuous line of living practitioners. And it's important too that the specialty movement in matcha doesn't stay static for so long, right? It's got to evolve, it's got to change. We've got to go deeper, broader, bring in innovation in the same spirit that the traditional Japanese tea ceremony practitioners do.

Yeah, I totally agree. Unfortunately, the culture and all the preparation and growing technique of Mocha has deceased because the first Ming dynasty emperor didn't like Mocha that much. He basically illegalized the production of Mocha, of powdered green tea, and Chinese Mocha was no longer. But I will argue that, you know, like if...

there will be enough people liking matcha or powder green tea again in China. New tradition can be revived or reinvented.

So, Zongjun, how have we seen specialty products move from sort of a niche category that not many people know about or care about to something that's not a commodity, kind of like the Korean mulberry leaf that you were talking about before? How do we see the transition of a specialty product that's only regionally known to a specialty product that's been thrust under the mainstream stage?

First, before it crosses the chasm where there's just a few early adopters, a few visionaries that are using it, and then afterwards when it's been really truly thrust into the mainstream where there's general awareness and interest in it as a product. Yeah, I think that there has to be a large enough population or consumer to support the existence of that category.

You had a very interesting story you were telling me earlier about Dancong, which is a type of oolong grown just north of Guangzhou. Yeah, I think that's one of the very few exceptions of this sort of transition. Dancong used to be a very esoteric tea category in China that was only consumed in a very confined region called Chaoshan. It's a

a city cluster that's surrounded by a place called Chaozhou and a place called Shantou in north east part of Guangdong. Very, very geographically confined and also culturally confined too. They have their own language. They have their own dialects, language and very different cuisine style than all the other regions surrounding it. And they have been

historically very rich. These are some of the very early days merchants or merchant groups in China that you can date them back to Ming dynasty. A lot of the overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia are largely Chaozhou, Chaoshan people. They are the Spanish and the Portuguese of China, so to speak. But the

And the very reason of Dancong being able to develop into a very sophisticated specialty product is because in the early days, the community of Chaozhou people had the money to really support a very large tea production region in the area. So...

their preference, their sort of inter -family competition of who owns the oldest tea tree, who has the most expensive teapot. This kind of tea competition art really or culture kind of evolved into a very small but very complicated specialty product that later got discovered by the mainstream tea consumer.

And nowadays, some of the most expensive Dancong can easily compete with, in terms of prices, can be compete with some of the most expensive Pu 'er or Yancha, which are more widely known by the general public way before Dancong. Yeah. Actually, it's interesting you say that because like even in matcha back in the days, largely controlled by large wealthy influential people.

or the patrons of the arts who supported the potters, the farmers, and these concentrations of wealth that kind of propped up the industry and allowed it to thrive. And then it was discovered and it's only grown since then. So it's an interesting parallel. And also for those who don't know, Chaozhou or Chaoshan region is the hometown of modern Chinese tea ceremony or Gongfu Cha, just to give everyone that reference. Yeah.

really becoming a foundation of a very elaborate art. But it was not necessarily supported by a very large community or commodity product consumers at the time. That's an interesting exception. Yeah, very interesting. I guess matcha is a little bit similar too, because back in the days, powder green tea, matcha, both in China and in Japan was really

just tribute tea or they are consumed by very high up monarch or literati or nobles that have the ability to purchase them and have the money and the associate culture to consume them in the quote unquote right way, the traditional way at the time. Which is in stark contrast to the spread of tea, which was largely through Zen Buddhism. So there's some interesting adoption cycles there.

Yeah, and later on, he gets commodified and, you know, matcha becomes a commodity product and move, you know, its presence into, you know, outside of Japan into the Western countries. And then we are seeing the specialty product movement start to thrive in this new condition. Yeah, very recently, maybe, you know, last 10, 15 years. Yeah, but that's really different or detached from, you know, what

matcha used to be back in the days as a Chanoyu or as Mocha, you know, back in Song dynasty. Yeah. It makes sense.

So Ryan, we've been talking about different definitions or interpretation of specialty product or specialty matcha from different aspects, from consumers aspect, from the manufacturers aspect, or from the farmers or the producers aspect. So how do you envision the definition of specialty is going to change in the future? Yeah, I think it's going to evolve and get more refined. You know, back in the days with coffee,

There were a key set of principles that were outlined. Coffee should be treated like a fresh food and be consumed shortly after roasting, and you need to have transparent roast dates. Blue Bottle was famous for not pre -grounding anyone a bag of coffee. So if you bought a bag of whole bean coffee, they would not pre -grind it for you because they thought it would destroy the product's quality when they took it home. So fresh milling, I think, is also going to be very important.

And, you know, copying a lot of these principles from coffee. And then, you know, as coffee industry evolved, to use that as a parallel, right, people started caring more about cultivars, and different sustainable cultivars. Thank God this is not a problem in tea, but in coffee viruses are a huge problem. In particular, there's something called rust, which is a type of plant virus that affects a lot of Arabica coffee types.

And there's a lot of breeding work going on and making really delicious rust resistant coffee cultivars. So sustainability will be huge. That's going to be very important in tea in different ways as tea farmers age out. vast majority of Japanese tea farmers are over the age of 60.

So we're going to have a whole generation will eventually need to move into retirement. And it's going to be interesting to see what that next generation does so that it's economically viable for them and interesting for them to get into that industry. So I think that's a huge region of growth where specialty matcha could grow, both from literally the organic movement from the farmers themselves doing new, interesting, innovative things.

is a very interesting point that I can see would really drastically change the landscape of matcha. Because one very interesting fact that I learned as I first started to learn matcha from a farmer's perspective is that how much fertilizer and pesticides gets used.

in modern matcha production, even for a lot of the very high -end matcha. All in the very high -end matcha. Yeah. The very reason for that is to really trying to reach a very, very sharp or intense umami flavor that requires such production technique. But it will be very interesting to see that, first of all, not all people like that flavor to begin with.

especially consumers outside of Japan. And secondly, as people care more about sustainability, I think that something is going to happen or needs to be happened in that practice in the future. Yeah. How long it's going to stay acceptable. Now, that said, Japanese farming practices are very well regulated. I don't think anyone's getting pesticide poisoning. And I know both of us personally, we care about sustainability. We don't necessarily care about the label organic and all the connotations.

come with it and how it can actually be a very corrupt system sometimes. And it doesn't necessarily translate to quality. But that is very interesting because there is a very large and growing consumer segment that does care about that label. And the way that the best matcha farmers respond to that will be interesting. And you're right, a lot of the farming practices are all for Japanese preferences. You need really nitrogen rich soil, which means you need a lot of fertilizer.

to create umami compounds, to create L -theanine. And then part of the reason it's shade grown is that those amino acids, those compounds, don't get converted into bitter catechins, which they do with sunlight. So you get a perfect recipe for a very umami rich drink. But does it have to be that umami? Is that going to be the sustained preference for most people drinking matcha? That's an interesting question that could result in...

having them use remarkably less fertilizer and pesticides. I was just looking up some reference photos in my phone. I was at the Toronto Tea Festival a couple of months ago and watched a very interesting presentation on Japanese tea.

Shizuoka, the largest tea producing prefecture in Japan, has a real sustainability problem just in terms of farmers' age. So the statistic is that 92 .2 % of tea farmers in Shizuoka are over the age of 67. ⁓ wow. And approximately 0 .0 % are under the age of 45. That's a problem.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you see that in a lot of other tea production regions or even tea production regions in China too. Young people don't tend not to work in the fields and then, you know, under the sunlight picking tea all day. It's a tedious job. And it's not an economically rewarding job for most people. I was just reading a research article and apparently even in like nice areas of Japan.

The people who handpick tea that can do, I think, 12 kilos a day, the average salary they earn is something like $23 US, which is crazy. The only people that have the skill or desire to do any of this work are older women, and probably typically less educated older women living in rural villages. And Japan has a huge demographic problem where everyone's just getting older.

and the population shrinking. So this is not a sustainable method. So when you look at the future of specialty matcha, it's not going to look the same as today just based on those constraints.

And not to disregard the fact that the consumer market of matcha in Japan is also drastically shrinking. Younger generation drinks coffee. Very interested in coffee too. It's a really great third wave coffee places. Yeah, it's not going to be sustainable also from a consumer point of view.

So, you know, in the future, as the trend of matcha start to really grow in the West or other countries outside of Japan, this new wave of global preference shift would really have an impact ultimately to the production of matcha. Yeah. And I think part of the sustainability of matcha in general is a category is going to be into the specialty market. If it's all a commodity and you have these very large

intermediary middlemen who are the tasters set the prices at auction and then they've aggregated the supply and they've also selling to these gigantic companies that either white label matcha and sell it to the public or they use it as an ingredient or they use it you know in various formulations it's not interesting to be a commodity tea farmer right what young enterprising entrepreneurial

young person in Japan would want to go into this industry. So the thriving specialty market, gives all of these farmers and producers and all the hands that touch the tea that we all love and can consume, that they need a stage to be celebrated on. And there's a really interesting trend that I've noticed recently as I go down the Instagram rabbit hole of discovering different tea producers, because, you know, we're trying to source Tencha in Japan for our mill that would be able to grind it fresh. There isn't a very large tencha

that you can readily order online. And I've realized that a lot of these really famous matcha farmers have their own Instagram accounts. They can talk directly to their consumers. They can tell us stories. We can have updates about the harvests that are going on, all of their collaborations that they're doing with everyone. And it's really interesting to think through the second and third order effects of the fact.

that these farmers for the first time ever can really talk directly to the consumer, any consumer, all around the world at scale, with really the only barrier being language, but with the advancements in AI and all these voice dubbing tools and editing tools and how good translation is getting, it's a matter of time before even the language barrier isn't as big of a problem.

And the hardest problems are going to shift around storytelling. It used to be you could create a successful matcha brand by going to Japan and hiring a translator and just sourcing tea. The only value adds that those companies had were finding, curating, and marketing and selling the product. And it's interesting, you're starting to see the specialty movement change to more value add. You have companies milling their own matcha to be being a part of the process, being a part of the set of hands that bring it to your drink.

at various levels up and down the supply chain, whether or not it means like kettle is very famous for setting up an office in Japan that will specifically order tea to be finished. So most of the tea in Japan is not finished finished. It's semi -finished. It's called aricha. And then it can be preserved at low temperatures in a refrigerator. And then anytime anyone places an order, they finish it. And then it would rapidly go to the consumer. And that's sort of how the supply chain works in Japan.

Usually by the time it gets to the US or any other country, it's very stale. So they're reinventing that where they're placing those orders regularly and then immediately shipping them to the states. And now you're starting to see companies that have direct lines of access to Tencha from farmers and then milling it fresh, really changing the supply chain and traditional gatekeepers. So as more of these tea farmers come online, they have smartphones and they have a lot more power than other specialty producers.

If you compare them to a random cocoa farmer in Vietnam or on the Ivory Coast or in Colombia for Japan is a first world country. Tea farmers and the average rural person in Japan is very well educated. They have a smartphone. They have access to the internet and these consumers. And it will be interesting to see the new savvy entrepreneurial generation of

matcha and tencha farmers in Japan and how that changes the whole industry.

Yeah, I think that would certainly be a be very interesting looking into the future. A semi tangible example, probably we keep talking about Yunnan coffee, but Yunnan in this really a magical place in the past decade that we see a drastically changing landscape and demographic landscape because of specialty movement. So commodity to specialty. Yeah. It's a perfect case study. Yeah. Yeah. So like,

if you go to rural places like Xishuangbanna and Menghai, like these places being, you need to probably drive for four or six hours into the mountain, you know, after you land in a small regional airport, that you'll be able to reach to those destinations. right now, I was actually there last year

for studying tea and we end up running into a lot of these coffee plantations and you just see a very, very international demographic out there. You see the French, the Americans, the Germans, all out there sourcing coffee. And it's not only coffee, there's a thriving international community that's associating with coffee. Like the French are not only just there sourcing coffee,

They were there only in hotels nowadays. And there are a lot of vineyards that are owned by the French. You know, like Yunnan wine is starting to become a thing. So it's a very interesting transition when you have what used to be very exclusive, very sheltered region that are now trying to get opened up.

by the international market because of coffee or because of the specialty product movement that you start to seeing this very interesting transition of culture as well. Yeah, it's power to the people. It's to the farmers, to the people who are selling it and telling the stories of those farmers. It's the exact opposite of a commodity product where it's just a big mystery.

Yeah, and the local tradition in that way is better recognized and preserved. There are more people, not just from China, but outside of China start to pay attention to that region. I think it's really a win -win situation for all sides. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think this is really the magic and power of specialty product. It's a consumer upgrade, not only from a product point of view, but also a collective cautious on every aspect that's involved in producing that very product. It's the producer, it's the community, it's the consumer, it's everybody.

that are making contribution to bringing a delicious flavor profile to life. It's recognition of everyone along that chain, every hand that touches that tea, that coffee, that chocolate. Yeah, they get recognized and they have a stage and they have a voice.

So Zongjun, at the beginning of this podcast, you put me on the spot asking me what is a specialty product. So I'm going to do that to you, but now at the end. So what is a specialty product?

I think I still find great difficulty in answering this question even until now. We have unwrapped the definition of specialty product from a lot of different aspects. I think it's, first of all, I recognize your initial answer in the very beginning of the podcast is the opposite of what a commodity product is.

But at the same time, it's not just the opposite. It's a upgrade. It's what everything that gets involved in the production of specialty product that has their own role, has their own voice, and has their own stage. It's a collective recognition of all of the efforts that went into the creation of that product. I think...

It's really a mentality. Yeah, it's almost intangible. They're like products with a soul. It's not this soulless product. It's just a brand label and who knows what's inside, where it came from, how it was made, who invented it. Yeah, the answer is just keep getting more abstract. Why? Abstraction is a great form of communication.

Yeah, and even if we come up with the answer today, I don't think this answer will be correct in the future. No, and I don't think we should be defining what it is at all.

I think it really is just a constantly evolving mentality that the entire community has their own voices into the definition.

All right, I think that's all we have time for today. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend or give us five stars. And if you didn't enjoy us, you can tell the friend that this is the commodity matcha podcast. And we'll see you on the next one. All right.