2025 Harvest Season with Marc from Ooika

Ryan · 0:00

Hello, and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is Zongjun Li, who also goes by Sam. Hello. Hello. And we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah. We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.

Ryan · 0:14

And today we are here again sitting at this really beautiful view of Ujigawa. And we are again having Marc from Ooika joining our conversation today. Welcome, Marc. Hello. Hey guys, good to see you again. How fun is this?

Ryan · 0:28

Look at this view. It's so nice. So lucky that this is an audio only podcast. Unfortunately, you can hear the birds hopefully in the background. So we wanted to focus this episode on the 2025 harvest here in Uji and elsewhere in Japan.

Ryan · 0:41

And you have tons of relationships with different farmers all across Japan and wanted to get a sense of what this year's going to look like, especially in these really unique conditions we are in, given the overwhelming demand and shortage of good matcha. Yeah.

Marc · 0:57

For you guys at home that want to buy matcha and restock and you're excited the harvest is here, you have some bad news. There's not a lot of volume this year. There's very little volume, although this is a particularly interesting harvest because the quality seems to be exceptional from what I've seen. It hurt.

Ryan · 1:15

For any particular reasons? Yes, I think my best to relay what I've kind of heard from the farmers, but just as a general kind of a backdrop. At least in Uji, we had a very intense summer previously, previous year and it was scorching hot. Many of the tea bushes.

Marc · 1:31

Not exactly quantifying what when I say many, but tea bushes died, tea bushes got injured from from the heat and this harvest we're actually still feeling some of the fallout. Some of the tea bushes are under producing this year because of that. The other thing is this year it's just less volume in general, but it's also because it was cooler. So like larger temperature swings in general? To my knowledge there hasn't been any frost that have have really damaged things, but what I've heard from the farmers we work with is this year low volume and pretty exceptional quality.

Marc · 2:04

One of the farmers said that the Okumidori that he harvested this harvest is maybe better than he's ever seen in his lifetime. Wow wow. I mean. Generational harvest and what do they look for? Like how can they tell before it's gone through like all the processing and aging and milled in Tamasha?

Marc · 2:24

Like what are the quantifiers that give them that impression? Yeah, that's a really good question. They don't go through all that yet. So for example, right now the farmers take the the shincha, the the raw tea leaves, they bring it to the factory, they process it immediately. And at the end of the processing, you can just look at it and you can see traits that are desirable or not desirable, such as the glossiness of it, the shininess of the pika pika, they call it, the aroma of it.

Marc · 2:53

So all of these things kind of contribute to a general sense of it. But you also do the testing. You take the tea, you pour the water on it, and you brew it like sencha, even though it's tencha at the factory, they have a small room. It's the Haiken Yaa and the observation room. And then you taste it, and you can actually get a sense of similar to what it will be.

Marc · 3:12

Even though it's aracha, it's still not fully processed. Yeah, it's not ground, obviously, but it gives you a sense of what it will be like. And this year's the Okumidori that I'm talking about. I got to experience it and smell it and taste it. And it was overwhelmingly sweet.

Marc · 3:26

It tasted like it had been jukes, tasted like it was, but it wasn't. It was raw. And I tried the Asahi too, from this particular farmer you saw. He still needs time. It's still a little too raw. But that's why I'm saying the Okumidori is particularly fantastic. And, and this is what I'm hearing from many of the farmers working with this year's harvest, smaller but arguably better in terms of its quality, which which is actually not Taishi mentioned to me what my my tea farmer friend said that this is actually not what they want. They want this year, we need to catch up on volume, but we're not getting volume this year.

Ryan · 4:01

Yeah. Yeah, that will definitely just translate into price this. Year is going to be expensive, yeah. It seems like it's being shoved into the realm of like it's moving from specialty to luxury almost just because there's just such a lack of supply.

Ryan · 4:17

Do you get that impression as well, or because there's just so little tea? We were walking around Shirakawa here in Uji and for hours, and it just gave us a new sense of scale of just how small Uji is. So it's so tiny. Let let me give you some numbers and just kind of talk about this generally before before that, let me just say I actually don't exactly agree with you. I don't think we're specialty moving into luxury. I think that the market still doesn't recognize that specialty matcha exists yet.

Marc · 4:44

I think most of the market is just treating matcha like a daily commodity and everyone is about to get very punished because I believe the prices of tencha and matcha are going to use much more aggressively high over the next year, 2-3 years.

Marc · 4:59

But I think the benefit of that is more people are going to realize, wait, why is this material so expensive? Is this a specialty product? And more people will, I think, recognize that matcha is more than just like the equivalent of flour to a bakery. It's actually a fine product itself. Yeah, it's not a commodity.

Ryan · 5:16

Yeah. And build the context to appreciate it. Fully I I think so. Yeah, that's good. One of the cool things about being outside and doing the podcast outdoors is the chaos of life surrounds us. And that's absolutely the beauty of matcha too, at the single origin matcha.

Marc · 5:31

So touch on what we were saying before I forget what was the question. About how small the key was. Some numbers Uji. As of now, there are 3536 farmers in Uji, OH. Wow, smaller than I realized. That includes micro farmers, so people that have like a small field that they don't advertise, they don't sell material as their own tea, they just kind of give it to a tea company, right?

Marc · 5:58

3536 farms in all of Uji. Of those, nine do honzu. OK, it used to be 10 last year. Now it's 9 and I'll probably continue shrinking. So to give you an idea of matcha in all of Japan, 6% of all the tea in Japan is matcha.

Marc · 6:16

That that might change this year. This figure might be from 2022. Maybe after the podcast I'll check the date but. It's still remarkably small, right? Yeah. People keep talking about 4000 ton in total might be a little bit of a increase for this year, but still very little tea that's. The point, so we're talking about a very niche product. Japanese tea is niche to begin with, just in, in terms of the world.

Marc · 6:40

But in Japan, such a niche part of the tea industry. And Uji represents 0.04% of all tea. Yeah. And how much Uji Cha has sold. That's the point, right? So I, I think that these are all kind of the context, the numbers that we're talking about.

Marc · 6:59

And, and, and it goes smaller every year because infrastructure, right? So you have a farm, you build a new highway and then you lose. That actually happened with Tai Chi's farm. So his farm was there for 300 years and they built the highway.

Marc · 7:11

Now that was not recently, but these things happen and the land mass gets smaller. And all this is just to say that in my opinion, the price of matcha and tencha right now is grossly underpriced. I think for what it is, for the quality, for the limitations, the price of the most expensive matcha that Ooika sold was something like 400 five, $100 for 20 grams, which is like what, $4050 a bowl around that?

Ryan · 7:39

Yeah, compare that to any other specialty product, right? That's what I'm saying. It's a joke. You know, chocolate. Right. Or even coffee now. Like ridiculously cheap when put into full context, especially within the canon of the other products that exists. That's what I'm saying.

Ryan · 7:54

I think the market isn't there yet. I think it's underpriced because there's not an awareness of matcha being a fine food and being a specialty product. But you both are directly challenging that in a way. And it's it's good. People should know that this is something very rare and specific and special.

8:13

And yes, that means the price will go up. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And we really hope that's the industry, the direction the industry is going. And it was interesting. We were hand picking tea last week and doing tezumi under honzu and we were picking tea for three hours or it was back breaking labor like we and like we're basically city people. We're not used to this kind of work. Our back, we were in pain, like people's like suffer pain bringing these products to market. And that's what I told myself.

8:43

I will never take anything tezumi and ever mix it with anything but water. And I will judge other people who like turn that into a latte. It's just so much effort. It's so historically all of the sacrifices that people make.

8:57

It's it's a little unusual to me walking around matcha retail in Uji and how all of that is abstracted away. It is, yeah. Matcha has like historically it feels being two people trying to learn about it gate kept at every single point, including the preparation and consumption.

9:16

I agree, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, in tea ceremonies, you learn about the weight of whisking the tea. You learn about the history of the wares, the utensils, all of the cadence. You kind of make turn it into a showroom of your collection of the antiques. But you never learn about how the tea was made itself. Like you learn about all of these artifacts and artists, but never about the farmers.

9:36

Yeah, that's, that's maybe a little critical, but I, I agree with you. And the thing about tea ceremony is tea ceremony is, is about the art of matcha. It's using matcha as a metaphor. And that's a lovely, wonderful thing to do for sure. But it has very little connection to the craft of matcha, right.

9:55

So that craft is, is the key because the art of matcha has made people think of matcha as this very Zen meditating thing, which has has functioned in matcha becoming a worldwide known product, but it hasn't contributed or helped people considering it as a specialty fine food.

10:15

That will only come from the appreciation in the knowledge from the craft side. And in my opinion, and this is, to be honest, maybe a little aggressive to say, but I don't think that there's really many people out there that are focusing on that, either by design or by a lack of knowledge on their part. Like for instance, for instance, like matcha influencers, It's all very surface level and doesn't get into the craft. Yeah, deep into it anyway.

10:45

At least for a lot of the influencers, I agree. But even tea companies, like, there are a lot of big tea companies that Ooika competes with and maybe doesn't compete with, but many of them don't put out content and from information that goes really deep to understanding the actual production cultivation. Yeah.

11:05

You know, at least that's how I feel because when I got to shoot in, there was nothing, Yeah. Accessible. But weirdly enough, now trying to like meet farmers ourselves, like a lot of it's still gate kept. Like it's hard to learn. It's like really on the bleeding edge of knowledge, at least for someone who it's not in the sphere. Yeah, yeah, I think by design is interesting point because like imagine or if you can calculate how much tea gets produced here in Uji and how much teas get sold as Uji tea, you know, there's a discrepancy over there. If you look at the incentive model, I mean everyone's making money off of bringing in aracha

11:44

from other places and selling it as Uji tea. Everyone's complicit in it except the farmers themselves here. There's a lot to say about that. Maybe that's a whole nother episode, which is look at all that. Wow. So you guys can't see this, obviously, but we've been sitting at the riverbank, it's been fairly calm, but all of a sudden there is a massive swarm of flying insects that just appeared maybe 20 feet above us out of the.

12:07

Blue, so fascinated about our conversation. It's true about specialty. Macho so bad. Like a school of fish. It is. So that's this is a really interesting topic and it's one that I've talked to the farmers about directly, which is, wait a minute, if Uji Cha can be made with product that's not from Uji, why don't you all band together and change the term?

12:30

And the answer to that is a lot more complex and more interesting than you might think. It's a trademark, isn't it? It's a trademark issue. But but it's not one that it's a double edged sword. It does hurt in some ways, but in some ways it does help.

12:46

And there's a specific story of another part of Japan that had AT with a trait. You heard about this? Well. You told us about it the other day. All right. Cool, cool. Story but maybe I'll audience might be OK. Let's say this for another time, because I'd rather do that conversation when I note the name of it and I forgot it off the top of my.

13:03

I can give you the specifics, but just so I'm not gatekeeping, basically there's another region that allowed something like this to happen and the farmers actually managed to get it changed and it resulted in such a small region that was producing this hyper local specific product that it lost all its fame. And then those farms like kind of failed over time. Sort of interesting, Interesting. Yeah, sort of like balsamic.

13:26

You guys know about the model of balsamic? Vaguely. So this is actually fairly interesting. So Balsamic is a very, very niche, hyper niche product that has almost no production capability and it got unbelievably famous.

13:41

So the Italian government had an issue, which is we have this niche cultural product that's very specific and we can't produce more of it, but the world demands it. So how are we going to benefit on this? So what they decided is they produced a new type of balsamic that has a lot of corners cut during production and they gave it a specific designation. So now there's 2 balsamic designations. 1 is like the real real real real stuff that's like $1000 for like 10 grams or whatever.

14:08

Then there's the mass produced but still technically from Italy version. I feel like Uji could have something like that but it doesn't currently and it doesn't because of the politics of like maybe the tea companies and factories blending all that stuff.

14:21

Again, that's a whole nother topic. Well, I mean, it makes sense too, because I mean like, if just the tourists that come here and buy tea retail, there'd be no more Uji tea left for anyone else left in the world. There just isn't enough of it and I'm sure they wouldn't pay these prices that that type of tea demands.

14:36

Right. And that's sort of The thing is other places are getting popular. Yame Cha is getting popular. If all of a sudden Uji Cha became this product that only one out of a, you know, 100,000 people could get so rare and limited that no one buys it, no one gets it, then it's likely that it's fame will diminish over time. And that's sort of what happened in some other regions. So you're doing something pretty unprecedented, arranging a matcha tour where people can really experience first hand, not only hand picking, visiting tea farmers and getting access to like watching tencha processing. So how did that come about and

15:09

how's it going? I know you're probably pretty tired. It's day one, the end of day one of the first day. Day one went a little too deep. Probably should have kept it light, but yeah, it's fun. We did a matcha tour, so students got tickets.

15:21

They flew to Japan, and we're visiting a number of producers, and the producers we're meeting are not producers that typically would allow tours to come. So I'm kind of spending a little bit of my, I guess, social capital to allow me to bother them during the most busy time in their entire life, which is the harvest. But we're visiting multiple first place winners, the national tea competition, we're visiting multiple honzu farms, 3 honzu, 4 honzu farms.

15:50

So it's pretty once in a lifetime experience. And I'm very grateful to the farmers and the other producers such as the Chasen makers, Potters for the store. So we're going to be spending eight days going across Japan and kind of visiting everything from Takayama Chasen makers to Potters, bees and Potters, and of course the farmers.

16:08

So behind us we actually have a number of people that were on the tour today and they got to experience a lot tea farm, matcha workshop and also the tea factory which was in production. That's cool. Yeah, with Asahi, I guess this is like the first, like tea experience, tea production experience for a lot of them too.

16:31

Yeah, I think so for sure. Well, should we invite them? Over and you guys want to join us over here and jump on the podcast and talk about some of your experience today I'm Kevin yo Kevin I know you guys but. Your reputation precedes you.

16:46

I was gonna chime in earlier, but I figured maybe later is the right. Time welcome, Kevin. Appreciate it. Nice to meet you and. Hi, my name is Peter. Peter, nice to meet you, Peter and John. Awesome. Cool. So actually, what brought you guys to Japan and how did you know Marc in the first place?

17:05

Well, I was first exposed to Ooika just through Instagram, as many people were, since we have, you know, a pretty international group it seems, and sort of the interests just grew from there. And where are you based? I'm based on California.

17:17

Oh nice. Cool. Yeah, same thing. I just, I found we got through social media. I personally have a cafe in Chicago and so we've been focusing more on matcha. And so that's originally how marketing of social media has kind of pointed be towards Marc. And so I think Marc is a great asset to the matcha community. And when the opportunity came up for me, it was kind of like a no brainer to kind of just come along and just meet him and everyone else and just understand matcha community more in depth.

17:47

That's awesome. For me, yeah, for me it was that I think, I think I've tallied up everyone that I probably the only one that's coming into this store with the background in China. You I started like 4 years ago, but still as you got your longer term practitioners of some sort of teeth and you know that it's lifelong.

18:06

Yeah. So I like, I think like I think overheard you guys say how like you learn about all these other things, but you really talk about the tea itself. That's right. I also I had A at one point in time about a year ago, appreciation for the chasen itself and we also never talk about that.

18:23

In. T school and how it's even such this disposable objects well, not necessarily one time you sold me, but still you use it for like a year and you burn it and. Yeah, in China, you now in today's cafe and you are one of the sunset case.

18:40

So it's part of just deepening my knowledge for T industry itself. I could never suppose. I guess I don't know all the science behind it and like Mark definitely not has it, has it better than I do, I guess. That's wonderful. Have you guys learned anything from any of the other people on the trip?

19:01

How does like the collective group and the conversations change their perspective, both in the questions that they ask or like the knowledge they contribute? I mean, I think certainly it's the group is sort of self selected to be people who are at a bare minimum matcha enthusiasts. So everybody has a baseline sort of cursory knowledge of matcha in general.

19:22

I think when it comes to the group that we're travelling with today, a lot of it also comes from a business perspective too, since a lot of the individuals here are business owners or maybe prospective business owners. OK. And so they're thinking about it through that lens as well. Yeah, that makes sense too cuz I find a lot of much education at the surface level, it's just all kind of the same thing. But when everyone's at the same starting place or similar but much deeper in like, you get so much more enriching, especially being around other people who are interested in the same thing, right?

19:54

It's a cool, cool community that can form too. Still day one so and it's a big crowd still getting to know everyone on that aspect. Cool. Well, so I go back to question, back to Mark, how was day one like for all the other audience right here listening to this podcast who didn't have the opportunity to participate?

20:16

Like how is it? Well, we started the morning in the tea farm and got our super, super money. Nice. You know, it's great. It's interesting because I feel like Taishi and I know each other really well. So it's sort of those things where you guys probably recognize kind of like finish each other's sentences all the time.

20:32

So it was, it was really quite interesting to talk about deeper topics in tea that I would not normally have access to talk about because in content like what Oika does is is usually more short form. But having longer discussions where we talk about all of the components of tea growing and how the local weather effects these bushes and why they're doing things like Hanzu and really getting to the nitty gritty of like everything about Hanzu and having you guys actually there under the Hanzu and experiencing it is such an opportunity for me to geek out about it.

21:08

I'm not going to like go to Taishi, be like Taishi, dude, let's talk about Hanzu. So it's a really cool experience to get an opportunity to kind of walk through stuff. Plus, a lot of what I learn is through the questions that I ask and when I have these guys here and another one who joined us, they ask questions that I don't think about really and kind of opens the door to thinking about things deeper.

21:31

Did you want to say something today that you found kind of interesting or you didn't expect? Well, no, I guess you guys got to experience Hanzu like for the first time. How was that experience like? What? What did you feel?

21:46

Because it felt amazing for us. We were on another day, you know, also doing home Soo picking and also in a very nice sunny day. I guess that's very important because you really see the lighting effect underneath Hongzhou. Prints traumatic difference between seeing the light come down through Hongzhou versus Kanisha. That's right.

22:05

So it was, yeah, I had no idea that would really affect the matcha and the coloring to come out in the final product itself. So it's great to say. I will say too, after seeing the Hong Zu in person, I had asked Hausi a question about can any of this be replicated in sort of like a contained environment?

22:24

Could you do this under grow lights? Can you do this indoors? After seeing it in person, I'm convinced that you cannot do it any other way. It's really one of those things where you have to experience. I think it's like when they say that, like seeing like an actual famous painting is so different than looking at a photograph of it. It's like Konzu is like that times 10. Like the way the light scatters and the color and like the temperature of the color is just the. Temperature of the color for sure, and that affects the plant because you're blocked.

22:52

So the conratia is black, so it absorbs all the frequencies of light. The conratia. Actually, if you have a camera, when you take a picture you'll notice that the color temperature is different. You can't, like literally cannot photograph this every time we pull out our phone or even on your nicer camera sound like it just doesn't look the same. Yeah, it's not even close.

23:11

The light is scattered in a very unique way underneath Hanzu and also like the smell too. It's really a multi dimensional sensory experience. It makes good oyica. The other thing is too when you're under the conratia is you feel cooler. It's way cooler in terms of temperature than under Conratia. It's like a greenhouse effect in Conratia, which is the black tarp.

23:33

And complexity loves coolness. That's why China has like some of the arguably best teas in the world as opposed to like II's not producing incredible teas compared to China because of temperature. It's because of coolness, because of, you know, you want to have the bushes grow in an environment that gives it challenge, which builds character and people are the same.

23:54

It's like the unique, yeah, the unique tawa in like Yunnan or like Wisan, you know, you have like their radical temperature changes throughout, you know, days and nights. And you also have this is sort of topic of Ponzu, but some of the best growing Tawas or Intel walls YIN in China, which are going to be more misty, more like obfuscated, more cloudy, more canopies of other trees and other vegetation on the bushes.

24:23

These kind of wet, cool at night, you know, hot days. These are great growing regions and Hanzu kind of replicates some of that. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Speaking about the terroir in general, we've been tasting a lot of back-to-back samples of fertilized and unfertilized tea, like more natural methods and non and places where use a lot of fertilizer. And I don't know if I even agree with this statement yet myself, but how would you react to the that the statement that fertilizer is more important than tarwar and that's actually driving the flavor and complexity more than the environment itself?

25:03

I would agree when it comes to umami. Probably like nuance, other character aromatic notes, maybe not so much, but umami, I'd say that's probably true. And I think that for a lot of producers, umami is the goal. So if your goal is more umami, then yeah, fertilizer is going to play along with the shading, which is how the plant is going to take in that fertilizer is going to be a pretty necessary, like component to it. And I think it'd be the same for Fogua. Like if we're talking about Fogua, if you want fatty liver, like yes, the terroir is going to affect the flavor notes of the liver.

25:36

If it's from a particular region, duck is from that region versus like just the sheer amount of food you put into it to fatten it's liver fats, the gold and yeah, food is going to be how you get there. I think with Hans with fertilizer it's probably similar.

25:51

For that particular parameter. For that parameter, which for many I don't know how to quantify this, but for generally speaking for producers that is maybe one of the primary goals. Is that umami taste? Yeah. And it's one of the biggest like sort of IP protection, right, especially with an Uji is the fertilizer composition.

26:10

Yeah. People ask me at Ooika sometimes. Like is the, is the fertilizer synthetic or is it natural? There's no information about it. It can be both. It can be 1. Can be mixed too. A lot of them are. Mixed. The thing is with the fertilizer.

Marc · 26:22

Synthetic fertilizer is very good at getting a quick injection of nitrogen into the plant, but natural fertilizers are good for a longer sustained thing. So they a lot of farmers use both, but they're very specific on how they use it and like what they use it.

Marc · 26:39

You know when it's applied? Most places do it multiple times per year or like right before harvest or. Both. Some producers do it more or less, some do it kind of regularly. Some producers actually go out and I don't know if I'm supposed to say the name, but there's a producer in Uji that goes out and like feels his Bush everyday at the shininess of the leaf.

Marc · 26:59

And the glossiness of the leaf is an indication of the fertilizer according to this farmer. Interesting. So if he sees it needs more gloss, he will apply some more fertilizer. OK. This is a producer that's known for like hyper umami. OK, So yeah, The thing is this is a black box. Not even I have like really clear picture on this, but many producers have their own schedule, their own thing. They're hyper protective of it.

Marc · 27:23

Fertilizers like the big secret lemon herbs and spices kind of thing. Well, the other secret is tea planting. Yeah, like chashi, I guess they have their own fertilizer. She. For sure, for sure. Chashi is also like an amazing part of Japanese tea culture that it's not an area I have a lot of knowledge in just because I'm single origin based, but that's a super interesting topic.

Marc · 27:44

And as a lot of these uji farmers and and ones in Yame too, right, superstar status can basically if they want sell their tea directly to consumers. Single origin single cultivar. Like in theory if you go back 5-10 years they were suppliers and basically ingredient suppliers.

Marc · 28:01

Yes, that's like massive change. How have you seen or heard about the ripple effects of that change? That's like a pretty huge change considering they're literally producing some of the best tea in Japan. Like what's happening to these high end blends at these traditional blend houses when they literally cannot find the components to make them? This is such a hard topic because it's so expansive and it's wonderful and it's a beautiful topic. Plays into the future of Uji and the future of of matcha. But yes, there are more single origin companies in the West. There is more demand for tea coming from specific farms. And how will the tea companies

Marc · 28:40

respond to this? I don't know. I, I don't know in the short term, right now, it doesn't look like there's too much pushback because it's small amounts. Like Ooika, for example, is not buying like, you know, 100 kilograms of an Asahi single origin to sell.

Marc · 28:58

So that I don't think there's enough of an inconvenience to the tea blenders where this is an issue yet. But the farmers and the tea companies are not at odds with each other. They're collaborative and they're working together to help preserve Uji tea culture.

Marc · 29:15

Uji tea culture includes blending. So I don't think it's ever going to go away and I don't think it's ever going to not be prioritized because the history of Uji is a history, a shared history of the farmers in the chashi. And I think that I can't speak for the farmers, but I would imagine that they will provide more material to the tea companies at the request of the tea companies, I would assume. Where the established relationships. Are and for for our experience, the entire Uji do feel like a very tight community, like everyone is out there to help each other.

Marc · 29:48

Uji is also very special because of how ancient it is. You might have a hard time, for example, if you wanted to start a tea company now. Good luck. It's going to be pretty hard with how limited material is in Uji, but this is sort of a funny story.

Marc · 30:06

I won't go off on a long tangent on this, but I made that statement once and a member of my audience sent me, I'm not exaggerating, something like 20 something screenshots of farmers agreeing to send him material sort of as a way for him to prove that I'm not right. But but this kind of plays it to my point. If we're talking about farmers in Shizuoka or Kagoshima or farmers that are in like Wazuka, not that there's anything wrong with them.

Marc · 30:35

They're a necessary part of the Japanese tea industry and one that Ooika, we sell Wazuka and we will sell Kagoshima. We don't yet, but we will. But these are not producers that are like established for 300 years in Naka Uji doing honzu, right. So I think I'm saying all this because it may be that as single origin gets more famous and more demanded, there will be farmers in regions like Kagoshima that are selling single origin directly to the West, you know, with their name on it. They'll get awards internationally. But I believe that Uji is still going to be this like very hard nut to crack and something that

Marc · 31:15

they're going to have, in my opinion, and this is totally conjecture, but more allegiance to the tea companies than to the West. That's interesting. Talking to a lot of other macho small business owners or people thinking about starting brands. It's interesting that all of these Rockstar farmers that everyone's heard of, basically if you can get them to sell you something, it's in very small quantity and literally it is basically impossible to build a small business out of sourcing directly out of here.

Marc · 31:47

Like everyone, it feels like it's almost marketing and then you need to go someone who is a more reliable supplier. Right. And putting it. In cold terms. Right. Exactly. And then on top of that, not only do they have an allegiance to the preexisting tea blenders, but also these companies, these like Rockstar named farmers.

Marc · 32:04

They're sort of a, I want to be careful how I word this, not a pecking order, but the relationships that came before. You are going to get preferential treatments. For example, just to talk about Ooika, there are many farmers we work with, but if you contact them through Ooika, you will be after Ooika in terms of. Time to build these relationships was 5 or 10 years ago.

Marc · 32:26

I could totally like ruin all my relationships and then you guys could be like. Anyway, stupid joking aside, this is true and there are farmers that I want to work with that have other foreign companies that are prioritized above above me and it restricts me.

Marc · 32:40

There's only one that I can think of off the top of my head, but these these things do happen. So you're right, five years ago it was very different than it looks now. It's a little bit sad for me. I think that's the unspoken damage of the matcha shortage is what it's doing to all of these small businesses that actually help make these people famous, these origins famous, the processing methods famous. And it's impossible now to build a business on top of it because in cold business terms, they're very unreliable suppliers that can literally just stop talking to you and ghosting you not to. Like if if your livelihood

Marc · 33:13

depends on it, it's very hard. So my theories, a lot of people are going to push into new regions that typically would have just been dumped and blended into Uji Cha. Really interesting and have cool stories to tell. Yeah, and here's the thing, I don't think, I mean, obviously I love Uji and I love Yame, but other regions have a lot to offer. There's a lot of cool stuff happening in other tea growing regions.

Marc · 33:35

One of the things that I want to do with Ooika is right now we only focus on really two regions primarily. We do have a few other regions, but it's mostly, you know, Yame and and Uji. And I think that exploring those other regions is attractive, but also necessary given how limited the material is here. And with Ooika growing her now wanting to look at the future, what other producers can we offer who are doing interesting things?

Marc · 34:00

Interesting. Not all of it is is super traditional. Like one example, there's a producer we work with in Wazuka and something unique about him is he has 90 year old tea bushes that outside eye and we have a 90. Kushu again?

Marc · 34:15

Right. And that doesn't exist in Japanese tea. But he has these bushes. We buy the tencha from him. We make matcha out of it. So that's not traditional, but it's super interesting. And Ooika is not about selling luxury matcha.

Marc · 34:28

We're about selling educational matcha, which usually happens to be luxury, but sometimes it's not. That's very cool. And we are also seeing a lot of these tea farms out there, you know, outside of traditional attention production regions starting to convert into tencha. And there's, I would say vacuum of knowledge actually exists even within Japan that a lot of these people just don't necessarily know how to make tencha. 100% and even if they know, if you don't have tencha processing facility, like OK, here's an example.

Marc · 34:57

In Yame there's a gentleman named Shima. He's one of the farmers. We we sell his tencha, his matcha from. But Shima won an award from the MAFF minister for some fisheries. So he want it not for his tea, but what he want it for is getting farmers together and forming a new Co-op that pooled enough money together that they can open a tencha processing facility to save the growing region.

Marc · 35:23

Because if you don't have attention processing facility, you can't make tencha. If you can't make tencha, you can't support Sencha and Gyokuro because there's just not enough of it being sold. The prices of Sencha are bottoming out right now. Interesting.

Marc · 35:36

So point is that there's regions that once tencha processing facilities arise, there will be more expansion. This is sort of an interesting question. Once someone asked me will there be enough matcha to meet global demand from Japan in the future? And they say that's 100%.

Marc · 35:55

There's definitely enough growing regions, it's just there's not the infrastructure yet and there's not time yet because it takes 5-6 years after you plant the Bush to get the new material. Yeah, from what we've been hearing too, there's a lot of government incentives to help fill that gap. Huge.

Marc · 36:10

There's so much money right now. I shouldn't say so much, but there's a lot of money going towards helping farmers switch over to tencha production. But there's just not a lot of information, and a lot of the farmers that have been doing sencha may not know how to produce excellent tencha.

Ryan · 36:25

Yeah, that makes sense. But they will. Is there like some sort of a mechanism to help these new farmers to learn about tencha production? I'm sure, I'm sure there's I'm sure, but I don't know. But one thing I will say is one of the farmers we work with is a multiple first place win a national tea competition in another tea, not in tencha. OK.

Marc · 36:44

And he he has a tencha field and we buy tencha from him. And he sent his son to Uji to visit with another of Ooika's farmers and they met each other through Ooika. How wonderful. So he went here to learn from him to gather more skills and knowledge and tencha production, which is like amazing.

Zongjun · 37:03

How cool is that to facilitate that? I didn't do it directly, but even still, that's really cool. But I think that happens, and I think that there probably are other programs that exist that are more formalized to help.

Ryan · 37:15

That's wonderful to hear. This is actually just a very nerdy question that I have. What's the energy source for the tencha ovens? Is it typically like gas or is wood? No, it's electric. It depends. I believe it's usually crude.

Marc · 37:28

It's oil. It's oil. And it burns so clean there's no smoke. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, because we've been learning a lot. Usually there may be other factories that use other. As we know, it's super energy intensive. Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Ryan · 37:38

Yeah, I've been seeing some of these, like oil tanks, like heavy oil, like they use it to power ships, like large cargo ships. They do burn super clean but it's out of the technique to kick start them. It is and and even once they kick start it, once they get the machines running, some of the factories take time to heat up.

Marc · 37:55

So one of the factories in Yame, it takes 24 hours to get hot enough that you can use it anyway. There's so there's so much cool stuff to talk about and like the production of of the tea is so interesting. Just like they heavily guard the fertilizer, they also, as you guys found out, they heavily guard the numbers on the control panels in the factory. Like do photos all you want, but don't take a picture of the the numbers here.

Marc · 38:19

Oh, I want the. Other farmers to see the settings they set. Interesting the. Tea factory and also another cool thing is some of the factories, most of them are not collaborative. So like farmers go in and they make their tea in a part of a Co-op, but they don't like confer with other farmers what they're doing. They kind of do their own thing.

Marc · 38:38

But the fact that we went to today in Uji, they're completely collaborative. So they help each other with everything and they all know their numbers and they all know everything and they even like help each other. That may or may not be typical, but in this factory it happened.

Zongjun · 38:52

Other factories have been too. It's usually not that collaborative. That's such a cool feedback loop. It's like the old world, like salons and like the old cafes in Vienna. People are critiquing each other. Or a Cafe de Flor. And like all the artists, it's coming together 100%. Super cool exactly how it is.

Marc · 39:08

It's. It's why the tea so good here. To Joraisan. Joraisan. There's a few other members of this collective, but yeah, it's very much like that old school salon. And you see them just sitting around the tea, like picking at it and like tasting it and talking and brewing it.

Ryan · 39:24

And it's really cool. It's really, really exciting. It's awesome. I think we should end it. Yeah, that is a great place to end it. And the sun's starting to set, getting cold. Thank you so much, Marc, and thank you for everyone who participated. Well, good luck on your journey for the following days and you know, we hope to learn more from you along with, you know, all the other people participating today. Yeah, cool.

Marc · 39:48

It'd be awesome to do a before and after too. Oh, maybe when it's over. I'm always, I'm always appreciative and I don't take for granted how amazing it is for you guys to allow me on your podcast. I really enjoy your podcast. So thank you so much for allowing me anytime you want to chat please please.

Zongjun · 40:02

Love talking about this stuff, obviously. Yeah, us too. Awesome. Awesome. So if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing with friend and we'll see you in the next one. Thanks. See you.