2025 Specialty Matcha Podcast AMA

Ryan · 0:05

Hello, and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my cohost Zongjun, 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, Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we are doing an AMA so we put out a feedback form about what everyone likes and dislikes about the episode and at the end we added a question of for them to submit a question for an ask me anything episode.

Ryan · 0:35

So to keep the Super authentic, Sam is going to be hearing these for the first time. I guess it's half authentic. So you can get 2 responses, 1 sort of on the fly and one from someone said a little more time to digest. Really, I just want to look smarter than Sam.

Zongjun · 0:51

He's so spoiled. All right, let's go. Let's go. But anyway, we're in Bangkok right now as we're recording this, sipping on some wonderful MTCH drinks, and so we're probably in a pretty good mood to do this recording. Liking my Hojicha so far.

Ryan · 1:08

Yeah, my, I don't want to like this Yuzu Frappe as much as I do. It is absolutely incredible and I honestly I don't think it would really work as well with any other matcha. This particular matcha that is paired with the Yuzu Frappe really makes 1 + 1 = 3.

Ryan · 1:26

Yeah, tastes really good. Anyway, into the episode and thank you so much for your questions. The first question is how can matcha be a trampoline for leaf tea consumption? How can it be a gateway product to get people into drinking senchas, gyokuros, hojicha or maybe even beyond Taiwanese high mountain, oolong or old tree pu'er? Well, it's in general a, kind of a, a gateway for us to or for people to come back to tea or tea flavor consumption in general.

Zongjun · 2:00

Because we've been seeing in Korea was kind of miraculous. Like Korea being a like 95% coffee consumption country is recently like going a full circle back to drinking matcha, which is something that, you know, they've been actually historically drinking in the past but has stopped for a very long time. Especially like for the young people, they are not growing up with tea flavors in their life at all. And this is like something really, really, really interesting to see, to witness if it necessarily will be a trampoline for leaf tea consumptions. We don't know yet, but at least it's getting people back to tea and I think that's super

Ryan · 2:41

important. Yeah, the interesting thing with matcha is it's so perfectly substitutable with coffee and coffee formats, lattes, frappes, Americano style, because it makes it really easy for cafes to add value. And you're only doing 1 extraction, you're not really re extracting matcha. And with loose leaf tea in almost all formats, whether or not senchado or various forms of gyokuro brewing or in Kong Fu Cha, Chinese tea ceremony and Korean tea ceremony darye, you're actually doing fractional extraction. You're taking fractions off of it. So if you let it steep for 30 seconds and you drink that and then you brew it again and again

Ryan · 3:23

and again, you're experiencing the tea from so many different angles as you're extracting different things because different flavor compounds and tea have different extraction rates. So you're fundamentally dimensionalizing the experience for yourself.

Zongjun · 3:36

It's actually part of the fun. There's a lot of problems with that. The first is it takes a long time. It takes, you know, you got to commit at least 1/2 hour of your day. It adds a lot of mess. You got to clean up the loose leaf tea, especially something like sencha.

Zongjun · 3:49

Personally for me, even the little bit of friction of brewing sencha on a kyusu, I hate cleaning up the leaves afterwards. It is like a pain. And I'm someone who's been like brewing loose leaf tea this way for around 12 years now on a regular basis and I still find it an unpleasant consumer experience, let alone for someone who doesn't even know how to do it well for as much that's kind of once and done. You don't need to have any skill other than you know, the first preparation steps that you need.

Zongjun · 4:17

But in when you're doing multiple infusions, the first cup might taste great, but the second cup might taste horrible, right because of water temperature? You brew too long? Maybe you dosed totally incorrect. There's a lot more skill involved. And not only skills, utensils too. Yeah, a lot of equipment to be able to brew tea. Whereas, you know, with matcha, it's literally just like coffee. Like you put everything in one glass, in One Cup, and you can drink it all the way.

Zongjun · 4:44

And it requires a lot of time. It does require a lot of time. And it requires a lot of time and energy to learn how to do it well. Brewing good loose leaf tea takes skill. That's why they call it Gong fucha in Chinese, the skill of making tea.

Ryan · 4:57

But on the other hand, you know, we also have formats like tea bags. Yes, and there's also the quote UN quote grandpa style tea. You can just throw some gyokuro and a giant mug on and sip on it all day. Much easier forms, you know, taste as much.

Zongjun · 5:09

No one takes their best tea and brews it this way because you're not extracting, you know, the flavors that that are great for it. So maybe it will be a progression. You know, as you said, tea is getting into people's lives and it opens new doors.

Ryan · 5:23

Something that I think might really help open new doors is moving these formats that are actually good, that are not much a substitute like actually good gyokuro, powdered gyokuro to put in these type of drinks. Actually good high quality single origin hojicha, actually good sencha in these types of formats might really open people's eyes to these different types of T&B. Like the next step on the ladder, the next ladder edge, the next step step on the staircase for people to really enjoy and appreciate these different products. I agree.

Zongjun · 6:00

I agree. I think the, I guess the, the, the, the most important part or the, the part or that matters the most is that people are getting back to tea in general. They're getting back to tea flavor, they're getting back to tea consumption. They're getting back to being used to like tea as a component of their daily beverage choices.

Ryan · 6:20

Yeah absolutely. And actually loose leaf tea is fundamentally better for a lot of different use cases, especially while socializing. It is really nice having the conversation reset every time you do a brew. You collect the cups your with your Q Su or with your teapot butter with your gaiwan you're brewing again, you redistribute and actually this is a big thing in Chinese tea appreciation circles as they talk about conversation flow and like the the number of people and how that impact conversation, but also with each re steeping you have a fundamental reset.

Ryan · 6:52

But also you're doing this over the course of an hour to 45 minutes. Very more intimate long tea gathering than something like matcha where you literally finish it in one minute. It's. Like smoking a cigarette versus a cigar.

Zongjun · 7:05

Interesting analogy. Actually I see a lot of parallel between them. You know, cigar is also like very sociable kind of moment. Just sit down with with your friend and it's a prolonged period of time you can share with your, you know, with the people that you care about or people that you want to have a conversation with in a very relatively enclosed environment. But I would say that that probably also confined cigar or loose leaf consumption in a certain context of scenario that kind of, I don't know if it will necessarily replace the role of coffee or matcha in people's beverage choices for now. So if you just want a quick

Zongjun · 7:44

caffeine grab and go, you know probably won't necessarily want a cup of loose leaf tea. Yeah, yeah. But hopefully there's a growing appreciation around sort of the culture of socializing and taking your time and having tea.

Ryan · 7:58

I know in Europe this is really growing. I was just at the Berlin Tea Festival a few weeks ago and like a lot of people say, yeah, you know, we just chill on the weekends and, you know, we have a bunch of people over and we taste through a bunch of stuff and just chit chat.

Ryan · 8:10

It's it's not a solo enterprise. Yeah, a lot of benefits to it too. So all right, next question, if you would start a tea farm, what would you do in terms of production, working, growing, culture, marketing, import, export? What would your three to five year plan be? Any tea farm or matcha tea farm?

Zongjun · 8:31

Let's assume, let's assume this is for matcha. For tencha. Tencha matcha. Wow. What's the five year plan? The Chinese are good at five year plan. Yes we are. Yes we are. Wow, this is hard. Because, you know, to be honest, my dream tea farm is not really a farm.

Zongjun · 8:47

It's a tea forest. I'm all into biodiversity of in terms of tea gardening, much like what people in Yunnan are doing for poor. But if it's for tencha, you know, like I still think that there's space or room for people to experiment that kind of farming ideology in tencha farming. And we kind of are seeing, you know, a lot of farmers in Japan doing so, like using more zairai cultivars, using more natural fertilizers or natural to no fertilizers, which means no pesticides.

Zongjun · 9:19

And we are seeing a lot of farmers in Uji, in Wazuka, in Yame moving into that direction. And so am I actually making some pretty delicious tea. And so I would probably take more inspiration from that pathway. And at the same time, there's just so much more potential for tea to express itself in, in a more natural environment versus, you know, dosing with standardized fertilizers and using all of these techniques to, to create, you know, like also pretty delicious matcha. But at the end of the day, what you're really tasting is the fertilizer, not like the tea itself or the terroir itself or whatever is making the tea so

Ryan · 9:59

unique from from other areas. What about you, Rye? So I'm going to drop an interesting foreshadow. I'll give my answer. But actually we've all, we've kind of already done this. So we've never talked about this publicly. We are.

Ryan · 10:13

No, but we will one day record a podcast episode. We were tencha farmers. I feel so embarrassed. Spring of 2025. We didn't think we could get anyone in Japan to agree, but we had a friend of a friend who had an organic tea farm, China, that was willing to do some experiments with shaded cultivation.

Ryan · 10:31

We'll share that whole story later. And we definitely weren't able to do everything that we wanted to do, just given budget and operational constraints. But we will talk about that epic failure, which is actually just a fantastic learning. Experience or prelude to a giant success? We don't know.

Ryan · 10:48

Yeah, we got to start somewhere. Got to start somewhere. But what I would do or one of one really cool plan. So I, I just had one of Ooika's awesome senchas that I got from Marc Alexandre at Yunomi at the Berlin Tea Festival. And one of them was from a farmer in Shizuoka who took seeds from fragrant cultivars like Koshin. So it was zairai, but you knew who the parents were. And the parents were these highly fragrant sencha cultivars and they took these seeds and they planted a new zairai garden of the zairai offspring.

Ryan · 11:19

So you get genetic diversity naturally coming from, from the fact that it's sexually reproduced tea. So you have DNA mixing, not just cuttings or clones or cultivars, but it's coming from a cultivar that already has some unique characteristics that people like.

Ryan · 11:35

And this is something that David from Tezumi talked about in a previous podcast, how in places like Wazuka, some of the trees, it was actually cheaper to buy seeds than it was to buy cuttings or for cultivars back in the day.

Ryan · 11:47

So people would buy seeds from Uji and say this feels an Uji zairai lineage and another field is a Shizuoka zairai lineage. I think this is super cool. And this huge benefit that you get from zairai is you have taproot structures.

Ryan · 12:01

All the cultivars, especially apparently the very good tasting ones Paul has told us from tea nursery, have really big rooting problems. The problem when you have very shallow roots is that you can't access a lot of nutrients.

Ryan · 12:13

Not to mention the fact that you have basically a monoculture when you have genetically identical plants, which makes everything much more vulnerable. So what I think would be super cool is collecting seeds from some of the coolest cultivars for that are known for matcha, Uji Hikari, Asahi, Kirari 31, all of these and create a new zairai field in one of really anywhere actually. So then you get the benefits of the children of these plants which will hopefully carry on some of the fantastic properties.

Ryan · 12:46

You get natural genetic diversity and you have fantastic taproot structures. And then if you do a very natural form of garden management, this would be really interesting. For fertilizer, I would use exclusively food based fertilizer that a human can eat.

Ryan · 13:01

So a lot of like mackerel, rice shape, seed oil waste, sesame oil, waste products, oyster shells, things that we've heard are really good. And we've tasted a lot of tea from farms that use this type of fertilizer. And it's not an umami bomb. It's actually creates an incredible complexity. And then after that it would be shaded for a really long time. I don't think we would use a honzu shading for anything other than marketing purposes.

Ryan · 13:27

So I'm not super convinced that it makes a massive difference in the taste of the quality of the actual raw material itself. So Kandesha triple layered just like Suji san. And then everything is tesumi and pick. And then I would be interested in doing 2 forms of production and tension processing. One very classic.

Ryan · 13:47

I'm trying to preserve as much inherent taste of the tea. So really short steaming times, very carefully dried, not too much Hika, not too much heat that too many of those roasty, toasty notes. And then another one I would want to have. What Paul talked about is if there was a producer, I forget where he was, the guy with the Hoy row, the roasting table. In Miyazaki.

Ryan · 14:10

Maybe that sounds right. So there's a producer that just takes this ten shot and roasted on Hoy row. So I'd hojicha it's just like lightly toasted matcha that bring in an entirely new expression. So then it's a mixture of these really cool xyrite plants, or we know the lineage that are really well shaded, but we're tasting the characteristics of that nature as much as we possibly can, along with the really good fertilizer.

Ryan · 14:35

And then one roasty, toasty step, because honestly, I'm getting sick of all of these very homogeneous matcha profiles, even among cultivars. The diversity, just like sometimes it just feels like wow, OK this there is a difference, but like I want something else.

Zongjun · 14:52

Give me something. Fragrant. Give me something roasted, give me something bitter. I think we need to see greater flavor diversity. So that's that's my very long answer. Yeah, well, for me, I will probably go one more step further beyond that. Why, why don't we do it outside of Japan? Yeah, when I was in Junan last year during harvest season, farmer of friend of mine helped me try a very interesting poor. Poor is local kind of fermented post fermentation green tea, almost like green tea that's very local to Yunnan. And so one of the first form of tea consumption that happens in human history.

Zongjun · 15:33

But he had me try this very interesting pour that just tastes so naturally umami. That was my first time actually taste the note umami from a Chinese tea. And I was so fascinated about it. And, and, and, and he was telling me that there's no shading called shaded cultivation.

Zongjun · 15:51

There's nothing similar to how people grow Tantra in in Japan. What ends up happening is that the tea was growing in deep deep Yunnan forest that has natural thick canopy. Oh, it's just shaded. It's just naturally shaded tea.

Zongjun · 16:09

The leaves has huge surface area and super dark, super green. And I cannot help but think that, oh, wow, why don't we just, you know, use that part of the garden and we implement some, you know, tensha cultivation methodology.

Zongjun · 16:25

And we just, you know, do it. Natural shading. Yeah, natural shading. We can even intensify the shading with some, you know, extra blankets, extra coverage. And, you know, the, the, the, the soils in inside of forests are naturally fertilized with all the fallen leaves from different vegetations. And and there's this concept of, you know, single tree poor in Yunnan that people like, yeah, these big money Lao Bank were commissioned for production.

Zongjun · 16:56

Yeah, I probably my dream scenario cultivation for attention production will be one single tree 500 year old poor cultivar that we use tension methods and use tension processing method to turn that into a very delicious matcha.

Ryan · 17:15

I'm ready to sign. All right, next question, what's your personal philosophy and practice on matcha with sifting? This is a good question. I have an answer. Well, if matcha is fresh meal that really doesn't need sifted, you can sift and it does help, but we notice that the clumps really don't form until after about 24 hours usually.

Ryan · 17:37

It depends on the humidity too. It also depends on the tent job. It's really variable. I mean, I think if you sift, you're safe. Sifting is generally a safe practice. I always. Sift because it's even like maybe, maybe it also depends on the grinding mechanism. But with our machine, I always sift and one time I forgot to sift because like because of the high compression of the ceramic plates, you end up like compress some powders into small flakes. Yeah, that's true.

Ryan · 18:08

And if we don't sift that, it will come. You do hear some people saying our matcha is so finely ground and it's such a fine powder that it doesn't need sifting. The. The correlation's backwards, yeah. Exactly. If it's very coarse, you don't need to sift because they don't clump together as much. You don't have as much surface area, therefore you have less surface to surface interaction, which creates this gumminess. So actually, the finer, you know, the more gummy it gets and the more likely it is to clump.

Ryan · 18:42

So that's a bit of misinformation that's flooding around the tea world. There are some people, especially for premixes that add in antique taking agents that can help. Actually, honestly, the idea of a matcha paste, I don't know what the water is going to do from a degradation perspective, but it's it's an interesting way. So I've heard some people choose not to whisk. And what they do is they make like a koi chop paste and they need kind of like kneading dough. They incorporate it with the CHA send for a few minutes and then they whisk it and they usually don't have clump problems. But I've I've done that before

Zongjun · 19:14

and I thought I did it well and I didn't and there were a lot of clumps. Do they whisk or do do they sis before making that? No, no. Yeah, no, they skip this step. Oh, they skip it completely. Yeah, they skip it completely. Interesting.

Zongjun · 19:28

The other thing you can do, one thing I've tried when I've been in a pinch, is it's pretty interesting. I started doing this actually before I worked in matcha professionally in China. You at least in, in a multisenke, I don't know about RSNK, but in a multisenke, you know, you put in your two scoops of matcha and then you create, you use your chassa and you, you sort of disrupt the little mountain of matcha that you made.

Zongjun · 19:52

You put basically they call it, you put a river through it, so a place for the water to flow, but you're basically flattening it and do kind of a zig zag motion to create like a Little River indentation. Pretty poetic and interesting.

Zongjun · 20:05

But what I've noticed is that that recompression actually really helps against clumps. So if you have a dry bowl and you put in two scoops of tea and you take your scoop and you just lightly decompress it, you're actually breaking up some of those clumps again. And I've noticed that that works. Pretty well, not always, but it's better than not doing it at all.

Ryan · 20:27

All right, next question. How do you think we can tackle the first harvest demand more effectively in years to come? What are your thoughts on what might happen in 2026 and what do you think there will be? And do you think there will be enough Ichibancha to last until next harvest?

Ryan · 20:46

Are we going to experience a shortage in 2025? Everyone's just going to run out of tea. I'll say one thing before you enter everywhere. Well, we've heard a lot of people express this concern in the industry. Yeah, it's.

Zongjun · 20:58

Very likely we've. Heard it from enough people but we also know a lot of producers are stockpiling and drip drip drip slowly releasing it so some of this scarcity is actually man made. But the shortage will probably be contained. But the price, Oh my God, it's going to go up. Yeah, I think the price for next year's harvest is going to be crazy.

Zongjun · 21:19

Yeah. Now that people have the experience of people ordering tea or that the pace of people or the time when people are going to order tea, I think, you know, the retailers and farmers and distributors will kind of design their supply accordingly. Yeah, I hope so.

Zongjun · 21:38

It's it's very, very, the whole situation is very concerning. And I don't know about managing the demand more effectively. I mean, it's a double edged sword because if you don't let that tencha rest in cold storage for a few months at least it tastes worse. And we've experienced that a lot. And actually, after we released our experience with our Sam's favorite blend that that I speculated on the podcast, they were releasing tea too early.

Zongjun · 22:06

The tencha didn't have enough time to rest. And someone deep within the matcha industry who listens to our podcast, thank you very much, reached out and confirmed my suspicion. He had direct knowledge of of that and they had direct knowledge of that, or at least had heard through someone that that was indeed the case that they basically burned through their reserve tencha stocks that were aged. I mean, and it just wasn't enough to keep the supply flow. And so clearly the big blend houses are already doing some pretty major compromises.

Zongjun · 22:36

That's crazy. Well, it makes sense because like after we opened that can and let us sit for a few days actually tastes better. That was not the case last year. Pretty rare for that to happen. The iconic olive oil notes came back after we opened the can, which was wild.

Zongjun · 22:53

Very interesting. It's really bizarre, but I don't know, I don't think anyone has the answer to this question fully. I think releasing it slowly is good practice and I like the producers that do that. I think that's smart. So some artificial scarcity to just kind of slow down consumption and make sure there's enough throughout the year, because that would be a horrible outcome. Is that come like February, like everyone's out of stock, that's not good for consumers.

Zongjun · 23:18

Like it's a it's a whole lot of short term pain for everyone now to hold that back. But I think that it might be better for everyone in the long term because it's having no supply available anywhere for that amount of time or very little supply is is really bad for consumers.

Ryan · 23:36

Agree. I might make them panic by when it's available and then we go into these boom cycles of releasing, selling out, releasing, selling out, but I think it's not a very healthy dynamic. Yeah. And also at some point, probably a lot of consumers would just get tired of it and move.

Ryan · 23:52

On Yeah, it's getting too expensive. I'm done. Forget this. Yeah, it's too much effort. Yeah. So that will be, that will be really terrible. Yeah, especially if the prices keep going up, right? Next question. Love this question.

Zongjun · 24:04

Do best by dates even matter? Well, in a lot of cases, they're putting there just to suffice deregulation requirements to me, no. Best by dates don't matter. A mill date probably matters much more. Tea is not a perishable product so long as that tea, as long as the tin is sealed. You could drink 100 year old tea like it's it's not going to grow mold assuming it didn't come into contact with any moisture. So from a food safety perspective it is. It's a non perishable product, comes in the best by dates mostly for is mostly for for regulations, but there's a huge range of standard.

Zongjun · 24:46

The best companies will put it six months after milling. The industry standard is 18 months. But even after six months, it's honestly, unless it's in the freezer or you're keeping it in really cold storage and then you put it, take it out, let it come back to room temperature and then opening it, you know you're going to suffer from a lot of degradation. I mean, a lot of studies have shown it's just two months, two months at room storage temperature. It can lose up to 30 to 40% of the EGCG. From the flavor nutrition perspective, I think best by dates are stupid.

Zongjun · 25:18

I think everyone should move to mill dates. It's very clear why no one's doing it. Moving to mill dates. In some cases it's definitely because the matcha brand owners cannot pull that information from their supplier where the supplier doesn't want to share that information. So that's one possibility. 2 it's actually going to be a range.

Zongjun · 25:36

So if it's a stone ground product, these stone mills only mill 20 to 40 grams an hour. So it's probably a range over the course of a week because it's they're actually kind of creating one gigantic blend. It's that's a complicated story to tell a consumer. Although if I were them, I would just pick the oldest date in the range.

Zongjun · 25:54

I think would be a good practice. But yeah, it's I think and I think for the others, they don't want to put it on because they their product is probably older than they would like to deliver. In a perfect world, especially right now, the every matcha business is buying as much matcha as they possibly can while it's available.

Zongjun · 26:16

There's so many small businesses around the world that like have to purchase matcha to remain a business. And it is a good business decision and we would recommend all small businesses. If you can buy 200 kilos instead of 100 kilos, you absolutely should in this environment, you know, put it in the freezer, cold store it, right?

Zongjun · 26:35

Like it's still better than completely running out of stock and having nothing to sell and having all of these small businesses which have created this much of boom by supplying it, by educating the market, educating all the people who talk about it on social media. This all didn't happen by accident. You can't just blame social media. These people who are doing these reviews have built the preferences are built off of people giving them that knowledge in English, giving them that knowledge in Spanish and Portuguese and French and Arabic and Tagalog and Thai and Vietnamese, right.

Zongjun · 27:07

Like it's, it's all the small businesses are the heroes of this matcha boom. So it's it'd be tragic. So on the we would like to have mill dates, but also at the moment the no one has any control over the mill. No one has any control over when they get product.

Zongjun · 27:24

Every single matcha founder that I've talked to in the last two months said that like supply for them, even them who have very established businesses is very unreliable. So I I think the keeping them solvent is the most important thing in the interim. But if you only care about consumers, yeah, mill dates are super important.

Zongjun · 27:40

Agree Next, what questions should consumers ask their and baristas to ensure they're receiving a high quality product? For me, actually, just drink the tea, taste it yourself. I think that's the most straightforward way of understanding the quality of the product that you're consuming because like knowledge or information doesn't necessarily equal to quality.

Zongjun · 28:01

In the past few days we've been sampling a lot of matcha shops in Bangkok and some of them have like very sophisticated menus with very detailed information about the terroir, about the origin. But the tea just, it wasn't that good. It was pretty bad actually.

Ryan · 28:16

Some, some we we had some exceptional tea. Also the bad one is bad by Thai standards. It was still miles above anything you can get elsewhere. Yeah, yeah. But but you know, like really is information doesn't necessarily equal to quality like people are probably willing to or sometimes it doesn't necessarily equal to preference. We, we, we were sampling this, this matcha shop that serve only Shizuoka organic matcha and they are, you know, like very has this very tight collaboration with the local farmers. They serve everything organic.

Ryan · 28:52

It's like basically farm to cup. Yeah, basically farm to cup and the tea tastes very, very organic matcha. Some people like it. I actually did end up liking the cup that I ordered. They they, it's not a pure matcha, it's a specialty drink. They add a some like lime and yuzu juice into the matcha without any sugar addition.

Ryan · 29:13

Wow, works out perfectly. It's almost like biting into a juicy grapefruit. It was delicious. It was delicious. But I can totally see, you know, that really organic kind of bitter structure taste profile doesn't suffice to someone's taste preference for a matcha.

Ryan · 29:30

So I think there is a discrepancy on that. And So what questions can you necessarily ask? I guess like just asking some of the standard questions about the matcha, like you know what cultivars are what you know what, what tana, you know what, what are the preparation method that you're going to use? Like if the barista behind the bar counter have some at least basic answers to your questions, I think that's a good indicator of them at least knowing you know what they are serving. To customers, what is it?

Ryan · 29:59

Where is it from? How are you preparing it? And anything like any questions deeper than that, like if you can get a answer, fantastic, you jackpot. But if not, then you know it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get a bad product.

Ryan · 30:15

Yeah, for baristas, it's tricky because Chip, typically they don't know very much about matcha. Even at matcha specialty cafes, you really have to go to somewhere with this very good training. And actually I think this is a big criticism of the matcha industry in general is that they don't make matcha very interesting for coffee people. There is nothing interesting saying this bag is ceremonial grade.

Ryan · 30:37

We source directly from the farmers. This is you know AAA and you know you should. It's good with just water and has a lot of natural sweetness. Tells you nothing about the product. I mean people can smell BS. Imagine someone told you the same story about some coffee. Like, it's so different than saying this is Kirari 31 cultivar grown in a place called Yame in Fukuoka where they're famous for toasting their tea at a little higher temperature, which gives all of these nice roasty, toasty notes that when combined with milk, often can create these almost like peanut butter or even like chocolate

Ryan · 31:17

like notes in the latte. But you know what? If you don't put milk in it, you get like some creaminess from that cultivar. But also in the nose, you get this wonderful walnut note, for example, right? And this was grown, it was shaded for three weeks or 4 weeks, which is a relatively long time.

Ryan · 31:33

And the longer you shade a tea, the less naturally bitter it gets and the more umami it gets because sunlight actually creates a reaction, turning sweet and umami amino acids into bitter and astringent catechins. And that's what shading does, is it totally blocks that. But this is a super interesting story. You're giving someone causal mechanisms and it's something that they can then pass on to their consumers and saying, yes, tea ceremony master and made this wonderful blend. It's triple ceremonial grade AAA, blah blah blah. Nothing is interesting about that product. It's literally just a bunch of

Ryan · 32:08

bullshit all of like, it's just things that people have made-up. It doesn't reflect anything about the tea itself. It's just all the stories that we tell on top of it. All the medals and awards that people given to themselves.

Ryan · 32:24

And labels, it's really crazy. Now, vendors are a different story. I think a really good vendor is very good at steering people to what they like and what they think is good or what is going to be a good fit for them. So it's. So I was talking with someone recently about the matcha scene here in Bangkok and they were saying that, yeah, you know what, if you're a matcha brand here and you don't have a wide variety of matcha, people just don't trust you. So the consumers are in a state where the industry standard is you need to have a wide variety of flavor profile outcomes, flavor profile options, and then

Ryan · 32:57

you need to have the labels behind whether or not it's cultivar, growing region or processing. Well, that that's very unique to Thailand, right? Like here, you have a very, very experienced and educated consumer cohort that's pulling that information, demanding that information from vendors, from brands, and you don't necessarily quite see that in, you know, elsewhere.

Ryan · 33:18

Yeah. Not even in Japan. Not even in Japan, Yeah. So it's but I think it will happen. Oh yeah, eventually we'll have. And that's going to be a big change. I actually think that Thailand is going to be the new standard bearers and they're going to define the rules of this new game, this new culture of drinking matcha outside of a ceremonial is by far most sophisticated here compared to anywhere else we've been seen or heard of.

Ryan · 33:41

And I think they actually have the possibility meeting the rest of the world and then it it moving outwards. I hope it happens because it's a sophisticated market with consumers who have deep preferences who probably know way more than the average consumer in Japan, like a lot more, like 10 times more probably for the daily matcha drinker here in terms of what they no, No 12.

Ryan · 34:02

Times 12 times. Japanese people really don't know very much a product, especially the tea ceremony practitioners. They get told things about the product, but they don't know anything about cultivars. Like there's no culture of that that existed.

Ryan · 34:16

This is totally new culture formation. So you know, in terms of Western vendors, I hope that's the case that they'll be able to guide you. So if they don't guide you, I would say I don't buy from them if they cannot answer questions around the cultivar was all of these things like it's if you can't get like information from people or they say they don't know.

Ryan · 34:36

I recently was, you know, the Berlin Tea Festival asking around about some matcha. I won't say from which country to keep this very vague. And I asked the person who is selling, this is one of three products that they sold.

Ryan · 34:49

They're a matcha business. I asked what cultivar is this? And she was very nice. She said honestly, I don't know. And like a lot of people have asked me today, like what is the likelihood that any of those people bought that product?

Ryan · 35:02

Like probably pretty low where the consumers know more about the product than the business owner selling it. Yeah. But, you know, after that day, you know, the owner will definitely go back and figure out what are the cultivars. Yeah, of the products that they're selling. So, you know, there's a push and pull interaction happening and I think that's very healthy.

Ryan · 35:22

Very healthy, this push and pull interaction between consumers and these brand owners. But you know, really broad strokes to literally answer the question. They shade. It definitely matters. Fertilizer matters a lot. So organic, non organic.

Ryan · 35:34

If they have the information. Yeah, if they have the information knowing exactly where it's from and not accepting Uji. Like where where is Uji? Uji can be Kyoto Prefecture, Nara, Mie or Shiga, and even within the Yamashiro region and what people would call the Uji region, there's a huge difference, right?

Ryan · 35:52

Like Wazuka has remarkably different climate than somewhere like Uji, that actual city, Uji, which sits in a river basin versus in the mountains or in a River Valley versus the mountains. So I think it's just a matter of poking and prodding and seeing what happens.

Ryan · 36:10

And if you experience some condescension, forget that person. If you're asking a reasonable question and someones like giving so much pushback, which happens all the time, I don't think that these people have a great seat at the table. If someone says it's proprietary, maybe that makes sense, but otherwise if they're just being super cagey, I think there's no room for this lack of transparency. Next question, what are our experiences with Matcha in the UK or talking with people based in the UK? Have you been?

Zongjun · 36:41

No, no, I have not. OK, what's your impression from afar actually? From afar, there's a surprisingly a lot of things happening over there and surprisingly a lot and surprisingly little because UK being a very large tea consumption countries doesn't seem to quite have such a diverse, the specialty kind of consumer cohort yet compared to, you know, places like Bangkok or even like in the States. It's a kind of surprising that the, you know, people are not necessarily using a loose leaf tea framework to to to assess matcha, but there are still a lot of people doing matcha. And apparently it's on the up

Ryan · 37:22

and coming. So I, I've been to London quite a few times in and out since 2017, I believe. And I didn't really notice any matcha was there before I worked in the industry in 2017, 2018-2019 and you know, just after COVID. But the, my last trip there, I did a sort of a matcha tour of four different places, most of which were very Japanese themed and focused that the quality, average quality of the drinks were pretty low.

Ryan · 37:48

Like actually inspired us to record an episode called Back to Basics, which is a little self-explanatory of my what, what I experienced there at the four different places that I went to. So not to be overly critical, but I think it is up and coming and growing big trend there.

Ryan · 38:07

And I know that the importation levels of just the volume of matcha that enters that market has gone up pretty significantly. The CEO of IA Europe, guy named Thomas, I forget his last name, presented at the Berlin Tea Festival. Him and his entire team recently did a big trip in London and he was too shocked.

Ryan · 38:29

He said that this is like the fastest growing place in Europe for Matcha. And he was commenting that, you know, it's part of the trends that start in the US that then first get adopted into the UK and then get adopted into the rest of Europe. But I don't know if I fully agree with that causation, but that's sort of what people in the industry that have a lot of context are saying is that the UK is going to be leading a lot of this matcha new matcha culture that we're seeing. Really, I think it's Germany based on my experiences talking to.

Zongjun · 39:03

People there, there's so many people in Paris too, like doing like issues requiring. Yeah, that's true. Even in the past 2-3 months we've have a lot of issues to a lot more single cultivar, a lot more advanced conversations than had ever existed anywhere. Yeah, hard to say who the market leaders there. I do think the US, they only had it first, then it's slowly moved and Europe is a huge problem because very little high quality matcha can enter into the EU.

Zongjun · 39:29

So even just finding a good product is very challenging. They should fight for it as the O3 Germany and and the UK was gonna be the first. So, yeah, I don't know, I think it's up and coming. I know a lot of tea people in in the UK and that I chat with that are other, you know, tea friends, tea people. And I think there's a lot of great work going on there by a lot of brands and that are really establishing the category of specialty matcha and treating it as something that's way more than just like a commodity product and so very optimistic. Agree.

Ryan · 40:01

Agree. Agree. Next question, since we are both a large travelers, would we ever consider putting together and sharing a Google map some of our favorite places in Japan, China, France and other places? Oh, we could, I guess. Yeah, we could.

Ryan · 40:16

We actually already have maps for for all the places and sometimes some very specific lists, and we're happy to share them if anyone who reaches out. Or we can create a separate account just for documenting that. Although I think it really depends on what your goals are for that type of travel, because, you know, if it's very food focused or very tea focused, we can kind of curate the list. Because even in a city like Kyoto, I mean, the list is just enormous.

Ryan · 40:43

And it really depends on what you're looking for. Yeah. And we also have our personal preference too. Yeah, yeah. So we're happy to do it. We've got lots of great recommendations and in various parts of the world, but they're very much catered towards our preferences, which are generally tend towards very local experiences that are extremely good value for money. We both hate overpaying for like a luxury experience and in our experience travelling at our last company where you know, we had a little bit of a larger budget, just frequently wasn't worth it.

Ryan · 41:18

Pretty obsessed with value from a traveler perspective. I think Sam and I have been to close to 15 countries together for either leisure or work over the past seven years and at this point we just hate overpaying for things.

Ryan · 41:32

So yeah, happy to. Yeah, happy to. I'd say the cities that I know relatively well, that would be Paris, NY, Mexico City. Used to travel a lot there. I know Milan decently well, London, a little bit Bangkok. Yeah, Bangkok. Tokyo, Kyoto, a lot of different cities in China. And then the other places I visited, you know, it's more like one or two times.

Ryan · 41:54

So wouldn't have any confidence. But if you end up traveling to any of those places and want some recommendations, we're we're happy to help. One useful framework will be if you are a drinker at all, you know, go straight to the best bar in the city and just talk with the bartender or the locals right next to you and frequently you can get some pretty pretty solid recommendation that you know there are not a tourist attraction. Yeah, or like ridiculously overpriced, but they're usually plugged into the the local scene really well. Same thing with baristas, actually. You talk to baristas like, hey,

Ryan · 42:29

where do you go eat? Where do your friends? What's the good local dish here? Where do you find the best version and sort of get a a sense of the landscape of the option? All right. Next question, What is your vision for building a team?

Ryan · 42:41

That's a great question. Wow, huge question to I'd say. So we at our last company, we were at a sort of a scaled startup. We went from basically three people to 30 in about 2 1/2 years, which felt like really fast grows at the time and learned a lot of very hard won lessons going through that experience.

Ryan · 43:04

I was the second most senior person, Sam was the 3rd in terms of our our tenure at the company. And so we've been through this before and really the wrong person. Can do a lot of damage. Lot of damage, Oh my God. And also just working with people that you enjoy spending time with.

Ryan · 43:20

A life is too short to tolerate people that you just can't stand. Yeah, my I guess my first advice, trust your gut. Feeling someone doesn't like you, you don't feel right. Frequently they turns out to be not right. I think that there there's something to to learn from your first instinct and we we have ran into a lot of situations like that.

Ryan · 43:43

There's a lot of the classic Silicon Valley advice of missionary versus mercenary, and mercenaries are just after money and status for themselves. Missionaries actually believe in the mission and sort of like spread the gospel, so to speak.

Ryan · 43:57

So having someone that's like highly ideologically and quote, UN quote, but not not exactly not quote, UN quote, spiritually aligned with the mission where it's really their work. And they're like actually truly tea people that they deeply care about the mission and the business and making people happy and customers happy, super important to us.

Ryan · 44:17

And people who are very hard workers too and that are willing to do any job. I mean, within the case of our company, there is no job that is too low for anyone to do. So really we can't can't stand pretension. That's actually like our biggest complaint about a lot of the matcha industry just in general, just how much judgment and pretension is floated around And you know, we'd something we really don't want to bring onto the team as we scale.

Zongjun · 44:45

There's a lot of that in the tea world sometimes. Any other non negotiables for vision for building a team Sam? I guess not necessarily non negotiable, but you know, we talked about hiring people with like minded people, people with like minded minds, but we shouldn't really necessarily find people or surround yourself with people with identical thoughts remained a healthy diversity of values.

Zongjun · 45:10

I think it's super important in, you know, making business decision or in making product development decisions. You want this like pushbacks from your partners, from your colleagues. Healthy tension. Yeah, healthy tension. We have that all the time, every day. I think we irritate irritate each other for about 15 minutes every day.

Zongjun · 45:31

But it's usually over some topic that there is no right answer. It just stress tests the ideas. Yeah, I think that's super important. Frequently, I think it's such a dilemma for solo founders is, you know, they don't necessarily have the environment to foster or create such culture.

Zongjun · 45:50

If you're it's hard to escape living in your own head if you don't have a intellectual thought partners to really stressed ideas with the ideas need to breathe. That's actually half the reason why we do this podcast. Like we come up with some ideas, some hypothesis, and we just want to let the idea breathe a little bit and get some feedback from people who message us all the time about what resonated with what they disagree with too.

Zongjun · 46:14

Even Sometimes a Park has really turned into a very healthy argument between Ryan and I, and we sometimes even didn't end up releasing those episodes, which they're pretty interesting to listen. Yeah, maybe we should in.

Zongjun · 46:27

Retrospect, but yeah, like this kind of dynamic, I think it's super healthy and super important. Yeah, To answer this question very literally, we want to remain as small a company as possible for as long as possible. We don't want to outgrow ourselves too fast. So and we really would love to partner with people. We would love to have a large network of people who understand our mill, understand the technology and the company that we're looking to build.

Ryan · 46:54

And we can turn this into an incredibly local movement with many different people all over the world involved, which we have represented in our beta program for our our mill that can mill much afresh anywhere and everywhere.

Zongjun · 47:05

That's right. And we'd love to foster that community as well. We'd like to see ourselves as as collaborative and helpful as possible to as many people as possible. And and to benefit as many consumers as possible as well. And there's no way you can do that on your own. And creating this community is like creating a team. Yeah, we're.

Zongjun · 47:26

All part of this team. The same team for Specialty Matcha Podcast, on the next question I feel a little under qualified to talk about considering we are not a runaway success yet. We've had some experience growing and scaling companies before that have gone on to I think we raised over $10 million at the last company. So decently well scaled from a venture perspective, but does so that's some context.

Ryan · 47:48

But the last question Sam, how do you know what the right person to build a business with and was there a defining moment where you clicked and that you realize that you would make great Co founders? Wow. Very hard question all based on vibes.

Zongjun · 48:04

Live check. I don't know, Ryan. We spent the past more than 10 years with each other doing all sorts of things. It's I don't think there's a single moment of realizing or having that vibe kind of clicked. It's it was, it was many moments. There's many moments.

Ryan · 48:25

So we basically have 3 chapters. The first was at the Tea Institute at Penn State, where I was the second executive director of that research group that it had ever had, and Sam was the 3rd. So we got to know each other super well as I was transitioning that rollover to Sam.

Ryan · 48:41

So that was sort of the first phase and then? Yeah, it was actually a very interesting first phase cuz it was in a academic setting. It's much more quote, UN quote, pure non commercial, non commercial. But it was also complicated enough that we had to we had the chance to see each other under stress, facing different challenges. It's really like executive training boot camp to take over the Tea Institute.

Ryan · 49:09

So for those of you who don't know, there was an organization, it doesn't exist anymore called the Tea Institute at Penn State, which was an interdisciplinary Research Institute dedicated to the study and preservation of all tea ceremony, studying Chinese, Japanese, and Korean tea ceremony.

Ryan · 49:22

And there's an international component where we would invite speakers to do week long lecture cycles to the university. They would typically then invite the students back to their country, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, the mainland China to come and then experience that we get funding for students to go learn at origin. And then there was also a research arm to the to the to the organization as well as a student on tea house. But collectively between Sam and I, we got very good at fundraising for this modernization. Cumulatively, together in about three, 3 1/2 years, we raised about a quarter $1,000,000 from

Ryan · 49:57

the university and from donations and to fund this research and to fund the institute that taught students Kung Fu Cha and Chanoyu, Japanese tea ceremony and the Korean tea ceremony, and was able to support all of these activities, all of this travel and all of these international events that got quite a bit of recognition from an international audience. There's a very difficult thing to hand over. We got to know each other very well and some pretty tense moments in emails because it's pretty sensitive because, you know, when you run this organization, you develop a pretty close personal relationship with all of these contacts and that you're

Ryan · 50:34

basically relying on to learn from. This was back in, you know, 2014, 2015 and 16. Information about tea on the Internet is very limited. You had a handful of bloggers. There's hardly any presence on YouTube. You just couldn't learn unless you knew someone. Or you know the local language that you are trying to extract information.

Ryan · 50:55

From very tricky. So it was a very sensitive thing to hand over those contacts. So it's a lot of trust building who can take over this research group and who can we trust to maintain this network of friendships basically so that these people will keep saying yes to coming to coming back to the university and to keep all this research going to keep all the teaching between students going and making sure that it stays focused and concentrated and mission driven.

Ryan · 51:22

And you have to also have to learn how to fundraise and how to pitch the ideas. And it was almost like running a company, except it was a volunteer organization. It also had its fair share of like, understanding, OK, how do we motivate everyone to swim all in the this direction at once?

Zongjun · 51:37

Honestly, I would say it's probably more difficult in the sense that you're not paying anyone to do it. Yeah, and there's a lot of drama and we both made a lot of mistakes. We lost friends, we met new friends, new friends. And anytime you have a group of, you know, grad students doing, trying to do very ambitious things, and when you don't know yourself what you're doing, there's still a lot of mistakes. And the academic, the faculties were involved too, which adds another layer of politics.

Ryan · 52:06

Various levels of help, helpfulness. Yeah, in retrospect. Or unhelpfulness, Yeah, but that was all fun. And then then one of the first pieces of research that came out of the Tea Institute was using AI to look at sensory data to start making predictions about what people would taste and what people would like.

Ryan · 52:24

That got spun out of the company. And then I got recruited out to go join. I actually dropped out university to go join, actually never finished college. And then we dragged Sam the moment he graduated and we entered that roller coaster and worked together for years. And we got to travel to over a dozen countries at that point to collect consumer preference data all over the world and to have people come taste things and places like Colombia, places like Italy, Germany.

Ryan · 52:54

We did Spain, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand. Vietnam. So it was quite the adventure roller coaster ride and we learned a lot as we scaled that from just a handful of people that we all knew to a thirty person organization probably at its largest. And so a lot of hard learned lessons there and a lot of experience working together.

Zongjun · 53:18

Yeah, there were a lot of very complex systems and problems. Yep, a lot of bounding moments and battle scars, scar tissues and traumas. This actually feels the easiest was founding this company, but we have a pretty good predictive model for how we react in different situations and we have very, very different personalities that I think at face value or not that highly complementary, but it actually works pretty well. And then we communicate.

Zongjun · 53:45

There's not a lot of festering that goes on. So I feel a little bit of imposter syndrome answering this question because we're we're a three person organization that hasn't figured had to be profitable yet. But if we end up being successful, then maybe this is there's some Nuggets of wisdom. I hope so.

Zongjun · 54:02

People who are already successful that talk about this type of thing, I hope so. In terms of our decision making framework, it was ended up being pretty easy. But I don't know, it's also super unique and we are just, I guess so lucky to wow, this sounds like a confession, Ryan, but it's honestly so lucky to have you in the past 10 years.

Ryan · 54:23

And we we had the opportunity to actually go through all of these and still remain, you know, as very close to each other. I think that's something that's you. I would call it pure luck. Yeah, good luck. And we're both very long term oriented and it's also really helps. Yeah, we, we are not short term optimization people and we genuinely like each other.

Ryan · 54:46

End time with you. Still, it's helpful. Anyway, thanks for all the questions and if you enjoyed this, please share it with friend. If you like this format and want us to answer more questions like this in the future, let us know and we'll see you on the next one. See you in the future.