Matcha companies we wish existed

Ryan · 0:07

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

Zongjun · 0:21

And today we're going to try to wrap our minds around like, what are there some white space or missing pieces that we can add to this very fast developing world of matcha that we are seeing today? In the past few years, we've seen like matcha literally just exploded all around the world in different countries. And most of them are honestly, in my opinion, I don't know if you agree with me Ryan, but try to copy what specialty Coffee has done in the past.

Zongjun · 0:53

And basically a lot of these players are following a very similar playbook into like in turning matcha into a specialty product. But what can be done differently? Or what can be done differently in the sense of like what is happening now?

Ryan · 1:09

Because I think that the coffee industry is a fantastic parallel because it feels like they're about like 2 decades ahead of what specialty matcha could be. And there's been a really interesting ecosystem develop. And if you listen to old timer specialty coffee people who have, you know, a presence on the Internet, you have like, really famous influencers like Lance Hendrik and like James Hoffman and then more niche people like Scott Rayo or Matt Perger.

Ryan · 1:37

I shouldn't say more niche necessarily, but they don't have, like, these crazy YouTube followings. Like someone like James Hoffman is clearly tapped into something way larger than what any specialty coffee person could have thought possible given his viewership.

Ryan · 1:53

But then you, you know, you can go deeper down the rabbit hole. And the further down you go down that hole, you find different ecosystems, different voices, different people, different levels of education. And so you have different like players that have emerged and there have there's now a set of conditions or has been a set of conditions within specialty coffee that can lead to new business models.

Ryan · 2:14

Basically, you know, it's not just that you're a cafe operator or that you are a roastery or that you are an equipment distributor. You know, these of course still exists. But now you can have all these other business models which we want to get into.

Ryan · 2:28

And I think the first super interesting one are competitions. We talked about competitions, you know, and coffee and you know it's, but we very, very rarely talk about them through the lens of a business. And of course there's competitions within matcha at the national level in Japan, but there are no international competitions in for brewing, for example.

Zongjun · 2:54

So the people who are actually interacting with the consumer and understanding what they like, something equivalent to like the World Barista Championship doesn't really exist for matcha or for tea in generally. Which would be really interesting to see either adopted into the World Barista Championship or someone creating their own version. Yeah, but I, I will foresee that a difficulty being like who has the authority to set the standards for such competition to exist.

Zongjun · 3:27

Like naturally I think people would try to look into chanoyu, but different schools of chanoyu in the 1st place have different whisking method, different criteria for standards. And then, you know, you get like you get you, you would naturally get into the weeds of like it's like re appropriating like a culture for like contemporary thing like who gets to set what and who gets to say what's than what sounds very difficult and complex.

Ryan · 3:53

Very difficult and complex. One of the things that inspired the topic for this episode. I was listening to an old interview that James Hoffman did. I've been a fan of his since his the very beginning of his YouTube journey. I think I found him in 2018 when I was really into Specialty coffee and when he was back doing his travel vlog when he released his book.

Ryan · 4:11

I remembered that he actually went to China. Yeah, at the time he went to Changsha, where where your ancestry is from it. Was pretty incredible. Pretty weird thing for someone to do, I don't know, Six years ago? And at that time there must be like, I don't know, 10 specialty cafes in Shanghai.

Ryan · 4:32

Let alone a Tier 2 city. Most people never heard about China. It's super strange but very cool. Very cool. And he was talking about his experience. So for those of you that don't know, James Hoffman was the World Barista champion. Please forgive me.

Ryan · 4:48

It's like 2007 or 2008, something like that. He was a World Barista. He was a really early World Barista Championship winner and he was doing some retrospection and giving some thoughts on how the competition has evolved and how it started and actually have a really good quote from him.

Ryan · 5:06

And it goes something like the World Barista Championship was designed to give legitimacy to what was a very niche movement at the time. And that specialty coffee was really actually in its infancy and it wasn't perfect and it's still not perfect. I mean, if you you can watch you you they live. I think they live stream it if at the very least they record it. No, I think they they live stream it because it was a freshman in college.

Ryan · 5:31

Someone organized a viewing party for the World Barista Championship. Not. Really. Wow. It was like, really? I guess across the chasm like moment. Yeah, almost. Yeah. But being on the Internet, yeah, we watched it and it's a little absurd.

Ryan · 5:47

Like you're watching someone and there's like 3 people with clipboards examining every move. Barbaristas doing like if you drop a coffee ground, if you forgot to clean this thing up, if you weighed it properly, like all the techniques are being judged and it is a little absurd, but at the end, it actually has brought the specialty coffee movement a lot of legitimacy. A lot of tools have come out of that competition. A lot of trends have come out of that competition. The single most, what we would say probably now is the most important coffee grinder in the world. EK43.

Ryan · 6:25

Reason it became popular was because Scott Rayo discovered it was originally a spice grinder. I discovered that it made had a really good particle size distribution for coffee. Who is friends with a guy named Matt Perger at the time, who also is a former world barista champion and now runs the fantastic blog Barista Hustle. And I've had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times over the years at the Specialty Coffee Association back at my last job.

Ryan · 6:49

And he it was considered controversial to time that you would use this type of grinder in these competitions to make an espresso. And he just blew the competition out of the water. And overnight the EK43 became the new gold standard. It kind of erased a bunch of old assumptions about what was good proved Oh no, like actually this thing, this new method of of of grinding with this new grinder actually can yield very high quality results and shifted the entire equipment industry from within coffee.

Zongjun · 7:25

Interesting so the participants at the time, they can use their own equipment to grind the coffee beans that they. Bring into and they select the coffee and now the coffee selection is really the crazy part too. Just, you know, they will work very closely with different farmers who are also kind of innovating because you don't want to do things that are last year.

Ryan · 7:48

It creates an incentive cycle to do interesting things, whether or not it's re mineralizing your water, whether or not it's another big innovation that came out of this is you can freeze a gigantic block of metal and you can put it underneath the porta filter. So when you're pulling an espresso, the hot espresso goes directly down onto this large cold metal block and it instantly drops the temperature.

Ryan · 8:16

The ice because it would dilute the. Coffee, it will dilute the coffee, but also it spends less time hot, so there's supposedly more aromatic and volatile preservation, so you have less. So like that was a technique that was invented. So this would be really cool for our industry to have and it probably will always kind of be a joke in the same way that the world Bristol, I mean, the World Bristol Championship winning it is no joke.

Ryan · 8:42

But like, it's still a little absurd. And a lot of people in the coffee industry, like will say, yeah, it's imperfect. But it's like kind of like, you know, the the the video that you know, when when you're talking about crossing the chasm, like people always reference to is like these two people dancing like in a very, you know, chilled metal and people start watching these two people doing this ridiculous dance and then it later just turns into a big party. Like this is something I think the specialty matcha community much needed.

Ryan · 9:13

And it would mint, I don't want to call them influencers, but like leaders, thought leaders, it mints thought leaders and it gives them a platform to then do something with it. James Hoffman ended up writing a book and starting and be having this crazy YouTube career. Matt Perger is now running Barista Hustle, which is the number one like barista education platform, if you don't count the SCA, and making his own equipment. Like it gives it platforms people in a way that gives them legitimacy.

Ryan · 9:42

And it has created this ecosystem and it goes down to farmers, it goes down at the equipment level and affects what drinks are being put on the menu, right? I could totally see this working for Macho where people are promoting new cultivars, where people are doing new brewing methods. And biggest barrier one is probably chanoyu, because you know, Chanoyu is the old and historic and quote UN quote right and traditional and authentic way of preparing matcha, which leaves very little room to innovate forward. And to our our tea friends who listen to the podcast. I something that I always like to joke about is that there is no Kong Fu in Chanoyu.

Zongjun · 10:21

And to break that down a little bit, Kong Fu Cha, it's Chinese tea ceremony, but Kung Fu translates a skill or the skillful way of making tea. And it's about just developing intuition through your senses of understanding, cause and effect relationships that create better or worse tea.

Zongjun · 10:39

So, you know, using a Yixin teapot versus a porcelain Gai, one really can drastically change the taste of the tea or the water temperature obviously has a huge impact on the tea and how long you let it steep, what the dosage is.

Zongjun · 10:51

If you're using a compressed tea like pour, whether or not you pick it apart or leave it in a big clump drastically changes the amount of surface area exposed or flavor being extracted. And then charger, there's some like really advanced technique to sort of the hometown of this, this idea of being a skillful, skillful Brewer.

Zongjun · 11:11

They'll take these beautiful oolong leaves and crush it in their hands. And there's different like crushing ratios with a crush like 30%, they'll put it in the corner of the teapot and layer in the other leaves so that dust in that powder. But what they're really now controlling for is surface area and for the amount that's being extracted all at once. And at the same time lit up a cigarette smoked bigly. And squatting on the ground, fanning the flames of their little charcoal stealth.

Zongjun · 11:37

Quite a scene. Quite a scene. So you know, Chinese tea practitioners spend an unusual amount of time practicing this Kung Fu and the skill and experimenting is very and it's talked about too. There's a pretty rich flavor vocabulary for expressing what you're experiencing. So your senses and for those of you that have studied Chana Yu either Mota Senke, ODA Senke and other school of Chana Yu. I am pretty sure I have never heard any discussion about how the brewing changes the taste of the tea other than maybe don't use boiling water.

Zongjun · 12:14

Sometimes in Urasanka you can be criticized, or excuse me, in the Motasanka you can be criticized for whisking too heavily, but never once are you given an explanation. Urasanka is that way Sir. So, but, but you know, it's not the type of education where you're given the first principles or the foundations to understand how you can express flavor through preparation. And when we interviewed Jeb from MTCHA few months ago, hearing him talk about, you know, whisking time and duration and how that impacts like the extraction and how some of the wasting times are into 90 seconds to extract what is like what the least extractable

Zongjun · 13:02

parts. There's a lot of flavor that are then locked up in there. And they're totally optimizing around what they want to highlight in that brewing. It's not just a set recipe or a set ratio. So that is one really big structural barrier because everyone goes to China U practitioners as the experts, but they know nothing about the cause and effect relationships in, you know, changing brewing parameters and the outcome really very close to nothing. Like maybe there's some hobbyists that have experimented with it on their own, but it is really a subject that falls outside of China.

Zongjun · 13:38

Yu. Although we are seeing some reason, I would say innovations within the channel, Yu schools, for example, the yeah motto of Edel Adelson K. For fun I guess. But I think it's a sign, it's a statement that they are embracing, you know, the contemporary culture. That's true.

Zongjun · 13:57

We were talking with someone in Yamai, the traditional old blend house there, and he was like, I just saw an Instagram story of the Iamoto of Edo Sanke making usucha with sparkling water. This was very, very nice. Very, very nice.

Zongjun · 14:13

And I mean, like, I think moving forward, we shouldn't necessarily think or trying to exclude channel you out of this conversation. Like you'll be actually very cool. I think that we can somehow incorporate them into the party as well.

Zongjun · 14:27

And I think there are people with innovations or innovative mindset that exist in that realm. Just need to talk to them. No doubt. And the way, I mean, there's a lot of like thinking that has to be done about the way a competition like this would be structured. But ultimately it would be a business. Like, you'd have to have sponsors, it would have to be an event, You'd have to either have a prize large enough or people compensated enough to fly from all over the world to participate.

Zongjun · 14:55

That structure already exists. Who are baristas? In the in the channel your world, right? Like the whole Yamoto endorsement situation. Indeed. But you know, having this be international, outside the scope of China, you would be, you know, quite a bit of work, but this type of business could exist in the future. It's a mixture of, I guess, ultimately advertising and events and a lot of organization, but we'd love to see some equivalent to that and something we wish. Existed.

Ryan · 15:22

Very true. Very true. Another one that's not really a company necessarily, but definitely a career that I would like to see is the equivalent to what in coffee you would call as a green buyer. So like green buyers in coffee, their job is to do quality control in the coffee, select the coffee lots, work with either importers or producers or distributors, depending on where they're buying the green or unroasted coffee from and bringing it in as things that will be used as fund components, things that are kept as single origin.

Ryan · 15:56

And their job is to basically handle all of that operational complexity of buying, of contracting, of making sure it's financed and making sure that the sample that you were sent is the same as like these 50 sacks of coffee that just arrived.

Zongjun · 16:11

Is that the same? And it's quite a bit of work. It's a very important job. Sounds much like, you know, chashi nowadays. close. Yeah, actually, it is what it is. But what we have not been seeing is such some person exists outside of Japan in the international level, which is, you know, it's for chashi that they're basically, you know, tea blenders in Japan.

Zongjun · 16:35

That that that usually is the hat of the tea company in different region, or at least holds a very important role in the tea company because they need to make decisions for buying wood in the auction by also purchasing how much or like how much quantity and also how much money they should be bidding. Which we have heard some what used to be very successful chashi are not having much luck in recent days in the auction because their mental model of price has been a little bit outdated because of this whole explosion in matcha. But but yeah, chashi really holds a lot of these functions in in the world of matcha.

Zongjun · 17:17

But I don't think there's a single non Japanese chashi. We've heard that there is one guy who's trying to become the first non Japanese chashi. Yeah, David from Tezumi mentioned he had a friend who's an American that was interested in doing it. Yeah, but.

Zongjun · 17:34

That's the only one only circumstance I have heard of it is you need the skill set of a chashi. But having this like at like these different matcha companies in the same way that roasteries do like I know if we reach a certain size, we absolutely need a green buyer.

Zongjun · 17:51

Like if we reach like, like, you know, where we're, you know, moving in the metric tons of matcha and we need to make a bunch of interesting decisions like that is a full time job. Yeah, yeah. But one other obstacle is that all of these auctions in Japan are Japanese participants only almost. Yep.

Zongjun · 18:10

So we it's actually touching a very systematic and fundamental inertia or how do you call that structural barrier? Structural barrier of the current, you know, system that exists largely just in Japan right now. Although, you know, I would envision like such precision being much easier to to achieve in places like China.

Zongjun · 18:34

Oh yeah. There's no such thing as regional auctions and Chinese only auctions here. The Chinese markets much more practical, thank thankfully. But you know, it's interesting the way that this works and I think the reason that a green buyer hasn't existed up until this point. And you can eventually meet a chashi and ask for some level of customization and quality guarantees. And you know, a lot of these chashi have relationship with other ones.

Zongjun · 19:00

And there's some degree of inter-chashi intercompany trading for sure going on outside of the auction system. So there's some, you know, some movement of product domestically within Japan, but there's very little visibility into where it came from, how much it was originally.

Zongjun · 19:16

You have no idea what people's markup are. So it's really very gated and actually for a agricultural standpoint for a country's economy, it's really good that it's a seller's market. Because if you look at the opposite, the idea of having like Q graders and, and green buyers and coffee and they have the equivalent in chocolate.

Ryan · 19:40

My girlfriend started her career in, in chocolate and quality control and the chocolate fermentation and, and doing sensory analysis. So I'm a bit familiar with that world as well. Is that you're primarily working with the world's poorest countries.

Ryan · 19:57

It is a buyer's market when you're working in coffee for for the most part. I mean, unless you're trying to source something like Leah Esperelda, Panama geisha or something that just has like insane demand or like think a Debra or like all of these really, really, really famous names, right? Like you're working in poor countries where? You know, the average income is extremely low and there's which comes with its own complexities too, of making sure it's, you know, being processed in an approved facility and that has the right testing and the right papers for export. It's very much post colonial

Ryan · 20:37

structures that just don't exist the same way in Japanese tea, right? The reality of Japanese tea is that almost everyone in the industry is properly educated. They all have smartphones and they drive nice cars. Like it's very first world agriculture.

Ryan · 20:54

And that's a great thing when you compare it to these other industry. A artifact of that, a second hand effect of that is that like it hasn't yielded the necessity of a green buyer yet. I'm hoping as much as becomes more international in places like Korea, China, Vietnam, Northern Thailand, that the role of a green buyer slash chashi type person and who's doing purchasing for people who are doing their own blending, milling or later stage refining and processing of tencha into matcha can have access to those systems. But I think that's part of the reason why this just doesn't exist yet, because it hasn't

Ryan · 21:35

needed to. Yep, very true. But as we move into the future, getting closer to the product and the production and to the agriculture will necessitate the need of someone who is taking care of all of them. So I hope the the Japanese tea ecosystem can open up a little bit because ultimately, I mean, Japan is still a very male dominated country, especially in an industry like tea.

Ryan · 22:03

And as I've said many times in this podcast, the majority of flavor and quality decisions and price decisions are being made by old Japanese men, not exclusively, but most of the control and the volume is heavily controlled by old men, old Japanese men who don't know what the preferences are of people in all of the corners of the world.

Ryan · 22:22

And it's much better off if a little more power is given to people that's that are closer to the consumer. And a great example of this is that, you know, we've heard a lot of stories too of, of farmers that are locked into wholesale relationships. They can't even go to auction.

Ryan · 22:42

This is true for a lot of Uji matcha farmers actually, where they have these ancient relationships where they have to commit way north of 50% of their volume to these large blend houses that we all know. And it turns out that last year some hand-picked tencha from Uji—like Uji itself—was selling for less than Wazuka machine-cut tencha.

Ryan · 23:08

So like that is a crazy statement and then you ask why? Well it it's the equivalent of not being paid because you're working for your grandfather who's mind is still in 1990s thinking that $5.00 an hour is an appropriate wage to be doing whatever it is that you were hired to do.

Ryan · 23:31

Right. The the price that like those wholesale companies give those Uji farmers is way lower than market price. In the same way that you're working for your clueless uncle or your clueless grandfather that believe that $5 like $5.00 an hour is an appropriate wage when it's not. Well, in reality, I think they're just very trapped by this contract system.

Zongjun · 23:56

Well, there's no contracts. That makes it even more fuzzy. It seems like this whole system, at least from the people we've talked to, lives in a whole lot of ambiguity. You have to sell and give that volume to the wholesaler, otherwise they will never buy from you again.

Zongjun · 24:11

And that is your biggest customer and has been your biggest customer for maybe 200 years. Like that's a scary relationship to exit. Yeah. Like they basically people exchanged security over, you know, capital gain for the short term and for them that there actually lies 2 difficulties, right? Like 1, there's no clear alternative. Well, ultimately they are being trapped by this, you know, legacy purchasing history with all these blend houses, which has worked historically, right?

Zongjun · 24:45

Like back in the days matcha was not such a popular thing. Like all of these farmers can only survive because, you know, there were stable buyers coming from these large blend houses. And for them that, you know, it's, it's quite a scary thing to cut off these legacy relationship with the blend houses because then they will be on their own voluntarily or involuntarily. It's it's interesting, actually, I see a lot of parallel between, you know, this situation with some other tea production regions too, which shares kind of a similar dynamic. So I was just in Laos, northern Laos, which is bordering Chinese Yunnan province, which is a very

Zongjun · 25:24

large tea production region nowadays. And it's considered the origin of tea actually by many. But historically, Laotian tea farmers are living in such a comfortable stage because buyers will just come into Laos from China to procure whatever tea they can get their hands to, and they would funnel that back to Yunnan and gets processed as Chinese pu-erh. Post CNNP, though, right?

Zongjun · 25:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 3-4 decades. Yeah, yeah, 3-4 decades post CNNP, but they will get processed. Actually, that part is a little vague too, because at a time the border was not fixed and there were buyers going, you know, between these villages all the time. Actually the border was only being so fixed and closed after COVID and before then.

Zongjun · 26:13

Like a lot of these people can just travel freely between the two countries in the. Mountains tea cakes could have. Could have Laotian tea It's it's very possible. But but, but yeah, so like people really enjoyed this kind of dynamic for a long time. And so was tea farmers in Vietnam in order these like famous tea regions and they have like procurement relationship with all these big, big brands and big tea manufacturers as well.

Zongjun · 26:43

But recently the the economy has not been so good in China. So the domestic consumption of pu-erh has decreased drastically. And a lot of these tea farmers have lost their own capability to sell their own tea, which they can now only relying on the procurement from these large brands.

Zongjun · 27:01

A lot of these Vietnan farmers are surviving at the moment because these larger brands are still buying tea from them, but these Laotian Tea Farm. They got they got shafted. They got shafted. These Laotian farmers are in big trouble. They got totally cut off from the system that the over demand system before.

Zongjun · 27:23

So there's there is wisdom for you know Uji farmers to stayed in this current system because it is a security in a difficult time. And there's an even more interesting parallels. You know, part of the reason that the pu-erh cycle had boomed so much in the past 15 years is there's something called the pu-erh bubble.

Zongjun · 27:45

In 2000 and seven, 2008, what happened was a bunch of Chinese people became convinced that pu-erh was a good investment. Pu-erh is a type of tea that can age. And so there was so much material produced that has never been consumed. People were buying it.

Zongjun · 28:04

They were all these stories of people buying these cakes, aging them and then it became an investment. So a ton was produced and give away as gifts. A ton was produced to sit around an age. A lot of uneducated buyers entered the market, a lot of quote UN quote stupid money creating this insane demand, which turned into a bubble and which then kind of popped.

Zongjun · 28:26

And now domestic consumption is still falling for this type of tea within China. So in those circumstances like this really good forest, ancient forest, ancient tree tea from Laos, like was going to that top of the market, but now it's all fallen out. Yeah, and and there's even more similarities to the current Uji situation because the Laotian tea at the time was so conveniently borrowing the fame of pu-erh and Yunnan tea and all of those sub regions that's bordering those villages in Laos that just that they're just conveniently caught themselves the Chinese equivalent of that.

Zongjun · 29:04

But now after them being cut off, they cannot they can no longer use those name but their own credibility hasn't been set up even though like it is pretty similar in quality and it's very similar to what's going on between Wazuka and Uji.

Zongjun · 29:20

Yeah, that's an interesting parallel. Imagine Wazuka didn't have a famous name and they had these very temporary wholesale relationships that vanished overnight. Or all of these sub regions nearby Uji. Imagine like Uji really gets like AOC certificate in the future and becomes like has to be Uji. Like what are all these other regions going to do? Like Like no one has heard of Mie, like in the middle of somewhere Pennsylvania probably.

Ryan · 29:50

But like they have maybe at the time heard of Uji, but they cannot use the name Uji anymore. So that like that it will be a big trouble for these regions. Something that Sam just alluded to. Mie is a different prefecture, but under the Uji Matcha trademark. In Japan you can use 100% MIE grown leaves so long as they're processed in Kyoto.

Ryan · 30:15

Not Uji in Kyoto prefecture. Anywhere in the prefecture you can call it Uji. I mean, you have roughly 1500 tons of tea that are riding on the name Uji or that theoretically can ride on the name Uji. Yeah. So if it does get GI.

Ryan · 30:35

Yeah. What are all of these other places going to do? Like, we were in northern Kyoto last year in Fukuchiyama. Who's ever heard of Fukuchiyama as a tea origin? Even people in Japan were like, why did you go there? Like it produces like decent tea, but it's not like, you know, special cultivars, they're using synthetic fertilizer. Like they're producing fantastic quote UN quote ceremonial grade tea that would probably work great in a Cafe, right? Like it's high quality tea from that perspective, but it's actually pretty mediocre tea if you're putting it next to a Honzu Asahi from Shirakawa.

Zongjun · 31:14

So you have a lot of not only from this region, but from a lot of other places that are making tea in a similar stock methods, much more industrial agriculture, not interesting cultivars, synthetic fertilizer, and you have a bunch of mediocre matcha writing a the Uji matcha name.

Zongjun · 31:33

And if they get GI status, that This is why Uji will never have a GI status. I mean, there's 4000 metric tons of matcha produced in Japan approximately right now. And what is that? That's over 1/3 can legally ride the name Uji, which is a crazy statement considering Uji is a tiny tiny tiny tiny town. It's hard to describe how tiny Uji is. There are 35 active farming families in Uji, and having about a third of your country's production being able to ride that name would be an economic crisis as what's happening. Actually, the Laotian example is pretty interesting. Yeah.

Zongjun · 32:11

And also like all of these other regions, I mean like they're, they're basically a extension of the Uji system or a extension of the Uji style tea. Like they're basically commodity supplier for a style of tea that gets made in the very specific region in Japan. Whereas these, all these other places have their own tana, have their own climate, have their own distinctive tea growing environment and cultivation environment and probably accessibility to different sets of machineries or fertilizers. The the, the potential diversity of the flavor space of Matcha can be huge.

Zongjun · 32:49

Well, now all of these places are riding the boat of Uji and just becoming and very comfortably becoming a supplier of Uji, which is a very, very unique, you know, tea making culture and the specific style of making tea that has been developed historically in this very little town outside of Kyoto. Actually bringing this back full circle, because I was wondering how we were going to do this back to our desire to have a green buyer, a tencha buyer.

Zongjun · 33:18

What we're going to call green buyer in Matcha is that it can help make the other regions famous. There is a whole new market that literally has appeared overnight in the last like say 5 to 10 years. It's interested in single origin products all being like we have 1/3 of the matcha produced in Japan can be called Uji matcha. It's not single origin.

Zongjun · 33:41

It is. If you're calling it single origin, it is a lie. It is. There's no objective treatment. You can call Uji style, that would be correct statement, but it is not single origin. It does not come from Uji. And what's not grown there, that's which is what everyone understands when you call it something like that, is that these buyers can go.

Zongjun · 34:03

The system is locked. If you want to find Joyo tea, you want to find Wazuka tea or Ujitawara. Ujitawara and Wazuka are becoming it's a little bit easier to find farmers that work directly. But in a lot of these other regions that people have never heard of or less heard of, like E day.

Zongjun · 34:23

E day is a little more obscure. Like I am currently not aware of anyone selling single origin E day matcha, right, that could have a huge market like these green buyers, these tencha buyers coming in. If they can get into the system, they can start pulling some of this volume out and making a name for these other places who could really benefit and help build the future that we would like to see.

Zongjun · 34:50

Because you literally just can't get your hands on the material controlled in this wholesale relationship system, this auction system, this chashi system, which has its merits, as we've stated, but it also is holding back what could be a very interesting future. Indeed, indeed.

Ryan · 35:10

Wow, that was an interesting tangent. This was deeper than I thought we would go considering we only got the two professions. Wow. It's a complicated situation. We're trying to unwrapped and we are touching a lot of I mean like we have seen tea being made and being so gold in a lot of different regions so differently. It's actually very interesting like how the attitude of people treating tea as a tea plant, cultivating them and turning them into a finished product by the end of the day. And how do they frame this tea as part of as part of either lifestyle, either just a business or either a very intertwined component of a very

Ryan · 35:54

sophisticated culture? It's just so interesting, like the attitude and the perception of tea across different culture. And I think a lot of these people doing things so differently can really benefit from learning from each other.

Ryan · 36:12

Well, when we were at Basa Nakamura, it was really interesting talking to them because they're so aware He's processed tea in Taiwan, making Taiwanese high mountain along with the producer there, Kundan, and the Thai matcha connections that he has in Chiang Rai. It's such a more rich experience when you can, you know, leverage what's going on in other parts of the tea. World and just have the open mind about what's being done in other places.

Ryan · 36:43

It has honestly been very my my, my perception perception and my attitude towards a lot of these practices has, has, has changed so much in the past few years. It used to be was like we we have different teachers or experts in different regions of different countries, right. You and I have been to a few of these trips back in the teen institute era and you know, also as a hobbyist later, I've been following different tea makers, tea farmers, or even professional tea drinkers into different areas in the world. And everyone talks about their own way of making tea or quote UN quote the correct way of

Ryan · 37:23

making tea. But after hearing so many stories, you just realized that there isn't really a correct way of making tea. Tea is such a versatile thing that is so adaptive to all kinds of usage scenarios. And by the end of the day, it's just a different flavor.

Ryan · 37:41

There's no right or wrong flavor. It's just a different flavor whether or not you like it. And it's so interesting like like always had this, you know, very negative view towards a lot of tea farming practices in Japan in the very early days, the treatment of tea bushes, the usage of fertilizer and pesticides and all of these things. But you know, like by the end of the day, it's part of the recipe of making a version of tea, a flavor profile of tea. And if you look into, you know, how how tea is being made in China and there are so many different style too. And people are like trying to call each other out, but these are all a different version of

Ryan · 38:28

making tea. And when even when you're talking about, you know, like Chinese matcha, Chinese matcha, like, I cannot forget that, you know, our, our friend in Baisa Nakamura brought out this matcha and his eyes were lit up and he just had this big smile on his face and like, try, try this Chinese matcha. It's delicious.

Ryan · 38:51

Like that was my first time hearing a Japanese tea person telling me that sentence. And. Very rare. Very rare and it was actually it was good. It tastes like white chocolate and with some very interesting roasted notes.

Ryan · 39:05

It's a very distinct flavor profile and was not bad. It was actually pretty good and, and just the fact that, you know, people have such an open minded, you know, perception towards tea and towards how tea gets made, I think it's just super important and super fascinating and super fun.

Ryan · 39:24

The least thing I want to do by the end of the day is drinking a weird tasting cup of tea and hearing like this uncle grandpa. Just like ranting about other people's tea and complimenting himself of making the best tea in the region.

Zongjun · 39:39

That's my reflection. You see that everywhere, but it does feel a little concentrated in Japan with some of these people with some very armchair ideas about what's right and. Wrong. And in China too. It's honestly the same thing, speaking different languages.

Ryan · 39:55

They're the same people. All right. So that's one and two. So preparation, competition, something. Equivalent to the World Barista Championship and Green Buyer. Another one that I had is something we need a Mr. Coffee pot.

Ryan · 40:09

The Mr. Coffee pot, it was such a powerful tool for households in the US, but households all over the world for people who need a very simple way to prepare something without thinking about it, that's semi automated, that's cheap and gives you a decent result. What is Mr. Coffee Pot?

Ryan · 40:29

It is like the world's cheapest drip Brewer is, you know, imagine like a hotel coffee maker. There's a reservoir for water, there's a little pump, a heating element and drips it over the cone coffee, a cone of coffee and outcomes the coffee it's. Interesting.

Zongjun · 40:47

Actually, I saw some company trying to do that in China last year and they're trying to seal Matcha into kind of like a Nespresso. Capsule. Oh, that's right. But what I have heard, I actually haven't personally try, but I've heard that the product is very bad. OK, they taste very bad and I think that's maybe. They just need.

Zongjun · 41:07

Better matcha, But I think that's one obstacle for, you know, matcha. And when we compare it to coffee, is that like that much really tastes bad? Yeah, That's like gift. That coffee has is coffee. Is like it's still like acceptable most of the time.

Ryan · 41:23

I just like the taste of quote bad coffee like I have no problem drinking like instant coffee, Nescafe or even just some like really old like pre ground over roasted stuff. Like in the right context, like it still has some pleasant aroma. Like you can find the flaws if you want to real, but like bad coffee still tastes pretty good.

Ryan · 41:49

Yeah, like it still tastes like coffee. And smells like coffee. But like like random can of bad matcha that's old and brown, just horrid. That fish or like or in plastic some horrible smell it's. It's very, it's unpleasant, but I know, I think, and you know, you could substitute the words Mr. Coffee pot for Nespresso or for Keurig any like very easy way.

Ryan · 42:16

And you could argue that the Cuzen, you know, might be the closest thing. And there's some companies now that are making matcha Nespresso pods. I mean, there is such a thing as instant matcha. I've never had anything that was prepared, you know, at the moment that really tasted very good.

Ryan · 42:31

And the Cuzen is probably the top of that list. That's the combination of convenience and deliciousness. But it'd be really cool if I mean, even the frother stick, I guess is the closest thing that the industry has to like kind of make it a little easier on someone.

Ryan · 42:47

But I think there's a lot of room in the matcha equipment space where someone can develop something where it's push button, put in my own matcha and make it taste good. We're put in my own tencha and there's some milling and mixing going on and make it taste good. At the end of the day, I think it's very sad that like this all has to just be so complicated for like people to brew every day.

Ryan · 43:13

And that, you know, it's great if it's your morning ritual, but there are so many people who it's just not, it doesn't fit in within the context of their life. They don't want to think about it. If you think about the number of people who buy Nespresso machines or that buy even like this, like the new fellow equipment that's like ultra automated, it just produces something good and it's like 1 less thing to think about every morning. And there's a huge market of people that wants their match a moment every morning, but there's an even larger group of people that don't want that.

Ryan · 43:49

And it's context specific. I hate doing it 80% of the time. I don't want my matcha MO. That must be crazy for probably some people to hear considering the profession that we are in. I don't enjoy making much. 80% of the time I don't.

Ryan · 44:07

It's a pain. It's a pain if you don't have access to a temperature controlled kettle. It's a pain to hydrate the chasen, to pain to clean everything afterwards. It's great in the right mind, in the right context. It's not great every day and one of the reasons why we made it made our first product, the Obsidian unidirectional matcha whisking bowl is to kind of just take one less thing off someone's plate who's making it and where you don't have to have the perfect zigzag technique and anti splash feature. And you know, at the time it was less common to see a bowl with a spout, believe it or not.

Ryan · 44:41

Actually, when we first made that product, I kind of saw that as AI mean they existed. But you know, something that was heavily advertised as form and function for matcha whisking, it felt a little bit more of a novelty than it is now.

Ryan · 44:55

Yeah, indeed. But I think the the ecosystem for this equipment is is really could be really cool. Yeah, and we are solving them 1 by 1. Another company that I think would do so well and this is really more of a passion project is an aged matcha or an aged tencha library of someone. There have been a couple initiatives in coffee. If you go to any of the high end coffee places in like Paris, for example, like Substance or Motors Coffee, they have entire sections in the menu where they sell 20 to $25 a coffees. And they're all pre portioned and zip locked or like vacuum sealed in a tiny bag in very

Ryan · 45:40

cold freezer. And it kind of just preserves it there and it's prepared to order. And you're able to have this huge library of different copies, different harvests that are have become relatively stable because they're kept at such low temperatures.

Ryan · 45:55

And we've heard that like 5 year old or 10 year old tencha, when kept at low temperatures, actually has some pretty like it preserves it pretty well. And we learned from Ian Chun who is an early guest on the podcast that amino acids degrade slower than catechins.

Ryan · 46:14

So you actually get a catechin and amino acid rebalance and catechins are bitter and astringent and those will lower very slowly over time. And the amino acids, which are sweet and savory and umami stay preserved. So you get a rebalancing effect with the aging of this tencha.

Ryan · 46:31

It just be like, this is my like vision for like the top of the mountain. The pinnacle matcha experience would be someone that has the ability to mill fresh small quantities of tencha that are kept in storage and you just build up this reference library to have the same thing as like a deep wine cellar. Like when wine lovers go to a three Michelin star restaurant, you expect depth and breadth in a cellar of different things and having that same thing be about it doesn't even need to be particularly expensive.

Ryan · 47:06

I mean, the most expensive tencha that you can buy if you're buying wholesale, you know, the competition grade stuff is maybe 4 or $5000 a kilo, right? And that's a kilo. And when you're like calculating that per serving, actually that's easy enough to do right now, at least the wholesale rates if you're buying something $5000. That's five, $5 a grand, $10.

Ryan · 47:31

It's $10. $10.00 for a serving. For like the best matcha in the world, that is crazy. Per serving matcha is like orders of magnitude cheaper per serving than some of the finest wine in the world for example. That's criminal almost that it can be that cheap and any consumers listening, you can now backtrack your the margin that people put on competition grade tea when they sell it and some of it is higher than 5000 kilos, $5000 per kilo, but. Well, the good news is you can indeed age tencha. Take notes.

Ryan · 48:14

Renan Lao ban. You can age tencha. Oh no. Yeah. So that's that. That is a business that I would love to see at the high end of the market. And you know, who knows, maybe we'll start doing this as well when we have more money to invest after we sell a lot of these mills. It's something that we would personally like to see. Let's go buy some fridges.

Zongjun · 48:34

Freezers, deep freezers. Freezers. Freezers. All right, Sam, wanna do one last one and we'll wrap it up. Well, the last one will be companies that look and feel like equivalents of Onyx or Sey Coffee or Small Batch or all of these like coffee Roasters or even like kind of like a coffee Cultural Center, like Counter Culture that's doing a lot of value add than just not just making coffee or serving coffee.

Zongjun · 49:04

Like there are a lot of these value add that all of these suppliers that are adding into the sphere of coffee culture. And we really want to see that to happen for Matcha as well. Yeah. And we're starting to see that now, you know, a lot of. Yeah.

Zongjun · 49:20

Bit by bit. You could, you could argue that and I, I'm hesitant to give examples because I feel like I'm going to leave people out. But like 2 very famous in the examples in the US might be someone like a Kettle or an Ooika where, you know, they're milling fresh, they're highlighting farmers, they're doing educational workshops, right? Like it becomes this like sort of center of gravity in a commercial setting.

Zongjun · 49:45

And the commercial setting is so important because that's how it becomes sustainable and how getting commercial access to things like that's great. We can talk about Narino all day and what an incredible cultivar it is, but until you taste it, it's just something you've heard about.

Zongjun · 50:00

It's just words. Like if you have a place to do it and people to teach you who know how to prepare it and have the stuff and have the theory and sell you the stuff, like then. Becomes an experience. And this is really, I, I would say the best way to grow the pie larger because, you know, that's something that people can very passionately talk about to their friends or to their family members or to their kids or to their parents.

Zongjun · 50:26

And this will really become big instead of, you know, just a few real videos or some words on a book or article telling you how amazing a tea is or how amazing a cultivar is. And one of the things that we're so grateful for is that all of our beta program members who've pre bought one of our mills have that community. They are these type of matcha companies in the equivalence of an Onyx coffee or a Sey Coffee or Small Batch from Australia. They're like they're all local and so tapped in to the communities and what's going on and doing education and sourcing interesting things.

Zongjun · 51:06

And we're just so honored to be a part of what they're doing by us, like bringing in the mill. And we're so excited to learn from everyone when we travel to all of those places to do or to half of those places to do these implementations in the US and other countries in Asia and in Europe, part of the implementation list. And we're so excited to see how that is getting expressed in this new culture that is being formed in these places. So, you know, companies that look and feel like these famous coffee company equivalents, we're in the really early innings of it and it's just blossoming into exactly what this the name of this podcast

Zongjun · 51:49

is. It's blossoming into this specialty matcha movement, which is I think, a perfect place to end. Yes, indeed. So thank you so much for listening and if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing with a friend and let us know which Matcha companies you would like to see exist in the world.

Ryan · 52:05

We'd love to know. Feel free to drop a comment or give us a DM and very curious to hear like how you would like to see the future of Matcha be written. Awesome. Thank you in the future. Thanks so much. Bye bye.