Opinion: Where is all the perspective?

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my co-founder Zongjun, who also goes by Sam. Hello. Hello. And we're the co-founders of Sanko. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories and interview the experts. And today's episode is where is all the perspective. This isn't necessarily where we have a fully fledged solution that we're here to present.

Ryan · 0:28

We actually just started talking about this casually and we were like, actually, this probably could be a whole podcast episode. And what we're trying to decipher is why a lot of the new matcha companies look and feel the same. Everyone has their own color palette, their own aesthetic choices.

Ryan · 0:45

But when you really look at modern contemporary matcha marketing, there is remarkably little unique perspective. Everyone is using the same philosophies. Everyone is using very similar set of aesthetics from from from mostly from tea ceremony or for some Japanese motifs.

Ryan · 1:05

And it's just not quite like what we see in other industries. Yeah, I think the problem, it's a little more fundamental in the way that they probably get their matcha from the same supplier too, I guess the same. And it's just getting repackaged. So Sam, there's something I didn't mention to you, but so the other day I was listening to a podcast with a woman named Andrea Allen was being interviewed. Her Cafe in Bentonville, AR, Onyx Coffee Labs and her grandma, home of Walmart headquartered the Walmart's global headquarters, which is one of the founders of Onyx Coffee and their cafe in Bentonville, AR was recently named the best cafe in the

Ryan · 1:44

world. And she's being interviewed by the two hosts on a wonderful coffee podcast called It's Just Coffee. Great podcast, highly recommended. Those guys have so much energy. I really would love to invite them on our podcast.

Ryan · 1:57

They also hate matcha. It's actually like every single time they talk about matcha, it is like, I just anyone want this? It's super earthy, It's disgusting, we have to make it. But what do people even see in it? Like I'm sure they're experts in it, but really this is just earthy pond water.

Ryan · 2:19

I might have added some illustration to this reenacted, but it's certainly what it sounds like when they talk about matcha. And one of the things that they do, which I actually would someday like to include, although I think it's too early in our industry, is they ask their guests that they invite on to be interviewed for their hot takes. They call it a hot take with cream and two sugars. And they asked her, her hot take about the coffee industry in general.

Ryan · 2:41

In other words, where does she have an opinion where people might disagree with her in the industry? And they really asked her to be like intellectually honest with herself and pick something where she would expect pushback.

Ryan · 2:54

She said something really profound that got me thinking about our industry, matcha. And she said, you know, so many people open a new cafe and a lot of them just don't really know what they're talking about and aren't bringing any unique perspective. They're recycling and reusing someone else's thoughts, someone else's philosophy, someone else's words, without even having like the depth or breadth of knowledge to approach it and form their own opinion on the topics. That got me thinking like, wow, actually so many matcha companies look exactly the same.

Ryan · 3:30

Like not to pick on anything in particular. It's just the observation that came to my mind. The word hana or flower in Japanese, HANA is the name of so many people's matcha. If you just Google hana matcha, there are like dozens of different products from different brands. And everyone likes calling their blend hana. And then, you know, they put a big sakura blossom somewhere. Maybe that's over generalization, but you know, I was talking with Sam and I was like, you know, our industry, everyone feels like they're doing the same thing. There are these unique perspectives and to be perfectly clear, you know, everyone that

Ryan · 4:08

we've invited on our podcast, we feel like they have a unique perspective. So we realized in this complaint that it sounds like we're describing a lot of people's Matcha brand, but this is more of an investigation as to why we get this vibe. Like we don't have hard data.

Ryan · 4:23

It's more of a vibe that if you compare it to specialty coffee or some other industries, Matcha just feels incredibly boring with lack of a better word. There's the specialty camp, there's the people that kind of sell Japan, and there's very little diverse or unique perspective.

Zongjun · 4:39

I think one reason of of what could be causing this phenomenon is the matcha specialty. Matcha is just so new. It's a scarce. There's a real scarcity of information and story that could be told by people. A lot of people are still trying to explore into, you know, what's going on out there and, you know, like, coffee has been around for millennia and so are a lot of other beverages.

Zongjun · 5:03

So matcha, you could argue, hundreds of years of practice. By a very niche group of people and. And a country with closed borders. And that evolved into a very interesting culture that that has its its own complexities. And with modernization, it really brought forth commercial matcha, like matcha as ingredient, matcha as a, you know, a flavor to, you know, things like ice creams and snacks.

Zongjun · 5:32

And I would say that's a very good foundation for any kind of special product. Like for any kind of true thriving special product, you, you need a commodity market to support that. And I think that's, that's, that's a prerequisite necessity for a specialty matcha to exist.

Zongjun · 5:49

But but for specialty matcha, it's just so new, like people are still trying to figure out what to how to weave the story or the narrative. And there is a very established place playbook, and that playbook draws on genuinely beautiful philosophy. If you're about creating a mindfulness ritual, if you're about seeing imperfection in things and finding those imperfections beautiful, If you're about seasonality and having things change with the seasons, If you're about the calm and zenness or something like matcha and its energy profile that it gives you, these are pretty like universal selling points.

Zongjun · 6:26

And when you're in the business of selling tea, which is what all matcha brands are, it makes sense that you draw on that established playbook. But then how do you develop a unique perspective on top of that? Like everyone's pulling from the same source of inspiration.

Zongjun · 6:43

Is it that there are no other sources of interesting things for people to gather inspiration? From well, one thing that people would naturally look into is chanoyu, right? You know, like people draw inspiration from it, people trying to mimic its aesthetics and and I think that's a trap in disguise because people trying to do innovations on top of chanoyu, you will naturally fall into a very dangerous realm of being accused as cultural appropriation. And I, I don't, I don't have any, you know, side to take on on that.

Zongjun · 7:20

And I think it's really about intention of boring ideas or getting inspired by, by things. But, but I think it's a dilemma, right? Like people, people will look at chanoyu and they were trying to borrow ideas from chanoyu. But then like either they're getting accused of being culturally, you know, appropriating something or they just become so careful about this very element or whatever elements that they appreciate.

Zongjun · 7:48

And and that mindset is the opposite of innovation. Yeah, well, you draw criticisms from both sides. If you take the liberty to do enough interpretation and you're careless or even slightly careless about it, you know someone's going to criticize you for using a plastic chasen.

Ryan · 8:07

That's not what they use in Japan, Sam. No samurais are using these plastic chasen or mixing their, you know, their matcha with sparkling water, right? So it draws criticism from the accusers, the population of, I mean, the subpopulation of people that like to accuse others of cultural appropriation.

Ryan · 8:28

And then on the opposite side, if you go too close, you're literally just copying the form of chanoyu and like, and sometimes it really manifests itself in some really beautiful ways. Like if you do, if you go to Kyoto and you go to a wonderful cafe called Yugen, I think they have a beautiful high fidelity, quick version of matcha preparation that mimics the spirit and the form of chanoyu that happens at a bar. It's fast, it's beautiful, it's easy to take your picture. They work clean.

Ryan · 9:04

Everything is presented clean. There's all this crap everywhere. Everything has its place. Just like in chanoyu, the bowl gets preheated, then the bowl gets dried and then they take out the natsume. It's like really particular set of sequences.

Ryan · 9:18

The way you get created, the interaction you have, you get to pick out your own bowl. It's a really nice modern interpretation of a very traditional thing. And but there's also when you get that close to something so traditional like a temae, you can't make that much extra interpretation. Yeah, unless you are a iemoto.

Zongjun · 9:40

Or you're really someone with like a lot of seniority that's really looked up to enough. And actually this is something David from Tezumi was talking about in his school, which is a little more flexible. And apparently finding some of the tea dogu or tea equipment is very difficult in the US.

9:56

It can be very expensive. And one of the temae that they were doing needed a Candlestick holder. And like they just didn't have the Japanese Candlestick holder that was typically, and he said that someone and these Candlestick holders, I think believe they have three feet.

10:11

So someone took a three. I don't know what they're called, a three time a fork and they bent one of them to make a little tripod and then use that as the Candlestick holder, which, you know, he described is just brilliantly creative.

10:27

And this is both trying to mimic the form, but also really mimicking the spirit of utilizing what you have. Ah, to your vet in terms of what you have available to you. Yeah, a little more scrappy, but a lot more authentic to that practitioner themselves with they have access to.

10:45

But technically there's very little room to do that because you're going to get called out on either side for making those types of interpretations. Yeah, I I totally agree. And and you know that particular school and also you can being Japanese to begin with, I think true offers them a lot of immunity. And Japan's not really a place where you see any form of a major step forward and revolution for anything. I they seem to be master perfectors and they import new things and then perfect them.

11:18

But as a hub or a source of really new innovation, it doesn't feel like it's the proper breeding ground for those types of ideas, especially things like matcha that are just so entangled in Japan's past. And you know, it's just another way of saying it has a lot of cultural baggage and maybe entangled to slightly more friendly word, but it's, I don't know, it's a it's a little bit crazy.

11:43

So like, why hasn't anyone been more innovative on the in innovative on the speciality side, you had some early movers like with Kettle, you have Ooika, which is a huge early mover in promoting matcha as a fresh ground product.

11:59

But like now we're starting to see as a playbook for specialty matcha and it all kind of begins to feel a little bit more like the same where everyone's copying the specialty playbook. And you can see people had creating reels explaining about why they're moving away from the term ceremonial grade to all of these other things. But like, how is it that we're not creating more companies, more brands, more thought leaders that are doing things that are genuinely provocative in the space that take a real risk?

12:30

I think one of the fundamental reasons of this is not happening in a way that coffee or beer or wine have happened in the past, is that up until very recently, matcha can only be produced in Japan, proper matcha. And there's a real lack of agency of people doing any kind of serious innovation like cultivation, processing, blending a cultivar selection, and all of those would require participation of people in Japan or facilities in Japan or equipments in Japan.

13:06

And that's really bottlenecking a lot of innovation, I think. Yeah. What risks or perspectives can you take on? You can have a sourcing perspective. You can have perspective on the way you present it to someone and how it's in their life feel.

13:19

In a cafe. You can do perspective because you can control the product that's being actually consumed, right? When you hand someone a matcha latte, they're actually doing the, the consumer is not really changing it anyway. Or you hope they're not changing it in any meaningful way by dumping in, you know, a ton of sugar or something like after you've prepared them really nice koicha or something. Although honestly, even something like a sweetened koicha, I bet someone somewhere could make a sweet and koicha taste incredible.

13:52

Yeah, yeah. There is some combination of things you can do even there that could just dimensionalize and move you from point A to point B that allow you to see this product from a very different perspective. And in a way where anyone who knows what they're talking about is going to say, oh, wow, I don't, I don't know.

14:14

That seems wasteful. It seems expensive. If someone went to all the effort to make that flavor profile for you and now you're putting your hand on that painting, you're adding a brush stroke, which is and that's where I think some of these most were the most brazen, but also some of the most interesting perspectives lie where there is failure. If there's not room to be criticized, are you really creating new perspective or new risk? Yeah, yeah.

14:45

And for the majority of the people that you are going to work with in Japan, there's a serious generation gap between you and those people. Like the average age of tea farmers are 65 in Japan. Even higher, I think. Even higher now and, and you know, older people are naturally less risk tolerant, which is very understandable.

15:08

And occasionally you will see people like, you know who we met in Bison Nakamura being very innovative. Yeah, that was the first time in Japan that I thought, oh, wow, I see this differently now. Yeah. They're young, Yeah, they are young.

15:24

I think that really matters. Very true. And they know what they're talking about. They know a lot about matcha. They have enough context to do that exploration. Because if you don't have a lot of context, you're just a fool wandering around in the dark.

15:40

You deserve to be criticized by those people because you don't know. You don't know that you're, you know, making this grave mistake for this weird cultural context that you weren't even aware of. So knowledge really is a prerequisite into forming a new perspective in the same way that, let's be real, like you couldn't be like a restaurant critic and critiquing a new, I don't know, let me pick an obscure cuisine Bolivian restaurant in New York if no one should be doing that critique. No one has any business doing that critique if they don't know anything about the culinary history of Bolivia, if they've ever eaten Bolivian food, right?

16:21

Like same thing. Like it's a big problem in the critique worker. I'm sure it's a big problem in the art world because all of this stuff, all of these brands, all of these markets, all of these industries exist in some pre-existing context. And unless you are aware of that context, it's very difficult to give thoughtful critique or criticism, which is ultimately the feedback by which all of this moves forward. But it is so much more difficult to take the risk and create a new idea that it is to critique someone who has actually done that creation.

16:53

It's like literally like 99 times harder birthing something into the world than it is critiquing what exists in front of you. Like, and I mad respect to everyone who does take that risk in those perspectives, because if it's not a risk, then it's not that interesting.

17:11

And as you said, I think a big problem with the industry in general, Like if you compare it to coffee, there's all sorts of risks that you can take as a producer. You can do it in your sourcing. There's this whole new thing that we've talked about here about Co ferments and coffee where they take first when when you process coffee, you need to remove the fruit from the coffee seed and you can ferment it with other things such as fruits. So there's a lot of coffee now that are called KO fermenter. They'll dump in some pineapple juice and some mango puree. They stuff it in a bag and typically it's anaerobic. So they close the bag, no

17:47

oxygen. It sits there and the and the coffee end up ends up tasting like what you put in it, like mangoes and like pineapple. And a lot of people in the specialty world say, OK, now it's not very terroir driven, right? The reason you taste mangoes are pineapple because there are mangoes and pineapple like had nothing thing to do with the cultivar, the roasting, the the growing, the production and then so that's a very valid criticism that those products are no longer terroir expressive.

18:13

The people on the other side say, well it's a flavor people like and typically no one takes their best coffee and does this type of Co fermentation. So it's a way of turning what would have been considered a defective specialty coffee batch and adding value to it, right? This is a beautiful example of new perspective creation, right? So if you took tencha and commingled it with osmanthus flowers and remove the osmanthus flowers, this argument on both sides is literally exactly the same. I mean, people have done that in China for hundreds of years, scenting, you know, green tea with jasmine or gardenia flower. So basically identical to do the

18:57

process of coffee, maybe less wet, but they would basically pile flower and tea together and then they ferment oxidized together, generate some heat and then they will remove the flower. They sift the flower out. I can see that totally being done to tencha or like, I don't know, dry mango peel. Or that could could totally work. That could totally work.

19:19

But Even so, I mean, this would be risky. I know a lot of people, and I'm sure a lot of people that we've even interviewed on this podcast would be horrified by that idea. And they'd actually be very against any tampering of a product that someone's already put so much work and time and money into. Yo, we should do that with Chinese tencha, right? Let's do it to experiment.

19:40

No, why not? And then the other thing is, you know, process driven, when you're a roaster, you have a lot of control over the end flavor profile of coffee. And like, if you go back, I don't know, like 1015 years ago, around the same time that I got into specialty coffee, a lot of people were really critiquing the Nordic countries because they were roasting what they considered to be.

20:04

Very light and the way we're way the language that I would hear at the time, I think it's a way too green, way too sour. And you know, I guess it's sort of terroir driven. But really we don't like these flavors. The sort of a debate within the specialty coffee industry of how now we don't talk about levels of roast so much.

Zongjun · 20:21

It's about how roast developed it is. So the vocabulary is kind of moved on from light, medium, dark to like how roast developed. So when a coffee person says a well developed coffee, they mean burnt to all ash, at least by their perspective.

Zongjun · 20:37

Which, you know, some people actually do prefer that. If you look into the coffee scene in Japan, like and the coffee roasting competition, every year that's happening in Japan, like dark roast is like the gold. Well, yeah, historically less and less thankfully, and then the emerging speciality scene. But these kissaten that take this sometimes even aged coffee. I've had a Café de l'Ambre in Ginza, you can get like 1980s aged green coffee.

Zongjun · 21:09

So on roasted aged green coffee. I don't know why, what why no one did anything with this green coffee from Brazil from 1980 until 2025 or 2026. I guess we're in now. And then decided to roast it a little horrifying. I've tried it once. It's actually not even that expensive. I think it was like 20 bucks.

Ryan · 21:32

I was like, I have to like, I like, I've never had aged green coffee that was freshly roasted. Yeah. I I don't really understand its appeal. I'll leave. It at that I got to try that. I've never tried that in Café de l'Ambre.

Zongjun · 21:46

Yeah, it's it's skippable. But it's the the the Quesatan itself is very unique. Totally worth the visit and there are other coffees are much better I think. Yeah, they're all well roasted, developed. Well developed. Got to have that preference.

Zongjun · 22:03

A unique charm about that. If you're with someone from an older generation that tends to like that, I go with them. But if you're a modern specialty drinker, maybe go to them to to like leaves coffee or something anyway.

Zongjun · 22:15

So but what they can do is they can express these different flavors, how much they want to express terroir, how much they want to express these flavors from Maillard browning and caramelization that happened during that process.

Zongjun · 22:27

And that's exactly what we saw at Baisa Nakamura when he took this Asatsuyu tencha from Kagoshima and did this crazy like 30 second toast at high temperature and then milled it fresh like, like those notes of hazelnut and nuttiness and the chocolate. And this, I mean, we're not talking about hojicha either. I mean, this matcha was still bright green. Like I've I've never had anything that was so, so fragrantly roasted, but still so green. Like I've had like, yeah, we've both had this a lot of yummy tea.

Zongjun · 23:00

But when you whisk it as usucha, I mean, you smelled it. You get a very different, like roast freshness, I guess, then when you did, when it's very freshly roasted coming off of a tencha, a mini tencha. I don't even want to call it oven. It's like finisher that he does.

Ryan · 23:16

Yeah, roaster, mini tencha, roaster. But I mean, I guarantee you take that exact product and process and you plop it in the cafe. They have a very successful company. It'd be so interesting to add that kind of value. But then again, people kind of treat tencha like it's nearly finished when you buy it.

Zongjun · 23:35

I mean, it still needs to be milled and you're still doing work on top of someone else's work. And also just the fact that we have only seen that in Bison Nakamura, we don't even know where to buy that piece of equipment. It's the availability of information and equipment or agency.

Ryan · 23:53

It's very scary. Or mill. Or the ability to mill yourself. We're trying to actively solve that, but you know, still like people, it's that they, they don't have the right equipment to to render their imaginations. And even us, let's say we decided to do that tomorrow.

Zongjun · 24:09

Like now we know something about milling because we're creating this machine, but we don't know anything about tencha roasting. And we could very rightly be criticized about the way we were doing it if we decided to open a cafe in one of the cities where we're based, let's say. Paris totally, I think.

Ryan · 24:25

We don't know anything about processing. I think there's some serious magic. I mean by some Nakamura get that tencha roasted so perfectly and so tasty. And so green because that's just growing the color. We would have been to other places that also roast their tencha.

Zongjun · 24:42

Maybe I don't call out the name, but if a tencha is badly roast really really develops this, this burned plastic flavor that's very off putting. And I personally tried to roast some tencha or trying to, well, the intention was to burn out the moisture, but that flavor really persist when we were trying to do that too. So yeah, it's there's, it's unique art and, and requires a lot of experiment and experience. I think people need to have access to these equipments to be able to even try, and I think that's super important and I think that's what's lacking in a lot of places. And just straight out knowledge

Zongjun · 25:22

transmission, like another way that you could offer a unique perspective on matcha as a product is through blending, right? And like a very interesting unique perspective is to create a blend of the same cultivars to homogenize it and create a perspective of an average Yabukita, an average Okumidori. And let's say we did that, we sourced Okumidori from Kagoshima, from Kyoto Prefecture, from Nara, from Shizuoka and from Zhejiang, China.

Zongjun · 25:55

And we mixed it together as a Okumidori blend. We would totally get criticized by a lot of people for creating a multi country blend, which actually if you think about it from a coffees perspective, it is absolutely super weird that something like creating a multi country blend would be so taboo and so so easily criticizable for for everyone in this industry. You literally the first person to make a multi country blend that is a serious brand like has a lot to lose. I don't think any of the predominant matcha specialty players would ever take the risk of not taking Japanese tea seriously enough by trying to do

Ryan · 26:40

their own multi country blend. Yeah, I agree. The risk is too high on the supplier side with your partners in Japan. And and also I think a multi country blend has its unique stigma too because it's very commodities what a lot of commodity company would do.

Zongjun · 27:00

And what a lot of fishy companies Do the shady companies do this? Yeah, yeah. So the intention really matters and the the result really matters. But you really have to be fearless because you don't know how you're going to get punished in Japan. I'll spare everyone the details, but like there is a lot of background politics that go on behind the scenes in the industry and even doing something that could be perceived as very innocent make its way back to people in a chain of communication that goes way longer than you would ever know.

Zongjun · 27:35

And you would have no idea that you just got blacklisted from that producer. You'd have no idea. Very rarely are these types of things explicit. There's a real price to pay for this level for for doing something that would require you to take on such a risk as like a multi country blend. There's AI actually, probably about half of the Japanese producers that we've met that I can think of would stop taking you seriously.

Zongjun · 28:02

And maybe it's not. Even cut you out probably. And you wouldn't know, and you also wouldn't know if it's their perspective or they're afraid of other people's judgement for working with you because you did that thing. It's a really interesting level of soft power.

Zongjun · 28:21

And the deeper you get into the Japanese tea industry, the more you realize this implicit culture is like an octopus of soft power and control. The way people get blacklisted, the way people won't work with some people, but there were others. The way that gossip and information flows in the industry is all of these levels of soft power. And you have to wonder at some of these people that do this communication, do they actually care that so and so person did this thing?

Zongjun · 28:50

Or are the reason they can't work with them is because someone else doesn't like them? And like all of this draws back to someone somewhere making a judgement. And unfortunately, and this is the big problem within the Japanese tea industry, as it's an industry controlled by old conservative Japanese men, not everyone, but almost entirely controlled by very conservative people like like try establishing a single origin matcha blend, sourcing from Uji itself, and having very visible tattoos.

Ryan · 29:21

That person probably will not allow you to to say that they're your farmer. Yeah, I mean, tattoo is very tabooed in Japan overall. You can't even go to a regular onsen if you have tattooed on your shoulder. There's all these like cultural stigma and taboo and boundaries that people need to be very careful of when you're working with them. And and it's just that, you know, like, how do I frame frame this right?

Zongjun · 29:50

But it's, it's all these things that you, as you learn more context about all these boundaries and stigmas and things that you should not speak or touch, it slowly creates a cage, a illusioned, a fear of what if you know, like for, for any kind of things, any kind of innovation that you are not following the rules. Like would I be touching something that I should not be touched?

Ryan · 30:17

Like, and, and I think that's very toxic to to, to, to people's mind because it, it's, it's almost a paranoid. It's like a mental cage that you put yourself in, a safe space where you're pretty sure you're not accidentally making this mistake. That if you did make that mistake, no one would actually tell you that you made that mistake. Exactly, exactly.

Zongjun · 30:42

Actually, I feel that way all the time when I'm in Japan. It's this feeling of being watched or judged, watched and judged. I feel less so in in in southern Japan, people are much, I would say friendlier for the lack of better words, but it's. Well, less uptight.

Zongjun · 30:58

Less uptight? Yeah, less. Definitely less uptight, much more opened. I think it's part of the reason why our friend named Baisa Nakamura is so innovative is that he got his knowledge and training from the South. In Kagoshima.

Zongjun · 31:12

Kagoshima So yeah, if there were any revolution or innovation that got started within Japan, I think it will be coming from the South most likely. Or from outside Japan. I mean, there are people who are unique, uniquely adding to the conversation in really interesting ways with new perspectives. And for me, at the very beginning of my matcha journey, like Ooika was a great example.

Zongjun · 31:37

There was no one else talking about fresh ground matcha, the importance of fresh ground matcha, how it loses so many nutrients and antioxidants even after room temperature, like 30 to 40% of the EGCG matcha's most prized antioxidant will degrade within two months. Like no one was talking like that. No one was talking about these cultivars in the art of blending.

Zongjun · 31:58

It was really fresh perspective, but I was I didn't necessarily know I was searching for. Yeah. And if you were a matcha innovators, new brand owners of back in the days trying to bring fresh milk matcha to the market and if you go to Uji and talk to all these farmers, you were most likely will be discouraged to do fresh milk.

Zongjun · 32:23

Probably. They. This is not your domain. It's very expensive, very difficult. And, and for what we have, you know, heard from all these farmers that we talked to in Uji, they will tell you that fresh meal matcha doesn't taste good. It needs to rest for a few days.

Zongjun · 32:40

Just don't do it. You are not creating a valuable product, which is I think true for some tencha based on our own experience, but definitely not true for a lot of tencha. Actually the higher quality it gets the more benefits from a little rest, but like 98% of the tencha made in Japan absolutely tastes better the first day it. Smelled totally agree.

Zongjun · 33:05

So yeah, it's like like, imagine you were, you know, like that was your first exposure to your idea, like by from arguably the most senior people in Japan that knows anything about matcha telling you that it's a bad idea.

Zongjun · 33:21

Like what would you do? Actually, reasonably speaking, if you're using an actual Japanese ishi-usu to mill matcha, it is especially someone like Marc who is really the first to to do this and create a brand that became very highly visible.

Zongjun · 33:36

Let's say huge, huge social media presence. Like you're importing this giant machine that costs an insane amount of money and the shipping. And if you drop a stone and you have two stones, you lost half your production capacity and it needs to be re sharpened periodically to which you need to spend 50kg of granite back.

Zongjun · 33:55

And you don't even, you know, if anyone in the United States cares that their macho was grown fresh. You're, you're like you're, you're entering a market where your biggest differentiator is something that most people have never thought about before, right?

Zongjun · 34:09

Like that's creating new perspective. And the reason it's so interesting is because it took a risk. You could argue the same framing for Kettle, who is super early in specialty matcha days. Does anyone actually care about who the farmer is that grew the tea or about the specific cultivar that's being sources?

Zongjun · 34:28

Is cultivar even a meaningful differentiation? If no one knows what a cultivar is, that means you got to educate the market, which means you got to create all of the demand for that thing that you are now tasked with selling, where it's its largest differentiator, right?

Zongjun · 34:43

That takes time, money, expertise, and also a massive amount of risk because you just don't know if anyone wants it, right? Like, you know, and there's so many of these categories like that. And that's what sort of makes these pockets of perspective so interesting. And once someone has done it, it becomes quite a bit less interesting because it's not a unique perspective anymore. People can iterate on it, refine it. You can take it to a market that's not even aware of it yet, which is largely what's happening now. But like a lot of these things, you got to be first and to be first means you got to take

Ryan · 35:20

risk. But you should only take that risk if you have enough context to make sure that you're not the fool and that everyone who's judging you is the fool who's stuck in a very different version of the past. And they they're no longer really contemporary.

Ryan · 35:36

They're, they're more preservationalist than they are about progressing the praxis forward. Yeah. Innovation is hard. That's true for other products too. And it results in failure most of the time. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's difficult.

Ryan · 35:50

And it's even more difficult to scale. Like some of the best innovations just don't make any commercial sense at all. Or for some reason or another, like they just cannot ever like become a thing. And for the intersection of those to come together.

Zongjun · 36:06

But, and it's the beautiful thing. Now you have dozens and dozens and dozens of countries all around the world with people who are becoming exposed to this, becoming curious, learning more about it, going to Japan, talking to producers, A lot of cases, some of them are doing their own experiments. And then like this can slowly start to happen. And one of the what's is our main motivation of the Specialty Matcha Podcast.

Zongjun · 36:28

We want to see matcha become more interesting and we want to see a lot new and interesting and fresh perspectives. And you heard it here first, folks, we support failure. Try something, anything like, you know, we need to have a community that embraces failure, embraces people pushing the boundaries, trying something new.

Ryan · 36:49

And it doesn't even have to be like product focus. It could be in aesthetics, it could be in messaging. I mean, look at Tom Sachs, the artist in New York who did this tea service ceremony where people acted out as if they were on the moon, like serving chawans that say NASA on it that get shipped that add kintsugi. And then the wagashi comes from a Yoda Pez dispenser. Like that is a fresh perspective on something Japanese and something very highly traditional. And it's interesting because he took a risk. It's like this could very easily be perceived as cultural appropriation and insensitive.

Ryan · 37:28

And if Tom Sachs didn't know anything about tea ceremony or chawan design or the reason why things are placed a certain way, it would be cultural appropriation and bastardizing and make no sense. But it was precisely that he knew the context of tea ceremony that made this so funny.

Ryan · 37:51

Both for people who know nothing in chanoyu, but anyone who knows anything about chanoyu looks at that setup and you cannot help but smile. You see so many parallels. It's so perfectly captures the spirit of what's going on in tea ceremony, not just the form. It's a It's a meme.

Ryan · 38:09

Yeah, it's exactly actually that's it's a meme. Yep. It's a, it's an insider meme. And I, I think that's, that's very cool, but it takes time for people to develop a meme culture in any realm, like a share vocabulary, shared inside jokes, shared insider information.

Ryan · 38:26

In talk. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, yeah. I think we we just need to be a little bit more patient and and people just need to be a little bit bolder. Indeed, I think that's a great place to stop. All right, so thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with friend and take a risk today when it comes to matcha, do something radical. See you in the future.

38:48

See you.