Our mill is working!

Ryan · 0:00

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

Zongjun · 0:15

In today's episode, we are going to share a major milestone that we recently just hit and we are super excited. And it's sponsored by Sanko Matcha Products, so to speak. We try to keep this podcast as non commercial as we can, but we also promise to tell startup stories.

Ryan · 0:33

So sometimes the missions are a big contradictory, but we will do our best to be as objective and clear as possible when these two things contradict each other. We are hypocrites. We're hypocrites. Indeed. So to zoom out and give everyone a little bit of context that might not already know, we don't just run a podcast, but we also have a Matcha company, Matcha brand. So far we have smashingly launched a single product so far that we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign. The One Dimension Matcha Whisking Bowl, which has been a giant success.

Zongjun · 1:04

Obsidian. Commercially and product quality wise. Yeah. We've been really happy with all the feedback that we've gotten from that product. And actually in retrospect, it was really the perfect place to start the company for us because really our original mission and vision was to make matcha milling and the ability to mill matcha fresh anywhere and everywhere. And that is a very, very tricky engineering problem. So we we started simple and have gotten progressively more complicated.

Ryan · 1:35

Well, even the bold was not that simple either. That's true. Even the most simple products are quite sophisticated. Yeah, but it really got us to end up talking to people in the industry with shared vision and standard really to help us understand what exactly do people like and do people want or what what exactly do people need. Exactly.

Zongjun · 1:57

And to better understand like what are the industry problems and where and how can we add value as a company creating matcha tools. You see this rich ecosystem in coffee and you see the success of third wave coffee, tea coffee. They didn't have to invent the espresso machine, they didn't have to invent coffee grinders, they didn't have to invent pour overs or gooseneck kettles.

Ryan · 2:18

All of this infrastructure already existed. But in the case of Matcha, yes, it exists, but it really only exists within this very traditional. Yeah, it served a very different purpose, yes. For a very different audience and that being tea ceremony of course. So we wanted to start fresh as a company and act or think about who are we steward of, who are we serving, who do we want to serve?

Zongjun · 2:42

And our goal is to serve the idea of matcha as a specialty product, consumers themselves and the businesses that service the consumers that are doing this. Matcha consumption on the global stage of the Japanese audience is pretty well taken care of, but we realized that there were some real problems to be solved for matcha within the craft of creating matcha and the rest of the world.

Ryan · 3:06

Yes, indeed. And one of the key challenge or I would say missing components of matcha making is matcha grinding. And that has been for hundreds of years being centralized and perfected in Japan. But now much now that much of serving a global audience, Imagine like all of the coffee being centrally grind in Ethiopia. Yeah, it's just very, you know, strange kind of status quo that we are living today.

Zongjun · 3:33

And then also imagine that all of the blends and all of the products and all of the flavor profile outcomes and quality is being defined by old Ethiopian men when you know, it's a product consumed by people of all ages, genders, cultures, races that might have very different preferences.

Ryan · 3:53

Yes, indeed. And in the case of matcha, you know, it's, you know, Japan and it has been historically serving a very, very narrowed and well defined audience. But nowadays we are seeing matcha being consumed globally every corners of the world in every kind of context.

Zongjun · 4:10

So that's a very interesting, you know, it was a dynamic between the market and the producers. Yeah, and it's interesting. The Japanese have this concept of Kaizen. A lot of people who, like, read too many corporate books or something will come across the word Kaizen, which means continuous improvement.

Ryan · 4:29

And it's one of the reasons why Japanese manufacturing is so good. But the spirit of Kaizen really lives in many of the different crafts and arts related to Japanese tea ceremony or Japanese culture in general. But I mean, you are do see, you know, the Japanese tea industry adapting to the current market, but you know, it's at a very different pace and the market is just evolving and expanding so fast. That is probably unfathomable for, you know, the Japanese. All of these family owned businesses that have exist for hundreds of years.

Zongjun · 5:02

They're not just quite used to dealing with this kind of change. Yeah, but it's also like the means of Kaizen, right? Continuous improvement in service to what? Yeah, yeah. Right. So like if there's Japanese tea competitions, if your goal is to become quote UN quote, the number one Japanese tea farmer because you won the competition, right? That's like quote UN quote, a fitness function. That's something that you're optimizing around or you're optimizing around the opinion of people who hold soft power like the iemoto.

Ryan · 5:32

So it's a very different type of innovation and feedback improvement cycle where perfection is headed in a very centralized and well controlled direction. Yeah, it's a bottom up optimization. No, it's a top down optimization.

Zongjun · 5:51

From bottom, Well, depends on how you, how do you define it, But you know, the, the subject of what you're being, what you are optimizing for is someone you know for the top is someone from the top. Whereas you know, a lot of these consumer markets that you see elsewhere like coffee, like wine, you're optimizing for, you know, a more general audience that doesn't necessarily have a higher power than you or a higher social status than you, which is very much the case that the still very much of life in Japan nowadays.

Ryan · 6:26

So you have these like different spirits of innovation, right? You can have a a continuous perfection of a craft through marginal improvement and in use of new technologies and getting very tight, tight feedback loops with people who have a lot of authority, hard or soft power. Creating smaller incremental improvements is what you see in all sorts of things.

Zongjun · 6:48

Like we were just in Kyoto. And if you go to the Raku Museum, you can see each generation of Raku Potter do their innovation, do their artistic style, and innovations can be aesthetic too, but it is very slow incremental change.

Ryan · 7:01

And you don't really see failure being celebrated. So you have this highly insular, highly tight feedback loop optimizing for these types of improvements, innovation cycles. Or you can let 1000 flowers bloom. It's a lot more failure. It's a lot more public failure, but you can get it's a very different type of optimization cycle that is kind of inherently not Japanese.

Zongjun · 7:29

Like the idea. I think about all of like the amateur kintsugi people who got into it over COVID, right? Like there's probably some someone in Japan thinking, oh, these guys have no clue what they're doing. I like, maybe that's true, but it's really kind of developing its own culture outside of that sphere.

Ryan · 7:48

Yeah, it's essentially new culture building. Yeah. It's a subculture. It's a subculture or it's a new culture, like or matcha serve as one element in a culture, or in many cultures actually. It was born in China and it served its cultural element in Doha in tea competitions or as tribute to the emperor for, you know, many hundreds, many 100 years.

Zongjun · 8:11

And then it brought to Japan and also served as one cultural element in tea ceremony, serving the feudal Lords, the monarchs, you know, offer as a excuse, so to speak, for the warriors together in peace and have discussions without drawing sword to each other. So, you know, it's it's of course culture related and it should not be bound by one culture as it has it. So like matcha really served multiple roles in different culture.

Ryan · 8:44

It has never been really bounded by one culture or 1 you know, ceremonial context, a in nature, a very freed item that's perfectly good for its own. Free Spirit. It has a free spirit inside of it. And now we are seeing much of being consumed and enjoyed and celebrated by a much larger audience globally.

Zongjun · 9:09

It has, you know, transcend China. Transcend Japan, transcend East Asia. It has entered into, you know, many corners in the world. I think it there's no way to, you know, articulate the the the reason that you know, matcha should be belong to a certain consumption scenario or there's one certain or one correct quote, quote, quote UN quote, correct way of making matcha.

Ryan · 9:34

Yeah, And I mean, these industries go through adoption and innovation cycles. When matcha got first introduced to Japan by Eisai, I mean, I'm sure the Chinese were looking across thinking, wow, these guys have no idea what they're doing. This is like, this is not the proper way of doing it, right? And then there's like maturity cycles where these cultures develop and you have these innovation cycles. They can be aesthetic, they can be functional, They can be all sorts of different things.

Zongjun · 10:03

And there's some fitness function for that innovation cycle. And honest to God, I bet Japanese matcha, you know, just from a flavor point of view, tastes better than Chinese matcha. Chinese matcha back in Song dynasty because you have no cultivar cultivation and all of those optimization to make this product taste better and more nutritious.

Zongjun · 10:22

So although they probably don't know it was making it more nutritious, it certainly make it taste better. There's some functional benefits, more L-theanine. Yeah, maybe it just made them feel great. But but you know, like all of these innovations, all of these cultural or local adaptation for, you know, at the time to them and maybe also in the future improvements.

Zongjun · 10:43

And they should all be celebrated because they are serving for it. If they're baked, they are being made and they are being innovative for for the purpose, for the intention of creating a better product. And within the context of Japanese culture and Japanese arts, that tight feedback loop, which is very top down and authoritative, where there's people with a lot of power, kind of like the patron system, patron of the arts for like during the Renaissance or even before then, where like the Catholic Church was doing the sponsoring of the art in the art generation, very top down. Well, meritocracy, you know,

Zongjun · 11:20

there are a lot of merits about it, but you know, at the same time there are a lot of limitations too. A lot of limitations and what's interesting is Matcha is growing and growing up to become a much more global product, global beverage and turning into its own culture shared by many different nations and many different peoples.

Zongjun · 11:38

It's the ideas are opening up a little bit about how these innovation cycles, what form they should take place now that they're the matcha is living in spheres that are outside where it has been in its last cycle, being within a traditional Japanese society. And now we are definitely going to see quote UN quote 1000 flowers bloom.

Ryan · 12:01

Yeah, well, it's, I think this is a great sign. Like it. It's a sign of matcha being very much alive, not just being a cultural element enshrined in a gallery or a museum. Yeah, oh, absolutely. It needs to remain a living art and to change and breathe.

Ryan · 12:19

And there is that change within Japanese tea ceremony. To be perfectly clear, there are some really staunch conservative people in Japanese tea ceremony that don't think much should be changed. But actually a lot of the practitioners do see it as vitally important.

Ryan · 12:32

But the fitness function for that change and who it is optimizing for is definitely not the matcha Gurley in California on TikTok or someone in metro Bangkok or someone in the Middle East or in Latin America, right? Like it's or in Europe, like these are very these places where we're seeing matcha boom and develop new cultures. Who's creating things for them?

Zongjun · 12:54

Yeah. Where are those innovation cycles? That's a very interesting question and that's honestly one of our driving impetus to create a infrastructure to enable people the capacity of making innovations. Yes, so we've seen the craft of creating a matcha beverage spread all over the world, right? It's no longer on it to Johnny Matcha in seiza with a bamboo chasen and whisking a bowl in this very ceremonial ritual anymore, right?

Zongjun · 13:22

It's been adapted. It's been adapted into cafes in the form of matcha latte. You even see some cafes in New York and in LA serving koicha or kukicha, right? That I mean, that's a little unthinkable when you think about this on larger timescale horizons.

Zongjun · 13:38

Not only are there people doing it crazy enough to have started that trend, but there are people who, once that their preferences have literally changed, move from awareness that matcha exists to koicha. That's a far like consumer journey to go and to really develop a preference for that.

Zongjun · 13:56

And the fact that that exists now is just an insane thing to me. Yep. Yep, and insane thing to the Japanese people too. Koicha was a form of tea, though, back in the days were, you know, only be able to be enjoyed by the very few in the society.

Ryan · 14:12

Now it's so accessible by everybody. So the craft has of beverage preparation has really spread everywhere, but there's a lot more to what's driving these flavor profile outcomes these products than just taking matcha powder and preparing it into some final outcome that a consumer's going to to enjoy. And there's a lot more that's driving the flavor of these products further down the the value chain or the value stream supply chain, so to speak.

Ryan · 14:40

And one of them is just access to a fresh ground product. This boom of matcha is so new that these supply chains haven't had time to adapt yet to deliver people fresh product. Freshness in matcha in Japan is not really a huge problem because it's all set up with hyperlocal supply chains.

Ryan · 15:00

And like the the availability of probably two to three month old matcha is pretty ubiquitous because people are also moving through it and consuming it as well. But that is just not the case for the rest of the world. And something that we realize, the more that we learn, the more that we realized, basically, this might be a bit of a controversial statement, but the entire world is drinking stale matcha for the most part. Yeah, that's very true.

Ryan · 15:23

Like, it's like the coffee example that we, you know, you know, talked about previously, You know, like now the status quo is everything is getting centrally milled in Japan and gets centrally packed in Japan and gets shipped out into every corners of the world. And matcha as a powder is just not a form of product that's optimized for long shipping and long logistic abusement. Or sitting in a warehouse in an Amazon warehouse waiting to be purchased.

Ryan · 15:55

There's no humidity control, no temperature control, it's literally getting second roasted. And it's actually really unfortunate for small business owners because typically when you're buying matcha powder to repackage and sell the MOQ, the minimum order quantities are quite large. Even for us, Like if we decided we wanted to sell matcha powder, we'd have to commit to buying like 20 kilos. Probably just a lot of big commitment for someone who literally cannot forecast how quickly they're going to move through it unless you're a super influencer and you sell out in three days.

Ryan · 16:25

This inventory problem is a very tricky one for a lot of people, building small businesses all over the world on the frontiers of spreading matcha and the idea of drinking it and the idea of it as a specialty product like a fine food.

Zongjun · 16:39

So something that all of this awareness has done, now that, you know, a lot of people know that matcha exists, people become inherently curious about like, is all matcha the same? Why is this one more expensive than this one?

Zongjun · 16:52

Why does it taste better? Why is my yellow and yours is green? But really, from even a taste point of view, you know, a stale matcha just tastes infinitely worse, you know, worse at best than a fresh 1. You know, from from a flavor point of view and also from a nutrition point of view. Absolutely.

Ryan · 17:12

And color as well. Freshness and product quality are heavily intertwined. So we set out to help solve this problem and we first started with the observation that people already recognized the same problem. People were importing what are called ishi-usus or these traditional stone mills to mill matcha fresh all over the world.

Ryan · 17:31

And we started talking with people that were owning and operating them. And we are very grateful to everyone that was willing to share knowledge with us and to really understand what is going on inside of these machines that make such a delicious product. And and then to give us the fundamentals to think, OK, how can we engineer a solution that might be a little more scalable than sending around, you know, 50kg of granite all over the world that can only manufacture A matcha at about 30 to 40 grams an hour, which is incredibly slow. Yeah.

Zongjun · 18:02

Well, traditionally all of the matcha are being milled by a, you know, machine or a device called ishi-usu, which is a stone mill. It's made out of soft granite in Japan and these machines, these machines, these devices produce a very unique powder form that makes matcha just taste better and suspend better in liquid.

Zongjun · 18:24

Whereas nowadays you see a lot of these more industrial production using ball mills or you know, jet mills to also make matcha at a very fine particle size. They, they just do not necessarily have a very, you know, a very similar kind of the particle structure than, you know, matcha coming out from ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 18:44

And and what we want to do is trying to mimic the condition and the powder quality that a traditional ishi-usu can produce. And very thankfully, in our last job, we were working at an AI company at the kind of the intersection of AI methods with human sensory perception or the perception of taste and consumer preference and product development. So we had a lot of friends who were food scientists in the food industry, and we had worked pretty heavily in product development at our last company.

Ryan · 19:13

So our next phone call was to some friends and food science to say, OK, we need particles that are 5 to 15 microns. It can't heat up that much. Is it theoretically possible, you think, to mechanically create a device that can go faster, but just leveraging some different technologies such as heat management, heat sinks, heat cooling systems, ceramic millstones, controlled compression, like is this possible? And they said yes enough times that we felt confident. OK, this is worth prototyping.

Zongjun · 19:44

Yeah, worth trying. And you know, for for I would say the first six months we were really not sure that are we you know, necessarily on the right path or did our friend really cheer us up and over optimize for a kind of an illusional goal? You know, by 6 months we had something moving and then after another year of development we finally have something that actually tasted.

Ryan · 20:14

Yeah, and I'll, I'll share a little story that might be a little embarrassing for us, but the very first time the machine turned on, we were, we were waiting like, oh, like, where's the tea? Where's the matcha? There's matcha in this hopper. We have a little feeding post.

Ryan · 20:29

Maybe the feeding post isn't working. Maybe things are getting stuck. Where is this T? Why is nothing coming out? Turns out it was wired the wrong way and it was spinning in the opposite direction. Real bozo explosion there. Oh, we you know.

Zongjun · 20:43

Come a long way. We have come. We have come a long way, and all of the success were lessons learned from failures. Oh yes. We got so good at figuring out what didn't work that we were basically able to like get some attribution of like if we tweak this then this will happen, or if we tweak that then this will.

Zongjun · 21:02

Happen or if the machine is making some noises. Probably should stop. Should stop or we know probably something is wrong with the plate or the belt. Slowly getting into AI would say empirical expert. I'm not familiar by, you know, just tweaking and, you know, playing with this machine so much.

Ryan · 21:21

So if we zoom out again one more time about like why matcha should be a fresh ground product. If we say that it goes through all the supply chain abuse and you have degradation of antioxidants, 40% of the EGCG, one of the primary antioxidants would degrade over two months and ideal storage conditions as well as you have chlorophyll degradation and oxidation and of course not to even mention the taste and will completely change.

Zongjun · 21:46

Why is that not the case if you're shipping around tencha or unground matcha? Surface area of tencha is just so much smaller than matcha that making it, you know, so much more resistant to oxidation when you're talking about shipping it in a seal container and not to mention about the, you know, customs clearance in import export difficulties between tencha and matcha. Yeah, loose safety versus powder. Yeah, You end up, we'll be going through a very different channel, you know, shipping these two items. I still remember back in our product development days, I guess it's about 7:00 or eight years ago, we were working on a powdered beverage product and it

Zongjun · 22:24

was being, it was getting imported, sent to us, but imported from another country and it got so stuck in clearance. We had to drive like one hour to New Jersey. We were living in New York at the time. I remember that go.

Ryan · 22:36

To some random warehouse like hey we're here to pick up this powder. Should be about 10 KGS. Well, very gladly, those powders were not white color. Actually, they were. Oh, they were OK. That's why we had to go all the way there when I was dealing with some of the sample shipping in China.

Zongjun · 22:56

Like I remember our warehouse partner actually asked me specifically if the powders are white. If so, then you have to go through a very different, they call it the Huagong, like the chemical engineering special channel for exportation. Yeah.

Ryan · 23:09

Well, good thing matcha is not. Three times more. Yeah. Ordinary channel, so a good thing you know matcha has a color. But yeah, there's just a surface area explosion. I mean, I see if you look at a tencha leaf, which should be about 4mm by 4mm, so like pretty big that is getting pulverized so many times it gets subdivided that each matcha particle should be about 5 to 15 microns in size.

Ryan · 23:38

And to put that into perspective, it is 10 times smaller than a fine grind of espresso, order of magnitude smaller than espresso grinds, and it is below the visual threshold. The naked unaided eye cannot tell the difference between 5 to 15 micron particles and the visual threshold is about 30 to 40 microns.

Ryan · 23:59

So these particles are really small. And because you have a surface area explosion, you have volatile loss, it's susceptible to oxidation. You have degradation of chlorophyll. When chlorophyll degrades, it goes from green into a yellow brownish substance is one of its it's oxidative components, which also has the negative advantage of tasting bitter, which is one reason why one of the flavor transformation that happens from a chemistry perspective as matcha degrades.

Ryan · 24:27

So like it is actually arguable that fresh ground matcha, fresh grinding matcha is more important in matcha than it is in the case of coffee because there's just so much more surface area exposed. And like people spend a fortune on their coffee setups, getting ever better coffee grounds, coffee sized particle sizes and distributions, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah.

Zongjun · 24:50

And, you know, like by the end of the day, after all those oxidation, after all those, you know, humidity infiltrations, you are going to have a inferior product. It's just not going to taste the same. Now having been in Japan, handpicking tea, watching tea, processing the amount of effort. It's painful.

Zongjun · 25:09

That goes into creating matcha or tencha. Even unground matcha is unfathomable it. Hurts my soul just thinking about all of those efforts when into a can of matcha just to let it being sit under the tropical sun in a random warehouse getting slowly getting expired.

Ryan · 25:29

It's really bad. Even when it follows the cold chain like these, chemical transformations still happen. And not to mention how environmentally unfriendly it would be to maintain product quality because even as the moment you mill matcha, it should really stay refrigerated as long as possible and treated like a fresh food.

Ryan · 25:49

So I mean, if you really care about the environment, this in theory should really help improve product quality because it really will lower the carbon foot footprint of the supply chain if you can move that last manufacturing step much closer to the consumer. And just saving tons of nutritions. Think about the number of metric tons of antioxidants that just wasted, vanished, vanished on the Earth because it's going stale.

Ryan · 26:14

Yeah, it's, it's, it's criminal. Well, it's excusable. There's no way to do it right. You can import an ishi-usu and it's going to cost $10,000. Or you have to buy a really industrial piece of equipment to mill it fresh in your country.

Zongjun · 26:26

It's very understandable. That's true that it's that there's a serious lack of infrastructure because of this global demand. You know, back in the days they don't need this infrastructure to be available because most of March are consumed domestically. And locally.

Zongjun · 26:41

And locally. So this is really a modern, modern problem getting, you know, exploded or magnified upon a very legacy infrastructure. Oh, absolutely. So yeah, that's that's the primary reason why we think this is an incredible important problem to solve.

Ryan · 27:01

And not to mention the fact that once you move that step much closer to the consumer, the craft of not only creating the beverage can become hyper localized, but the craft of creating the matcha powder can become more localized.

Ryan · 27:15

Where a lot of cafes, coffee companies, new matcha companies, new specialty companies can exist buying tencha the same way that you would buy coffee beans from all over the world and creating local blends. And no one knows consumers like the people who are on the ground serving those people.

Ryan · 27:35

And if we talk about like creating things in service to the customer, in service to the people who are actually doing the consumption of the thing, in this case matcha, we want a diverse group of people serving them. We want to see people who come from all walks of life to see themselves represented in these brands.

Ryan · 27:58

Yeah, matcha blending is a exceptionally tricky 1 because it has been historically controlled by this very mysterious group of people called chashi in Japan. It's so mysterious, not only to the outsiders like you and I, but also even to the Japanese people domestically, like when we ask questions to them about, you know what, what do you note about all these chashi blenders.

Ryan · 28:25

They do not know very much about. They know their existence. They know their quote UN quote very skilled. Yeah, which they they, they probably are. Most likely are definitely. Definitely are. Yeah, like the. Craft of blending is largely unknown.

Ryan · 28:40

Very, you know, being gated and obscured away from, you know, all of the consumers, which is a very interesting phenomena. You know, there are a lot of, you know, historical historical reasons and connotations went into that installation to which that we are probably not going to talk about it in this episode. But, you know, we we very much want to see a world of that part of art being democratized too.

Ryan · 29:05

And really really available and accessible to anyone. Anyone should be able to acquire the skill. Doesn't mean everyone is going to be good. At good at. Anyone should be. And like, I mean, I'm going to critique Japanese society a little bit right now, but oh. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Ryan · 29:22

Seriously, I mean have a tattoo that you can visibly see? Try becoming a chashi. You won't. There's this 0%. Well, yeah, you can't even go to your own sand. A hot spring Try. Being openly gay, do you think you're ever going to like, get an in on what's going on to develop the skill to become a chashi? How about a woman?

Ryan · 29:41

Have you ever heard of a woman ever being a part of the craft of tea blending? Right? Like the barriers to entry are highly discriminatory. Yeah, it's very historical, but you know, also very true that there are a lot of, I would say, legacy obstacles that still very much exist in the world of matcha in Japan.

Ryan · 30:04

Because, you know, Japan, the whole Society of Japan, still live in that part of the legacy too, still. Yeah. And it really is a hamper on growth. You're just you have to kind of be born into it and know the right people to even get into the right spheres to acquire the knowledge and the context to bring these products to life. And it is doing Matcha a horrible disservice for the new generation of global matcha consumers. This is very interesting because that part of the social Rd. is so intertwined with the Japanese society that it's very difficult for them to be able to adapt into this new matcha drinking culture outside of it's

Zongjun · 30:47

essentially 2 cultures clashing into each other so to speak. And the clash I wouldn't necessarily think is a bad thing. I think that you know, this fusion and clash of different cultures and different ideas of trying to make a better product just because of different culture or different standards, so to speak.

Zongjun · 31:08

I think we generate something very interesting and beautiful in the future. Yeah, I think so. And I really like the idea of kind of opening up this craft to a more diverse group. Yeah, yeah. Because like both culture do care about matcha and they do want to make a better product. You know, it's just serving very different audiences or serving very different goals.

Ryan · 31:31

Yeah, historically and it's just extremely gate kept. The motivations are a bit of a mystery. It is very opaque how intentional it is. Why it's that opaque? People will say a lot of it's like that blending and milling is proprietary, but it's we, no one knows. Honestly.

Ryan · 31:49

Honestly, we know so little about chashi that we don't even know what to talk. About and it's not even for a lack of trying. We've interviewed a lot of experts on this podcast. We've interviewed a lot of people in Japan working in the Japanese tea industry.

Zongjun · 32:03

It is very unclear what's going on. Some are even Japanese too. It's really, really, really hard. So hopefully we didn't make any enemies with that. But you know, Japan and Japanese society and these traditional crafts do not come without their negative benefits, and especially when you impose sort of modern morality and expectations and moral lens onto this very traditional culture that is historically very slow to change. So we do think this culture is important. It needs to be preserved.

Zongjun · 32:32

But I also think for specialty matcha to exist and to survive and to thrive in the rest of the world where we're creating new optimization cycles and innovation cycles, creating better tasting products or brands that are reflective of new and different values. A new culture is going to have to be formed around create the idea of the craft of creating matcha powder. And that needs to live in a much more diverse set of hands. And that's actually where this podcast comes in. We are all about spreading the awareness of matcha as a specialty product and how it can be appreciated for for the agricultural product that it is

Ryan · 33:14

and for the flavors and expressions it can bring and for all the richness and all of the things that surround and touch matcha, culturally speaking. But we're probably all going to have to help each other when we have these mills out into the world. In particular, with these beta program, we cannot give you guidance on how to achieve a certain flavor profile outcome from certain tencha that you buy. Yeah, we are as new as you do.

Ryan · 33:43

We cannot tell you exactly what speed you should run to get a certain level of bitterness. We cannot tell you what compression is going to yield the best matcha latte when you're milling this cultivar or that cultivar. But what we are we are able to do is provide you variable RPM or rotation and variable compression that you can tweak.

Ryan · 34:06

We are giving you the opportunity, the freedom of tweaking out of these parameters, but not necessarily offering you a guidance on what is the best solution for a certain goal. We are, you know, as much of a newcomer as you are and I think, you know, we've very much see you as our partner in this very interesting and adventurous journey. So we are actively looking for beta testers, and we have a lot already as well.

Ryan · 34:33

We want to get to a total of 15 people, and we're going to release the details of this beta testing program soon. But our goal with this beta testing community is to create partners, intellectual partners, maybe even sourcing partners.

Ryan · 34:49

We can all help each other source tencha and discover like how flavor transformations happen, what works best with this type of alternative milk and what works best if you're doing an Americano versus a koicha for different milling parameters. And collectively learn together to create our own feedback loops to understand the mechanisms of these flavor transformations so that we can create things that consumers in every corner of the earth where people are doing this type of craft will have access to it.

Zongjun · 35:21

And this is not to hate on the craft of the highest end matcha that exists in Japan. We think it's additive. Even getting to the tencha phase of matcha production requires such insane and extreme craft. It's hard to wrap your mind around. So you know, we want to form this community where we can all learn from each other.

Ryan · 35:43

Yeah, absolutely. You know, this mill is really the first component of a very large portfolio that we want to accomplish in the future and 1st footstep into this very complex world that we want to essentially build a new culture upon. A new culture that can be shared by each other globally. Every corners of the world that doesn't necessarily be defined by a certain small groups telling you what to do. We want to really create an infrastructure to offer the liberty for everyone to be able to explore this very burdened and fresh world themselves.

Zongjun · 36:19

Yeah. And there's so many interesting stories and learnings to like. Even in our experiments in the past few days, we were doing different speeds with the mill, same compression, different speed. The rate of matcha being produced from the 15 RPM to 20 to 32 RPM was about double the efficiency.

Zongjun · 36:41

We got double the amount of powder in a given amount of time, The color identical, the taste very different. Very different, yeah. Color is actually a really horrible indicator sometime about what a product is going to taste like. Well, if it's fresh enough, you know and also like the texture too is a pretty, pretty similar, but there's something happened along the way that we don't know for certain, but I think it probably probably will be related to the heat being generated the.

Zongjun · 37:11

Shearing force or the shearing? Force. Yeah, so. In the heat. Yeah, so, but we don't know well. Weirdly enough, we open the mill every time we do it. After each of these settings, from 15 RPM to 32 RPM, we take a thermometer. We look at it exactly the same.

Zongjun · 37:28

Yeah, it's pretty, pretty similar. So it's very interesting. Because if you imagine rubbing your hands together back and forth, imagine your hands are cold and you try to warm them up, back and forth, back and forth, your hands will get hot. But the moment that you stop rubbing that your hands together, they kind of come back to that temperature again. So similar things going on where there is some immediate heat generation and then dissipation.

Zongjun · 37:51

Now that being said, if your hands are already warm and you're rubbing them together way too fast, you're going to probably burn yourself. So we do have heat sinks that are actively pulling tons of heat that are controllable out of this machine and it is able to stabilize, but we still cannot control the amount of shearing force because that's just a function of physics. You can't fight it when you have that much compression and you're going that fast, that's just the shearing force and the amount of energy that's going to be created there. And the color is the same, the texture is the same, the efficiency is double, but it's a

Ryan · 38:22

much more structured better and a stringent matcha. It's much more intense. Actually, it's probably perfect for a latte. The ones that run really slow at 15 RPM where we're milling, I'd say about .6 to .7g of matcha a minute. So about as fast as an ishi-usu, a little faster in some cases. Super sweet.

Ryan · 38:41

Yeah, very little bitterness. Super umami. And it was like not even a very good tencha to begin with. It was some pretty mid tencha that we put in as a experiment. The amount of quality increased because we also tried the, you know, already milled matcha from the same tencha from the, the, the, the, the vendors that we end up procuring the samples from like night and date difference.

Ryan · 39:06

It's it's pretty interesting. And not to mention we end up putting some pretty high quality tencha into the machine and it tastes phenomenal. Yeah, I mean, it was still very high quality tencha, but it definitely wasn't like Tezumi from a rare cultivar from a famous producer.

Ryan · 39:21

Yeah, of course. Like especially nowadays those kind of tencha are not purchasable. #Matcha shortage. Yeah. But well, good news to a lot of, you know the tencha being more on the mass produced side of manufacture, we can really use this machine or maybe not just this machine, but all of the machine that will be available in the future, but be able to achieve a very high quality fresh ground capacity.

Ryan · 39:48

Good news, you can actually taste the difference. Thank God. Well, I mean, like, we're by no means trying to be a replacement of ishi-usu, but you know, we really want to bring the idea of fresh milling to life. And you know, there are also obviously good fresh milling and bad fresh mill and we have been really trying our best to try to hit. The the powder finest and also the flavor at the, you know, best case results that we can get, Yeah. But we by no means want to even define what is best. We can tell you what it tastes like, but you know, it also depends on how you use this stuff. It's almost like cooking.

Ryan · 40:26

You can develop attention on milling recipe. Yeah, it's very contextual. Like 1 matcha is probably good for a usucha, but not necessarily good for a latte. Or you know, 1 matcha can perfectly be very drinkable in a latte, but you know, it doesn't necessarily be taste, you know, be tasty in the usucha kind of scenario.

Ryan · 40:47

Or some cultivars might be better when you rest it a little bit after milling than not. Something that we've heard from people that operate ishi-usus is that some cultivars when they put it through, it actually is very intense, very grassy when it first comes out, but you let it rest the day 2-3 days, then that's when the everything kind of balances out and it peaks.

Ryan · 41:07

Of course you can't do that unless you have an ishi-usu so as these supply chains aren't that efficient that you can get something that quickly typically. Yeah. And there are probably like just so many other factors or problems that we haven't even encountered. But just having this machine, this device or this capability of fresh milling be able be available to a lot of people. I think the whole discovery process or the result of this discovery journey is just going to be so much more diverse and so much more interesting.

Ryan · 41:37

And just to plant some seeds, there's no fundamental reason why you necessarily have to restrict this machine to tencha. These plates that we have designed and manufactured. These millstones are very hard and they're very durable.

Ryan · 41:54

We have really abused the current set that we have. I was touching them before we left yesterday. They're super sharp. It's like they look like the day that we had been made. Yeah, Yeah, there is. Yeah. There's a what they call self polished, the characteristic of these ceramic plates, the material that we used end up choosing to make this ceramic plates. So it's very different from, you know, soft granite that what people used to make usus.

Ryan · 42:22

It has, you know, in terms of durability, it's definitely much, much better. Yeah. And it's also incredibly biologically inert, like people have made artificial teeth out of this type of things and various forms of implants. It's a very similar material.

Ryan · 42:37

It's the same material as the ceramic coffee burrs. And so it's a very food safe as well. We're very excited about possibilities and potential of our people potentially milling some other things and we actually think that we might have accidentally created the best machine for Turkish coffee that is also a suspension of coffee particles. Yeah, or for buckwheat flour, Ryan, we can use it to make your favorite soba.

Ryan · 43:03

But you know, even within the tea universe, you know, putting on some some various white teas, it, it has to be something that's pretty soft and tender. If it's like super woody or lignus, it might do some damage or it might not mill very well.

Ryan · 43:17

But certainly there's some really cool experiments that people could start doing once these are in various people's hands. So the idea for other forms of powdered tea is well within the possibilities. It's not our particular focus, but could be pretty interesting for some people. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Ryan · 43:33

Well, please don't put like super hard materials into it. It might be a little bit difficult for us to help you fix it. But you know, like we obviously really want to welcome everybody to try to test the limit of the machine and also test the limit of your imagination and creativity. So let's get down to business and be a little more real, Zongjun.

Ryan · 43:54

All right, What's the timeline look like? When can we get our hands on these bills? So, so far, we have finally solidified the mechanical design of this machine. Hey. There we go. Major milestone. I would like to take a small moment here to thank Sam for literally finding some of the best partners and manufacturing partners and design partners. It was very uncertain in the beginning, one, if this was mechanically possible, and two, if we could find anyone that was willing to go through this very uncertain roller coaster ride. If it's like physically possible to do this and you set up, I will.

Ryan · 44:31

I don't want to be overly complimentary, but you really set up. Please please please try the. World's greatest process for finding the right partners. And we visited a lot of different people trying to find partners that were willing to kind of run with the punches with us. And we really found the right people. And this project scope has dragged on. I I think about 3 or 4 times longer than they originally agreed to in the contract with only a minor change of cost scope increase.

Ryan · 45:00

But you know, this is such a interesting and unique project that our partners end up, I think really think or kind of transcend from their pure commercial interest that is willing to, you know, let us take in time for a ride.

Zongjun · 45:16

But yeah, yeah, it has really been a long but very interesting journey so far, Ryan. Yeah. And it's it was, we were really not 100% sure if this was even physically possible. But finally, major milestone finally hit so. But finally, we have solidified the mechanical design of this machine and we have hit our major milestone, honestly an existential milestone.

Zongjun · 45:43

Yeah, this is really, you know if it will work or not there. Might be no, there might be no Specialty Matcha Podcast if this haven't worked as the out of commercial ideas and we can't run this. Forever. Yeah, we being our own sponsor no longer be able to sponsor this podcast anymore, but thankfully it it works.

Zongjun · 46:01

And so right now we are looking at another one or two months of development time for the appearance design and the factory ready redesigned and then another few months of unknown time, hopefully within two to three months of filing all of these certificates and compliance for different markets that we want to launch. For safety, for electronic certification, making sure everything is food safe, quality tested and making sure that everything's up to spec with the quality assurance procedures for each one coming off the line.

Zongjun · 46:35

And our partners have guaranteed that they are going to personally inspect each one along with us. So these are really things that are touched and being very carefully born into the world. So we are looking at our first commercial beta tests probably by the end of the year.

Zongjun · 46:54

Honestly, you know at this point after two years of development, I can never be so sure about a deadline. But this one I can be a little bit more sure because you know, we, we actually have a working machine that can produce a product that live up to our standard.

Zongjun · 47:14

Yeah, and we're going to release all of the details about the beta program to our existing beta users. And if you are also interested in becoming a beta tester, please do reach out to us. Instagram, the form on the website, or just our e-mail, fax, fax.

Zongjun · 47:32

Please don't fax or please don't call either. WhatsApp is OK. You have my personal phone number. Feel free to WhatsApp me anytime. Yeah, we are. We are looking for more partners. We are looking for a more lively and larger community that we can all grow together to make this a tastier future.

Ryan · 47:51

We're going to start with capping it 15. If there's overwhelming demand, we might increase it slightly. We're not sure yet, but we're going to give out details around product specs, what we've learned so far, the cost, what you can expect from us, what you should not expect from us and sort of what our expectations of being a beta tester are also.

Ryan · 48:11

As well as laying out all of the risks of becoming a first user of a product that really has no equivalent in the world yet. There's a lot of unknowns and uncertainty and we believe that we've structured the beta program in a fairway that adequately compensates everyone for the risk that they're taking in being an early adopter to what is and unproven technology.

Ryan · 48:36

And it's unproven until we have the first set of users that can have their primary experience using it and to see the value it creates everyone else. So it's something that we're really looking forward to, but it's also someone something that we want to really find the right people to work with.

Zongjun · 48:52

Yeah, really just want to say thank you to you all. Like it has been such a It would have been a very difficult and lonely journey without all of you. And without you, Ryan. Thanks, you too. That's founding a company and doing things that are so uncertain, such a lonely path. And so many times Zongjun and I left the prototype thinking, Oh my, is this ever going to work?

Zongjun · 49:19

Like at one point we were getting very good product, but it was being very slow. Like how do we do like at some points? Like some. Some changes really require large step size functions, not marginal improvements and. Yeah, we.

Zongjun · 49:33

Figured it out. So I think we just got lucky. And you really develop a new level of appreciation for all of the, you know, matcha milling or matcha making equipment that was being, you know, created the in Japan. You know, at some point they were talking about, you know, Shizuoka being the the home. Of Kyoto Prefecture.

Zongjun · 49:50

Kyoto Prefecture being the the home of Matcha Mills, and we very much see our lab being the same way after all these development works. And we are very grateful to everyone who's helped us on on our journey and bringing this product to life. Time, money, wisdom, knowledge, you know, without that we would be running clueless and context less. But we also asked that all the beta testers kind of come in with a very open and kind personality. We would like to really truly be your partners intellectually speaking from a craft protect from a perspective, from an education perspective.

Ryan · 50:28

And we're all students of Matcha ultimately and we're here to help and contribute freely and openly as much knowledge as you can, something that's part of the beta program as you like. Everyone will have basically unlimited access to us on which we obviously cannot promise everyone at the point where all these mills are being sold. But along with a pretty substantial cost reduction on the the cost of this mill and the beta program. And then afterwards, we have come up with a really nice model for everyone else and their business to profit off of this as well.

Ryan · 51:02

With a very competitive, well compensated wholesale program where everyone that has had personal experience with the mill can then teach others how to use it and to spread the skill and the availability of fresh ground matcha to more and more and more people. And we would really like to see this being organically LED community movement where there is no right or wrong way to do anything.

Ryan · 51:25

We can all learn like what are the cause and effect relationships in milling matcha from each other. And then, you know, everyone figures out how does that work best for me and my business or how does this work best for me and my consumers. And that there should be no right or wrong way to do anything.

Zongjun · 51:40

And to have a very inclusive, open minded community. Exactly. We are here to help, and we are also here to learn. Yeah, yeah. We're here to learn from you. We're here to, you know, have you alongside with us learn from the consumers too.

Zongjun · 51:56

Like we really want to create a very positive feedback loop to keep optimizing and keep innovating, you know, to for this machine and also for all of the other products that we want to create to make much of making a, a better future.

Ryan · 52:15

Yeah, no doubt. And even to learn from everyone too, about what other products we can make as we can reinvest in new product development. Because two years is a long time, Sam, you got to get that ball rolling. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Zongjun · 52:29

Well, hopefully the next product is less complicated than this one. I hope so. I hope. Probably not, Is a little. Bit big mess. A fair warning to all beta testers. Wow you should look at our lab. The amount of green powder that is everywhere now.

Zongjun · 52:50

It's pretty well contained. The machines aired, but still, it's a messy enterprise no matter how you're milling matcha, actually. Well, flying matcha powder is messy, but also it's a good sign. Yeah, if it's not flying out of the mill, you probably didn't mill it fine enough. It should be like snowing.

Zongjun · 53:05

Yeah, yeah. So it's painful and happy at the same time. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Quiet feeling. Wow. All good things take time, and all good things also require quite a bit of human hands, skill and knowledge, and Matcha is no exception, so it's for sure we can get very excited. For sure, for sure.

Ryan · 53:25

And we can't wait to visit everyone. We will not travel to all 15 beta testers, but the way we are going. To we want to trust me. We would love to, but from a time, resources and cash perspective, we are still a very small under resourced company at the moment. So please, please do be patient with us, but we're going to, we don't know the exact number, probably be around, we'll promise for the 1st, 6:00 to 8:00-ish beta testers that give us a down payment.

Ryan · 54:01

So basically you will secure your spot in line by giving a down payment or to to prepay for the mills so that we can afford to to run this factory run for all of these mills. And for the first people who paid either 6 or 8 will guarantee to come and do an in person implementation.

Zongjun · 54:22

And if it's geographically convenient like if you're in the same city as someone else. So we will also, of course, come. Yeah, can we do 9 right? Or 10 depends on airfare rates. But yeah, we're coming along with the machine. Yeah.

Ryan · 54:39

And we're also here to help with tencha sourcing as we are also looking to to source tencha. We want to keep it again open ecosystem. So all the matcha businesses that are involved in the beta program can totally not only can you sell on these machines in a wholesale capacity to your B to B accounts, but you can then get the reoccurring revenue of supplying your branded tencha to them.

Ryan · 55:02

And so we hope that the mill can create more economic value, significantly more economic value and then it could ever deliver to us directly. We want to see the world of matcha milling accessible and that means being able to mill any tencha from anyone, which is very important to us.

Ryan · 55:20

And so we really look forward. If you're interested in the beta program, please do reach out. We originally intended this podcast recording to be something closer to 10 minutes. We are now past one hour. Wait, really? We are time flies, OK, but we really wanted to put what we were working on in context and perhaps we indulged ourselves a little too much. A.

Zongjun · 55:40

Little too much. Thank you for listening if you made it this far. We really genuinely appreciate everyone that's helped us get this far and our goal is to really work together to create a better future for matcha. Yeah, Thank you for your patience for waiting so long for the machine and also waiting, listening so long for this episode of the podcast, which originally intended to just be an announcement, but we end up talking something very interesting. Ryan.

Ryan · 56:04

Yeah, even after like 5 failed attempts at trying to do this, we were like, oh, I don't like that framing. Oh, we don't like the way this sounds. Yeah. And we thought it was 10 minutes and you look at the clock. Wow. Well, we are excited. We are very excited and happy and honestly very relief at the moment.

Zongjun · 56:23

Yeah, relief is a really wonderful way of putting it. We please allow us to be a little bit indulged in this moment. Details to come soon. If you're interested, please e-mail us. I'd say in the next week or two, we'll have like physical documents with the details in including the cost.

Zongjun · 56:39

Apologies, we're not gonna put it in quite yet. There's still like one or two things that we need to double check before we can confirm it. But it will be more than $2000 and it will be cheaper than a $10,000 ishi-usu.

Ryan · 56:51

And that is the range that we're willing to say and it will probably be pretty close to the center of that, but we need to make sure that we're not making some serious mistakes by underpricing. Yeah. Otherwise, we have to change the company into an NGO status.

Zongjun · 57:06

We definitely need to be able to sort of repay our debts and also have enough capital to reinvest in new future product development. We see this as a gigantic snowball that we wanna get rolling and really listen to everyone and what everyone's needs are.

Ryan · 57:22

Yeah, this mill and the bowl is a start, but there are many other matcha making tools yet to come. Yeah, and it's a future we're super excited for. Again, thank you so much. We're actually grateful. We're grateful to our partners. We're grateful to everyone who's helped. We're grateful that this machine works. Thank God or whatever matcha God, thank you. Thank you.

Zongjun · 57:43

So we'll see you on the next one. Yeah, see you in the future.