Our Startup Updates

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan and this is Zongjun Li who also goes by Sam. Hello and we're the co-founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha share startup stories and integral experts. And today we're talking about our startup updates. So it's been a while since we've posted, and we've been less regular than we've hoped to be.

Ryan · 0:31

Sorry, sorry, sorry, hope to have been. I should say, I think we went about 75 episodes that were nearly weekly on a continuous basis, which I was very proud of. So we've been a bit less regular lately, and it's largely due to Sanko Matcha Products, which is our startup. And you know, part of our intro, we promised to talk about the startup stories and we've realized it's been a while. We've talked about what we are doing as a company and that we owed everyone some updates.

Zongjun · 1:01

Yeah, that's right. Has been a lot of ongoing holidays in China, which really makes some logistic more complicated. But thankfully everything has been solved. Yes, we are going to see this prototype in the very beautiful state very soon, which is very exciting. Yeah.

Ryan · 1:19

So for those of you that don't know, we run and founded the company Sanko Matcha Products along with our cofounder Gwen. And our goal is to raise the ceiling of what consumers can or should consider high quality matcha. And a huge part of that mission is to give businesses and cafes, the agency, the equipment, the knowledge to create matcha as a product much closer to their consumers.

Ryan · 1:48

Because there is no such thing as the world's best matcha. It's really the world's best matcha for whom, at what time, in what circumstances, in which context, and to what their preferences are. And there's like a million best matchas in the world. And the people that can find them are the people that know their consumers the best, which are people who are in their local geography.

Zongjun · 2:12

And one of the biggest quality barriers is just a fresh product. There's a massive difference between matcha that was milled on day one versus 2 weeks versus two months versus 18 months. That's totally right, and you're also totally right about there's no world's best matcha, but there could be world's freshest matcha, which is the matcha milled right in front of. You and there are tons of benefits to that from a from a flavor perspective, you can immediately tell the difference even between day one and day 2 can be massive on a lot of the matcha that we've milled in our prototyping. Not to mention even the

Ryan · 2:51

nutritional benefits. What we're going to record a separate podcast in the future that is sort of like how we would advocate for matcha as a fresh ground product and why everyone should be drinking fresher and fresher matcha.

Ryan · 3:02

And just in the same way that the coffee industry, especially the 3rd wave movement and specialty coffee, etcetera, like early days, Blue Bottle, Intelligentsia, Counterculture, Stump Town really pushed the idea of coffee as a fresh food, as a perishable food, as a food you would want to or a beverage, a beverage that you would want to know when it was roasted, a beverage that was made from coffee beans that were only fresh ground, not have been ground you didn't even know when and then brewed because oxygen and surface area and air do their magic. They create oxidation and off flavors and destroy a lot of the health benefits.

Ryan · 3:43

And matcha is 10 times finer than a ground for espresso, which is sort of the context space that we're operating in. And unfortunately, nearly all of the matcha grinding equipment are at the industrial scale. It's not anything that would look good on your countertop. There's really only one form.

Zongjun · 4:02

Of matcha grinding equipment which is ishi-usu. That's that, at least from a gold standard perspective. Yeah. And also, well, aesthetically looks kind of cool to have that sitting over your countertop. But it's just especially for the situation right now, so complicated and expensive to get your hands on one of them.

Ryan · 4:25

And you most likely will be put on a very very very long wait list. And then if you don't know what you're doing, which will be most people for the first time, you're going to need to get it refinished more often than not.

Zongjun · 4:37

Yeah. And there's a very high risk, especially if you're using random tensile, that that soft granite is going to get damaged in some way. So typically for new users, probably it's going to have to go through a refinishing process anywhere from one year to every two or three years. And that requires shipping about 50kg of granite back to Japan to get put on another wait list to have a stone mason refinish it for you.

Ryan · 5:04

So it's awesome that there's so many cafes that are getting these traditional stone mills all over the world. But from an environmental standpoint, from a practicality standpoint, it's just not very scalable. That's true. Also like one piece of interesting information we learned recently, not verified yet, but we we've been seeing like this very interesting looking ishi-usu you've been running in some cafes recently, which has this darker color that's a little bit different from the Japanese ishi-usu and they're Chinese made.

Zongjun · 5:35

And the key difference between them, not to talk about the quality of the product coming out from it, but the mill itself, is that the stone that they use is not natural granite. It's actually a type of synthetic stone which shares more similarity to a concrete. It's a composite.

Zongjun · 5:53

It's a composite. Supposes though we need to verify this still, but we have it on decent authority that they're composite stone. We also had primary experience tasting the product coming out, which as an usucha has some texture problems. Yeah, but but for this type of composite stone, you can use a machine to cut it and finish it, whereas for a natural granite there are some natural cracks inside the stone which will not withstand a very high pressure machine cutting. Like CNC like.

Ryan · 6:25

CNC it's you know, that's why you know, all of these Japanese stones are usually finished with stone masons. And it's a very protected craft in Japan. So anyway, it's the company that we're working on in the product. We have been working on this product for over 2 years now or just about exactly 2 years from when we like really hit the ground running. The idea is 3 years old of kind of copying the physics of an ishi-usu and shrinking it and putting it on a machine that would look good on the countertop, that could produce a very similar quality standard as an ishi-usu, but faster with a lighter machine and with some

Ryan · 7:08

benefits that you you don't get. It's much smaller footprint, you have a lot more control. We put sensors all over it so you can control the speed. You can see what's going on with the temperature. You have swappable millstone, so no big deal. There's no shipping 50kg of granite back. So from a maintenance perspective, it's much more economically viable.

Ryan · 7:29

If your stone breaks, we will send you a new one the made with a very durable type of ceramic. So that's what we've been working on. So in October, we launched a beta program because what the machine that we're creating is new technology and that needs to be battle tested and there needs to be a lot of co learnings. Like if we were, I don't know a coffee grinder company, right, like most of our customers would have had experience with other coffee grinders and grinding coffee before. But because matcha is such a protected craft, very few people have any direct knowledge or experience milling matcha themselves or understanding

Ryan · 8:07

quality standards or blending tencha, what works at certain different parameter settings. So we wanted to create a group of tight knit early users, early adopters that we're calling our beta program. We found 15 fantastic people all over the world representing over 8 different countries.

Ryan · 8:26

And we are right now here now in April 2026 and the final stages of getting these things to life out to be manufactured and assembled. And it is just been a whirlwind the past two months of bringing this thing to life. And I have you to thank Sam, who's been here in China.

Zongjun · 8:51

It's the first time we're manufacturing such a complex product that is not like would be very complicated, let alone for the fact that we're doing it for the first time. Yeah. It's not just we are doing it for the first time, it's anyone doing it for the first time.

Zongjun · 9:05

That's right. It's actually turns out to be a quite complicated machine to engineer and manufacturer in the 1st place. And especially so because all of these suppliers and factories and our design partners have never seen a type of machine like this before.

Zongjun · 9:21

Yeah, we're not just making another like Mr. Coffee Pot or something. Yeah, there's nothing we can in reference. There's no comparables. Yeah, exactly. So we are Co discovering a lot of interesting problems to solve and which made the whole journey very intellectually intrigued. At the same time, you know, it's it's, it's quite complicated to work through all of these weeds.

Ryan · 9:45

A lot of dependencies and a lot of complexity, especially with the electronics component. So like we have a thermoelectric cooling system that's constantly removing heat. We iterated through I don't even know how many versions of ceramic mill stones, but to find things that work shockingly complex science actually, the number of harps that you have, which determine the angle and number of grooves, the depths of the grooves of the geometry, the concavity, there's a the surface finish. There's so many different variables that make millstones effective or ineffective, and even in other industries like milling grain, it is very much

Zongjun · 10:22

still kind of considered more of an art than a science. Yeah, it's or, or more of the empirical science. Yeah, the the the way to kind of examinate how these particles actually gets a process through all of these mill surfaces are actually quite intricate and sometimes impossible.

Zongjun · 10:43

So very hard to learn what's actually happening, you know, in between these very hot and fast spinning. You know. Plates. We spent an abnormal amount of time envisioning ourselves as a tiny flake of green tea moving through this system.

Zongjun · 11:00

I dream about it. All right, it's going down the hopper. It's trying not to get stuck getting pulverized and slowly pushed out to the edges like the migration paths and the and not to mention too like it's not really talked about when you learn about matcha in Japan.

Zongjun · 11:19

The idea of different like angles, the idea of surface finish, the idea of cavity, how tencha doesn't get stuck when it moves from the hopper into the plates, the migration path once it's in the plates like it's really under talked about.

Zongjun · 11:37

Which we actually develop a very specific component in the mill to solve that clogging problem, which we probably will talk about it in. After it's successfully patented, we have a lot of hard one lessons. We are all for transparency in general, as I'm sure all the regular listeners of the Specialty Matcha Podcast are aware. But one of the reasons we haven't talked about the Mill quite as much is because these lessons are very hard one. And we're not quite ready to talk about them publicly, at least until this thing is out in the world and all the IP is a little more secure.

Zongjun · 12:14

Because we went through way too much pain and way too much money to give someone a playbook to, to make this quite yet. We are happy for competitors so long as they're not just directly copying what we're doing. This is would be unfair competition as far as we see it, at least at the moment. So it's a it's been a whirlwind and we're so excited among the 15 people, we promised the first seven that we would go do an in person implementation for the first seven people who who gave the prepayment.

Zongjun · 12:44

So we'll be going to a couple places in the States and we're going to announce the full list later. So we're psyched. And while we're there, you know, we would love to host matcha meet ups and kind of be a little more community thing and we'd love to sort of make an event of it. Yeah, really puts a smile on my face that this list is so like, random, all these like places in the world, like really is a good manifestation of how matcha has spread. Indeed, it's very exciting and to have such a diverse group of users to some.

Zongjun · 13:22

Some are owning cafes, some are tea companies, right? Like some are matcha distributors. So just even getting a large depth and breadth just for us as our own. Like, like, like if we view this conversation from the lens of a startup and our go to market strategy and trying to create what is economically viable, sustainable and what we hope to be quite successful company is just understanding how everything is going to be used.

Zongjun · 13:51

And we're we're so excited that we could find a group of fantastic individuals that were like minded. It's so understanding. We've we've had to delay this manufacturing a few times and everyone has been nothing but gracious and nice and understanding and we are just incredibly grateful. Yeah.

Ryan · 14:09

Thank you, thank you, thank you. They say hardware is hard, but wow, hardware is hard and hardware is expensive. It is. It's hard on our wallet. Even with the prepayments that this is very challenging to to get over the finish line, we're very happy to do it.

Ryan · 14:25

And I mean we're creating the future that we would like to see. I mean, I really think it's a shame that probably 80% of the world's matcha, maybe higher, is probably more stale than it needs to be. And it's just absolutely crazy that we live in 2026 and it is nearly impossible to get a fresh ground product.

Ryan · 14:45

Most matcha founders have never tried matcha straight off the mill like it, like most of the people who are doing this education all over the world that's created this crazy demand for matcha. That's created these morning rituals that have become so meaningful.

Zongjun · 15:03

And so many people's lives just don't have access to large parts of the way that matcha gets crafted to understand that flavor transformation and to like get a little closer to the process. Yeah, and even people in Japan like, it's pretty incredible that how inaccessible fresh crab matcha is even in its home country.

Zongjun · 15:29

We're actually pretty happy that a few mills are going to be, you know, based in Japan, too. Yes, and it's really making a grand homecoming to bring this idea back to, you know, where it's from. And we are pretty excited to, you know, really empower people in Japan underground to, you know, keep making more innovations, you know, using our tools to help them learn or discover more about this very beautiful product they they have created.

Zongjun · 15:58

Also helped move the ball. And I personally see this as a great accomplishment when we win over the people in Japan when they use the machine. Indeed. And all the positive feedback and interest that we've gotten from people we've met there, it's very exciting.

Zongjun · 16:13

We hope to move the ball forward too. Like it's, I think innovation like this isn't talked about so much among the Japanese tea industry and community. So the idea that all these places that could potentially be fresh milling matcha or fresh milling even something like gyokuro or finishing their own tencha by giving it a light roast or something, and really participate in the craft of making it not only domestically but internationally too.

Zongjun · 16:41

Yeah, that's right. And one thing that really surprised me is that we end up getting a lot of attention and interest from farmers in Japan, which we kind of accidentally stumbled upon. A very interesting problem amongst the tea farmers and the tea manufacturing communities in Japan is that a lot of these milling capacities, matcha milling capacities in Japan are centralized and controlled by a very few blend houses or local factories that are not equally accessible by all the farmers in Japan.

Zongjun · 17:13

So a lot of these farmers just do not have the money and the capacity to own any milling equipment or own any land they'll construct any milling facilities. So this machine will actually be very useful for them to make, enable them to have more liberty into investing more in perfecting their products or making interesting new innovations or new products. Absolutely.

Zongjun · 17:38

So we're very excited to get these out into the world. So moving through dependency and rate limiting step by rate limiting step, I mean it's challenging. Not only is this there's no like comparable products to what we're making, like we're not making an espresso machine or something that people kind of have some understanding of the way these things are put together.

Zongjun · 17:58

But like we're small company in our first order will be just for a total of 20 mills because we need to fulfill everything from the beta program and we make a few extra that are based basically sales demo units and some to sit in the warehouse in case someone's breaks, we can kind of hot swap it.

Ryan · 18:14

And you know, we're a small player and you know, when you're talking to all these different manufacturings, just even getting prioritized is it takes a lot of pushing. And that's one reason why we have been significantly less regular with the podcast is Sam has just been pretty heads down, constantly trying to move the ball forward here to make sure that there's no abnormal delays. And we understand what the dependencies are and where we can push and how we can push.

Ryan · 18:40

And, and you know, we're still not even on time. So it's, it's honestly, it's I, it's very frustrating, Well, having so little control. It's OK, you're in good hands, right? But it's, yeah, it's, it's quite complicated to manage 28 different suppliers at once.

Zongjun · 18:57

And there are politics between these suppliers, which is, you know, kind of requires some art of guanxi to, to, to make sure everyone is, you know, like being accountable at the same time, you know, willing to work with us continuously.

Zongjun · 19:13

Yeah. And really investing in these relationships for the future. I was, you know, we think that this is just sort of the beginning of what can be what we hope to be a rich ecosystem of matcha infrastructure to allow to give other people agency and the infrastructure to do other cool things to craft a fantastic product.

Zongjun · 19:34

We're not exactly sure what that's going to look like in the future. We are way too in this like tunnel to to think or be, you know, more creative. I mean, this next year is going to be our go to market year for Sanko Usu One, which is the name of our mill.

Zongjun · 19:50

So that's that's going to be full time for a while, but we'd love to innovate on top of this and see where this all goes. There is this very culturally rich community out there in the world of matcha that just constantly innovating and envisioning things that we probably never thought of or could have thought of because of, you know, their cultural background, their ethnic background and all of these wonderful things that makes matcha so unique and so delicious. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan · 20:23

So, Ryan, you've been working on something very interesting recently. Yeah. So unfortunately I don't speak much Chinese, so I'm a bit less useful, other than bothering Sam to bother everyone else, which says sometimes productive, sometimes unproductive.

Zongjun · 20:39

It's a good thing we've worked with each other for more than 10 years. So there was, I'm pretty sure. I will be driving each other crazy. But I know my limits. I know your limits. I'd like to think that I stop before I drive you too crazy.

Ryan · 20:53

Oh, you just need to buy me a very nice drink. But I, I've been working on a couple projects to move the ball forward to create what we hope to be useful tools for the community. And something we've talked about quite a bit on this podcast is, so both Sam and I, before we started this company, worked at a startup before ChatGPT at the intersection of AI, sensory, sensory science, and the science of taste and smell, food and beverage product development.

Ryan · 21:22

We primarily worked with really large companies and understanding consumer preference models. And we created a predictive model that you could put in any combination of flavor, aromas and textures and the model would predict what consumer demographic would like it, how much would they like it, who among that group would like it, and different ways of improving it for them.

Ryan · 21:42

So part of that work involved collecting a lot of consumer preference data for different combinations of flavor, aroma and texture. I mean, both Sam and I got to live what I considered the best, one of the most interesting jobs in the world that I could have ever envisioned myself having is just going from country to country, city to city, recruiting anywhere from 100 to thousands of consumers to taste all of these different products. And we were doing this on a particular sensory system that was very proprietary to the company. And we spent the last, I don't know, 5:00 to eight-year 5 for you, 8 for me years working on a

Ryan · 22:18

sensory tool to capture flavor Roman texture experience products that we no longer have access to, which was a little frustrating starting this company because sensory is so important in creating good matcha even for us to we want to be able to track in a quantitative way.

Ryan · 22:36

If we are milling at 10 RPMS versus 20 RPMS versus 30 RPM, but you're generating different amounts of feet, you're changing fundamentally the migration velocity of tea through the mill, which can change the taste in non predictable ways.

Ryan · 22:52

I mean, we needed a way to really measure what was going on, so we didn't have access to the tool. And then recently, with all of the explosion of AI tools for coding online, I realized that all I needed was a good scope on what the software needed to be and look like, and I can now code it myself with these tools. And so for the past month, I've been working on a tool, which I'm calling Matcha Graph, which is a sensory system to collect what you perceive from flavor, aroma, and texture in matcha and what your preferences are.

Ryan · 23:26

And it's the system that we are using to evaluate and make experiments on our mill. But we're also doing it for a wide variety of all of the matchas that we're just trying and have even talked about on the Specialty Matcha Podcast.

Ryan · 23:40

And a part of this development, I created a little community page where people can actually share their tasting notes. And what's beautiful about this community page is that a very thin layer of AI on top of all of this, it will create really powerful recommendations. So you know it knows what you rated and what you taste and what you liked it and how you described it, and also knows that of all of the other people.

Ryan · 24:08

And a very thin layer of AI on top can points you in certain directions saying, you know, you really like these Hoshino village roasty, toasty notes. You know, Ryan me reviewed something from Nagasaki from Kirari 31 cultivar that was produced in a method where it was both steamed and pan fried at the same time that exhibited the same hazelnut note that you absolutely loved in this other tea and has the same basic profile. And unless you went through every single review, you just, I didn't know that.

Zongjun · 24:43

Yeah. And also, like I found this tool exceptionally useful in a way that it really like kind of solve the difficulty or the inertia of just doing a review. Yes, like all of these sensory reviews out there, like at worst a piece of like spreadsheet that you have to fill, which is very, very painful. Or at best, like a, you know, a semi functional app that you still need to click around to think about all of the entries and all of the things alongside, you know, keep sipping this product in front of you.

Zongjun · 25:18

Or you're using a Google form and then you're stuck with all the data in the spreadsheet and you have to figure out all of the data visualization on your own. Yeah, but you know, with also a very thin layer of AI, but you can just like type or even talk to the software and then it will figure out all of the implications of, you know, flavors and flavor intensities for you.

Ryan · 25:41

And obviously you can make adjustment after, you know it presented the resulting analysis to you before you crystallize it into a a final review. But it's just so much easier. It's incredible. We're going to do a full podcast episode on Matcha Graph when we release it.

Ryan · 25:58

It's we're a couple weeks away from doing it, but essentially it uses LLMS and you give it natural language description of what you're tasting. You can say it tastes. This is a super umami bomb. It has really nice roast and toasty notes. I get a hint of maybe zucchini and edamame vegetable notes mixed creamy.

Ryan · 26:17

It has the richness of unsalted butter. I'm also getting some notes of nori and this delicate white flower note. And it will take that and it will guess and it gets it about 80% right about how intense you might find the bitterness or the umami.

Ryan · 26:35

And then you can. It also structures all those other notes and the beauty of having both quantified as well or quantitative data, like saying I taste bitterness at a level of two on a scale of five, right? As well as qualitative, like your natural description.

Ryan · 26:55

The way you would talk about it to someone else is that it really allows us to see to put some really cool data visualization. So for example, if you want to review someone's premium ceremonial grade versus their standard ceremonial grade, you can just put those graphs on top of each other and see exactly how different they are.

Ryan · 27:18

And there's sort of a I've also built a Venn diagram feature to see what flavors they have in common and which ones they have that are separate, but also some much more complicated features to help you discover your own preferences.

Ryan · 27:31

So this is the most powerful feature for me is it looks at everything that you've ever tasted in a particular category like usucha, or you could set it to latte or whatever, and it looks at multivariate interactions on your preferences. So when a creamy flavor, which is that would be under dairy, is present with let's say a roasted flavor, if you look at all those reviews and compare the average preference score compared to all of your reviews, is it higher or lower? So in other words, if it is both creamy and roasted, are you more or less likely to like the product? And you can learn about your own

Ryan · 28:11

preferences like, and there's some really non intuitive ones for me, the more I've used that tool. So it's going to be community based. We're also going to make it groups where you can form different tasting groups and you basically set up panels.

Ryan · 28:23

So if you're a large group of people, you can pre enter in what all the detail is. You can make it blinded, unblinded. And so we're currently, the software is like 90% finished and we're in the late stages of testing. And because obviously I'm not a programmer, but I've spent the last decade, what feels like the last decade of my life thinking about what sensory software should look like. I'd like to think that we're at least qualified to have made on the front end of it.

Zongjun · 28:50

And also the intention of, you know, polishing this tool is that it's useful for us. Yes, we first and foremost built it for ourselves because we needed a solution to keep track of flavor and to visualize it and to compare it for this mill and for everyone that's part of the beta program.

Zongjun · 29:07

It's so much easier instead of like sharing freeform notes, to share quantifiable data, especially if we link it with data from milling parameters. Then we can really help move the craft of making matcha into the future.

Zongjun · 29:23

Because who cares that you set it at this pressure in this RPM if you don't know how it made it taste better or worse. Like it's all comes down to sensory. Isn't that like the whole point of like why we're drinking this is to make it taste better and better and better to the grease, to the degrees to which we can control it?

Ryan · 29:43

So this we're super excited about. The other project I've been working on is something called the Tencha Exchange, which will be a B2B tencha trading platform. And so we're going to sell tencha on it as well. But we're going to open it up to other people to sell tencha as well to sort of do cross business commerce because it's just so difficult buying tencha right now.

Ryan · 30:03

And the reality is if you are a major customer of matcha at the moment or tencha at the moment, like we know people that import like many metric tons of matcha a year, they will always be prioritized before us unless we grow huge.

Ryan · 30:21

So their ability of how much and even what they can order is very different than if you haven't built up any transaction history with farmers in Japan. So if you're just entering in the door because of this matcha shortage, maybe they'll sell you, I don't know, 3 to 5 kilos a month.

Ryan · 30:40

But someone who's already ordering 100 or 200 or 300 kilos a month has the ability to order much larger quantities even than that because they've been doing that for like 6 years. And so we hope to make this a platform where they're able to make some money, but they're also able to unlock some tencha supply for people that are mill owners that are in a less established business or sort of these win win ecosystem interactions. So we're working on that.

Ryan · 31:09

It doesn't have a launch date yet. And last but not least, and we're going to record some stuff about this is we have alluded to this for over one year now. Zongjun and I have been pretty intensely researching a piece about what is Uji matcha? Which turns out to be an insanely complicated question to answer.

Ryan · 31:30

And I was polishing up my article was supposed to be a blog post and then we're going to record a podcast turned into a 33 page document. So I'm not exactly sure how we're publishing it yet, probably. But at the start of Season 4, we will publish at least 2 episodes dedicated to answering the very complicated question of what is Uji matcha, what was Uji matcha, and perhaps even what should Uji matcha be. And that, of course, would be more of an opinion piece. Yeah.

Zongjun · 32:02

We do along the way learn about all of these, you know, compromises and political complexities on the ground that really kind of made the current status quo of Uji matcha inevitable, which is kind of the sad reality we are facing.

Zongjun · 32:21

But for those of you that you know, maybe haven't back listened where we were referring to this research that we've been doing Uji matcha, it doesn't mean that it's from Uji. It doesn't mean that it was even processed in Uji.

Zongjun · 32:34

Uji is a very small place that has about 35 active farming families, but the legal realities are it can produce IP 37 metric tons of Matensha a year and they put that into perspective. Japan produces for about 4000 and the amount of Uji matcha that's sold is very likely in the number of 1500 metric tons. So it is just a very small percentage. Less than 1%.

Ryan · 33:12

Well, it's, it's about 1%. Actually it's about 1 to 2% depending on what assumptions you make. But actually it's worse than that. It's because almost all of the Uji families with very few exceptions. I think we can count the exceptions on perhaps one hand or close to one hand, send almost all of their volume to the large wholesalers like the traditional blend houses that are every I'm sure everyone listening is aware of who blend it with tea from other regions.

Ryan · 33:42

So the amount of true single origin matcha from Uji grown tencha is probably way less than 1% sold because even the farmers that do keep some a single origin, it is way less than 50% of what they produce. And it's a very complicated and interesting story of sort of the because at one time actually all matcha had to come from Uji by like decree.

Ryan · 34:10

It was illegal for it to come from anywhere else. It's a state controlled monopoly called Ujishisha man. And then that changed and evolved over time. I mean, there's all sorts of interesting things from a food labeling scandal to a UNESCO bid to ancient fertilizing practices. It's even to even to a beef labeling scandal that led to the modern definition of what Uji matcha has evolved into. And there's all of these different people that disagree with each other.

Ryan · 34:43

There's so many different perspectives. It is fascinating. Like there are some people that believe it should be GI protected single origin. There's some people that believe it should just be the Yamashiro region, which are like the eight towns around Uji, which include like Ujitawara, Joyo, Wazuka. And defenders of that narrative, like a lot of people will say Wazuka matcha is Uji matcha, right?

Ryan · 35:11

And there's also farmers in Wazuka that say Wazuka is Wazuka, it's not Uji. So even within the same place, you have very different perspectives. And obviously people actually in Uji I think is the most strongly opinion in this situation.

Zongjun · 35:29

But yeah, like by and large, Uji matcha doesn't mean it's from Uji. It doesn't really mean it's from Japan either. Technically not. Technically not, so we've. All heard of this big argument about like whether or not matcha should really be Japan, a Japanese product, which I think intellectually I would say that you know, matcha is inherently Japanese.

Zongjun · 35:56

It's even in the name, right? That the spelling the romanization of matcha is based on the Japanese language, but in reality matcha came from China, which was called mocha at the time to Japan. And to this day there are still large amount of matcha or if we want to call it mocha or powder green tea being manufactured in China too.

Zongjun · 36:18

And there is this whole argument, like between Japanese and Chinese or between consumers who will side either with the Japanese or with the Chinese or with none of these parties, you know, just enjoying this whole turmoil and fight, sipping matcha on the side. But in reality is that the Chinese and the Japanese have always been working with each other, creating matcha. There's so many farms.

Ryan · 36:46

Well, not always. Let's say in the past like 3 decades. Yeah, which is, you know, after the Cultural Revolution, modern China, I should say that. China didn't create matcha for like 700 years. 800 years. Yeah, it was like a. Contemporary thing it.

Zongjun · 37:04

Was it was also by decreed band? Quite the opposite actually. By by the 1st emperor of Ming dynasty. But that's another very interesting topic that we can talk about in the future. But anyways, in modern China, the Japanese and the Chinese have always been working with each other to set up factories and farms to produce matcha.

Zongjun · 37:26

And, and actually some of the top quality matcha currently being produced in China are Japanese owned. So there is this very interesting dynamic and cultural and economic exchange between these two countries. And now it's also slowly spreading into other countries as well, such as Thailand and even, you know, countries in Africa like Kenya. And Korea and.

Zongjun · 37:50

Korea and Sri Lanka, Vietnam. So, you know, we are really not just seeing a globalization of matcha consumption, but also matcha production, which is, you know, some people will see this as kind of a sad future. Some people celebrate it.

Zongjun · 38:11

But I would say that matcha has been international since the beginning. He was coming from China in the beginning, and it was a wonderful, wonderful cultural exchange between the two great civilizations in the past. Yeah, it's transcended its original thing.

Ryan · 38:25

It's like sushi. Like, why are we passing judgement on someone having like, convenience store sushi in like Peru or something, right? Like sushi has just become like, it's really its own unique identity. Actually, there's a really interesting is is an article and maybe it was a YouTube documentary about sushi in Ukraine and why it really took root in Ukraine really very early. And they did a lot of local adaptation, and it's still just incredibly popular and it's kind of blended itself into contemporary culture.

Ryan · 39:00

Was it because of like Japanese immigrants or like, why would they? Forget the details, I need to look them up again. OK, wow, that's fascinating. But what's really weird, I actually have some personal experience with this. My grandfather and I took the train when I was 13 years old from Vienna, Austria to Odessa, Ukraine. It's like 36 hours on a sleeper car with shared with like four other people.

Ryan · 39:29

No air conditioning in the summer. It's quite, quite the adventure. But I remember when we got to Odessa, we, I, I was tired. I'm sure he was very tired. I was like, you know, grandpa, what are we going to eat? He's like anything you want. I think he just, like, wanted to stop walking. I picked the nearest thing.

Zongjun · 39:46

So we walked into a hotel. We had sushi. And I was like, oh, that sushi sounds good. So my first meal in Odessa was sushi at a hotel. And I remember thinking, wow, this is weird. It was good. It was good. But it's interesting how, like, you know, these two cultures take root in other places in ways that you can't even fully appreciate. Even within the case of sushi, sushi's actually Chinese invention that made its way Japan. Same with ramen.

Ryan · 40:20

That's the other thing. Shocking number of things that are actually Chinese origin. Since the Han dynasty. So it's, yeah, it's much more internationalized, but that's what we've been working on. And we're trying to work on things that can help lead to a more successful future of the craft of matcha leaving Japan's borders.

Ryan · 40:42

And whether or not it's measuring flavor and communicating what you like and discovering new things that you might like more other than some mislabeled town of quote UN quote, Uji matcha all the way through some matcha exchange platforms to to make it easier for people to buy and sell.

Zongjun · 40:59

And of course, probably not. Probably, definitely the most important is getting this mill out into the world ASAP. Which? I heard you. I heard you. We are in the final innings of doing. We're recording this year in China and we're going to be here the next few weeks and then we're going to head to Japan for harvest season.

Zongjun · 41:18

We're going to pick some tea in Uji Prefecture for a couple days and record a bunch of content around that. And of course, keep everyone updated with the launch of these mills and produce more content on it and hopefully get some more guests on pretty soon. We have unfortunately completely run out of our backlog. That's why we've had a couple of weeks where we weren't able to post, but we hope to be on a bit more regular schedule now we're both physically in the same place. It's a little bit easier to coordinate recordings. So thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for your support. It wasn't for the Specialty

Ryan · 41:56

Matcha podcast. I don't think we would have able to find so many like minded people who are willing to go on this journey with us by pre purchasing a mill and you know, really help form the foundations. And we hope to be a big and thriving community of what we hope are the early stages of a major wave of specialty matcha hitting every cafe near you. Yep.

Zongjun · 42:19

Oh, stay tuned. Wish us luck and we'll be putting our full gears into content and also this mill production and we wish to see you very soon. And we wish, on behalf of our machine, to see you very soon. Yeah, we hope the future is bright green and thanks for listening. And if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it the friend. We really appreciate your listenership and we'll see you next week.

Ryan · 42:47

Next week. Next week, I promise. Bye bye.