Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / Currency of Trust

Transcript

Currency of Trust · Specialty Matcha Podcast

0:07
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast.
0:09
My name is Ryan and this is Michael Hozunjun and also goes
0:12
by Sam. Hello.
0:13
Hello. And we're the Co founders of
0:15
Sanko Matcha products. We launched this podcast to
0:17
discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories
0:20
and interview experts, And today we're going to talk about the
0:24
currency of trust. Have you ever lied to me, Ryan?
0:31
Yeah, I'm to confess. Only when it's convenient.
0:34
But no, we wanted to talk about the undercurrent that is so
0:40
prominent in our industry within matcha and tea in general.
0:44
And that's trust. And that's really the currency
0:47
that we all trade in from consumer to brand interaction.
0:51
We trust that a brand is going to deliver on its promises.
0:55
We trust that they know that the claims that they make are
1:00
factual and true. We trust large institutional
1:03
blend houses that when we buy a poetically named product that
1:06
it's going to taste the same every year, season after season
1:10
because they're masters of blending.
1:11
We need to trust the organizations that regulate our
1:15
industry. And perhaps most importantly,
1:17
when it comes to sourcing matcha, we need to have trust
1:21
within the value chain and within the supply chain or.
1:24
Should you be trusting them? Yeah.
1:28
How do you cultivate your own trust and how do you judge
1:33
whether or not you should trust others?
1:35
Mistrust is not a binary thing, right?
1:37
Like Sam, I can trust like any random person.
1:40
Let's say we work at a fifty person company.
1:43
We can probably trust pick any random employee that they're not
1:46
going to steal from the company. All right, That's relatively
1:49
uncommon. We can probably trust that there
1:52
are not a fraud and that their degree on their resume they
1:56
actually have, but you have more subtle forms of trust.
1:59
Could I trust them to handle a sales call with a very important
2:04
customer, right. That's a form of trust in
2:06
getting to know someone. Could I trust them to close a
2:09
deal? Could I trust them to uphold our
2:12
culture and onboard a new employee?
2:15
So trust is really a spectrum, and these judgments that get
2:18
passed back and forth is really the underlying currency of the
2:23
Japanese tea industry. It's not so much about money,
2:27
it's about relationships and the people that you know and are
2:29
willing to work with. Yeah.
2:31
And these trusts don't come they, they, they don't
2:37
necessarily come as a default. It's a really, you know,
2:41
construct upon credibility. And this credibility usually
2:45
comes after a pretty long period of time of relationship dealing
2:51
with each other and and that there's almost you almost always
2:57
start with a negative trust when you're dealing, you know, with
3:01
with the relationships here. There's that famous Soviet line,
3:05
Trust but verify. There's some contact during the
3:10
Cold War, but I don't know if it's that extreme, but it's
3:13
certainly the case. And just to make the Super
3:15
tangible, say you want to start a new matcha brand tomorrow and
3:18
you're searching for potential suppliers.
3:20
The Japanese tea industry is not an industry that's for new
3:24
customers. There is a macho shortage.
3:26
There is way more demand than there is supply.
3:29
So how do you decide who to sell T to?
3:32
How do you decide to take on a new client?
3:35
It's all about the values that you have and whether or not you
3:38
can trust your values at least to some extent of align with the
3:42
people that you're selling to, especially to Western brands.
3:45
It's really not that uncommon for Westerners or foreigners or
3:51
anyone actually outside of Japan to come in and be requested not
3:55
to reveal the sourcing information.
3:57
There's a lot of farmers, a lot of very famous farmers actually,
4:00
that will not let you use their name to represent them and their
4:05
products, whatever brand or stage that you're standing.
4:09
On yeah, I mean like once the tea is out of Japan is basically
4:13
out of their control. Actually out of their warehouse
4:15
is out of their control and they have no idea how their tea will
4:19
be represented or, you know, be prepared or be consumed or
4:23
perceived by the end consumers. The trust, you know, like by
4:28
revealing their identity, that forms a association with a
4:32
different brand. You're basically bounding
4:35
yourself with their reputation, which is, you know, like a
4:38
pretty, you know, serious consideration with you.
4:42
You're basically handing your own company life to a different
4:46
entity that will be representing you overseas.
4:49
And so like when you want a source, it's all about trust
4:54
building in the beginning in Japan, there's very few, maybe
4:58
even when we started, you know, meeting producers before the
5:03
matcha boom, I guess about a year ago, year and a half, in
5:07
2024 and 23, it was a little bit more transactional.
5:12
There are some of the larger players that would hand you a
5:14
price list and you could order what you want.
5:16
And maybe there was some sales pressure.
5:18
But this is completely evaporated.
5:20
The degree to which the currency is no longer money and is now
5:25
trust is growing and growing and growing.
5:28
And probably it's going to be that way for a long time.
5:31
But it's so much more than supply to like especially when
5:35
we talk about the specialty matcha movement, we have these
5:38
influx of newbies entering a very traditional industry trying
5:43
to source product and then putting different lens on top of
5:47
it, in particular this single origin concept or a single
5:51
cultivar concept. So you have brands coming in
5:54
trying to source Uji matcha, for example, and you have that being
5:58
represented all over the world as a single origin product.
6:02
But it's actually not very widely known, I don't think even
6:05
very widely known in Japan, but especially not abroad, that
6:09
almost all uji matcha does not come from uji grown tensha.
6:13
In fact, it doesn't even need to be processed in uji.
6:16
It needs to be processed in Kyoto Prefecture.
6:18
And in fact, the leaves don't even need to come from Kyoto
6:21
Prefecture. They can totally be legally
6:23
allowed to come from Nara, Shige or Mie neighboring prefectures.
6:27
So you know, we know of a lot of brands that label and sell Uji
6:33
matcha as a single origin product where we know that
6:38
they're not getting their tensha or that tea is not coming from
6:43
35 ish families that still produce tea in Uji.
6:48
So calling that a single origin product by most people's modern
6:53
understanding, by most people's parlance, semantic understanding
6:56
of this word is a form of mismarketing.
7:00
Yeah, but this is a very interesting phenomenon, right?
7:03
Like Ryan, who do we blame to? Like who is lying to who?
7:07
Yeah, that's exactly this is. Very like, like it's almost like
7:13
people are not like aligned with their expectation and their
7:17
communication, right? Like the people in Wuji are
7:20
doing their own thing. They've been planting tea for
7:23
centuries and that's their way of understanding of what Wuji
7:27
tea is. And you know, they were not
7:29
trying to lie to anybody. There wasn't even a single
7:32
origin concept back in, you know, the ancient time.
7:36
And now all of a sudden, you know, like all these people
7:40
coming outside of Japan come into Fuji and start telling them
7:44
that, you know, they have been lying, you know, with a very
7:49
different concept that you know, that that, that, that, that,
7:52
that it's not created by the locals.
7:54
Well, actually I think that's less common because it's so not
7:57
well known. I don't think there's very many
7:59
people accusing it yet because people don't fully realize where
8:04
the, you know, the fact that G matcha can come from these
8:06
places. I think it's the opposite place.
8:08
Yeah, I think people come in and make the wrong assumption.
8:10
They make them. They labeling it as a single
8:13
origin. Exactly, exactly.
8:14
But then, you know, consumer went on to accuse them of, you
8:18
know, mislabeling or, you know, using tea outside of wuji and
8:22
labeled as Wuji tea. But you know, these vendors or
8:25
these brand owners, they, they don't know better.
8:27
They don't know better. They being told that this is
8:30
Wuji tea and you know, all these tea suppliers in Japan, you
8:34
know, they, they've been calling this wuji tea for like hundreds
8:37
of years. And there's a very interesting
8:41
misalignment of definition flowing in the market.
8:44
Like everyone is doing their own thing.
8:46
And it seems like no one is trying to like intentionally lie
8:50
to other people. What is this currency of trust
8:53
even is rooted upon? Yeah.
8:56
Well, it's a really complex story and I think it ultimately
8:59
depends on what you're interested in because you know,
9:02
Uji Cha, although it can be their blends from things that
9:06
are come from way outside Uji proper, Uji City like Shirakawa,
9:11
Goku, Shoji City, etcetera. But it can be considered what
9:14
I'll call real or true Uji matcha from Uji grown tensha, of
9:21
which there's about 70 tons produced last year.
9:24
I don't know the statistics for this year, but that's not very
9:27
much. It represents about 1 to 2% of
9:30
the amount of tea that could be amount of tensha matcha that
9:34
could legally be sold as Fuji matcha.
9:37
And actually there's some loopholes around that where you
9:39
can actually expand that number quite a bit and which we're
9:42
going to get into in a later episode.
9:44
But Uji matcha is also kind of a flavor, right?
9:47
It's a blend, right? So in terms of what it's
9:50
delivering on its promise to the consumer, right?
9:53
It's those chashis in Uji or in Kyoto Prefecture that are
9:58
blending these products together to create these consistent
10:02
profiles that the world now associates with Uji matcha.
10:06
But that's also this is where the currency of trust comes in
10:09
too right? To be labeled as ujimacha, it
10:12
just needs to be processed in Kyoto Prefecture.
10:14
You know, not anyone, but anyone with the right licenses or
10:18
permissions can set up a shiage refinement factory anywhere in
10:22
Kyoto Prefecture and buy some mills and turn it into matcha.
10:26
What percentage of these refinement factories have the
10:29
long heritage continuous practice, multi generational
10:34
pass down of knowledge as these like traditional Uji blend
10:38
houses like Maruku Columan, like Ipodo, like Yamamasa Columan,
10:44
like those are like what we would consider like the original
10:47
a blend house is creating these flavors and leading this
10:50
industry historically. But that's not necessarily the
10:53
case for every single shiage refinement facility anywhere in
10:58
this entire prefecture. So it is a flavor, but
11:01
sometimes. Yeah, it's almost a, you know,
11:05
imaginary community, like a style agreement that's kind of
11:11
being passed down from generations to generations.
11:14
But, you know, every time it gets practiced by a different
11:18
person, I, you know, it drifts, you know, like that.
11:21
There's no way that you can actually clone the people, a
11:24
trashy's mind onto another person, you know, and, and, and
11:29
climate changes, ski changes like drifts, you know, even if
11:33
it's the same cultivar, you know, new cultivars being
11:37
created every year by these institutes and people's
11:41
preference change, the fertilizer style change, like
11:46
all these kind of changes led to it's it's it's really a very
11:50
fluid concept almost that's be passed down by by all these
11:54
people. So how exactly do you defined?
11:57
Like how do you find a unchangeable anchor in this
12:01
definition? I think it's impossible almost.
12:04
Well, actually, so personally, what I care about and what I
12:07
hope we promote in the specialty match of podcast, it is an
12:11
exploration of objective truth on factors that control the
12:15
flavor and the quality of matcha.
12:18
So like an objective truth is that Uji matcha was grown in
12:23
Uji. That's an objective truth.
12:24
And it might taste different than a same cultivar grown in
12:29
Uji Tawara which is not that far away, or in Wazuka or in EDA
12:34
Town or that same cultivar grown in Fukuoka.
12:38
Right? Like we live in a very weird
12:41
world where if you really care about objective truth and
12:45
associating objective truth about a product and its flavor,
12:49
you basically have to assume that everything is fake and
12:54
mislabeled until proven otherwise.
12:56
Like like in the beginning, beginning of my matcha journey
13:00
when I started taking matcha seriously, I really wanted to
13:03
understand Uji as a flavor. I wanted to be able to blind
13:06
identify Uji as a flavor. I spent hundreds of dollars
13:10
walking around Kyoto and Uji buying Uji matcha and I would
13:14
ask, is this from Uji? I would get yes, yes, yes, yes,
13:18
yes, right. That trust is now broken in me
13:22
on my personal learning journey. I now have to assume that I'm
13:26
being lied to, but the nature of that question, it's like they're
13:31
answering a different question than I was asking, even though
13:33
it's a very simple question. But I wasn't aware of their
13:37
context of what Uji Macha has historically been and what the
13:41
legal definition of Uji Macha was.
13:44
I'm asking about origin. They're answering like it's like
13:48
as if I'm asking is it like from Nike or is this a Lululemon or
13:53
something? Like it's like it's like this
13:55
brand idea not. But it was actually, you know,
13:58
manufactured and actually sourced from a certain place,
14:03
which was obviously my intention.
14:05
Where these trust chains get broken.
14:08
They get broken at these very interesting cross cultural
14:12
points and this is one of them. Yeah, it's, it's really, you
14:18
know, yeah, it's almost really the wrong question to ask or a
14:23
wrong kind of framework to try to understand a concept.
14:28
But like also can can you call it wrong?
14:32
Like this is what consumers are care about caring about.
14:35
And this is industry that is so that it has its own culture, its
14:42
own definition of things and doesn't necessarily have a good
14:47
answer yet to this very new question or concept.
14:51
Like how, how do how do we react to this reality?
14:56
Because it's almost not a currency of trust, right?
14:59
Like it's it's a trust. But at the level of like the
15:02
judgement and context, it's, it is trust first you have to have
15:08
understanding, trust, trust. It's a more base layer.
15:11
We don't even understand each other.
15:12
Yeah, we don't even understand each other, that there's no like
15:15
even there, there's no credibility to to begin with.
15:19
Like people are talking over each other and it's not there
15:23
there, there isn't really a definition being aligned yet.
15:27
Like this is as if, you know, starting a credibility, starting
15:32
a relationship, you need to have a agreement.
15:35
But these two groups, groups of people are signing two different
15:39
agreements. So there's a very interesting
15:42
artifact that comes out of this fact.
15:44
What we are talking about primarily are vendors who know
15:48
their local market very well, whatever country that they're
15:51
from, who are buying things and interacting with people in Japan
15:54
and then going on to do some level of mislabeling with or
15:57
without their own knowledge, probably without their own
16:00
knowledge, and they just don't know.
16:02
And they're calling it like a single origin product when the
16:04
idea of single origin in Japan is very, very, very different.
16:08
But there's a huge secondary effect if you think through the
16:12
implications of this. Typically because people who
16:16
come to source are not very skeptical and are not willing to
16:19
necessarily judge what people are being told about whether or
16:23
not it's true. What like is behind the words
16:26
that they're saying. It leads to this gigantic
16:29
chaotic sea of misinformation that's floating out there and
16:33
where people are selling Fuji tea that is 100% Kagoshima
16:37
claiming that it's single origin, talking about Fuji Tawar
16:41
and Fuji processing history and it really is just a fantasy
16:44
story that is completely nonexistent.
16:47
And this exists for Chinese matcha too.
16:49
The other day I was looking at a matcha, a new matcha Chinese
16:53
matcha company that was trying to do the single origin single
16:55
cultivar concept and relating it back to Song Dynasty Mocha or
16:59
Proto matcha that existed in China before it even made it to
17:03
Japan. And they were saying that areas
17:05
around Hangzhou and Jijiang have actually always been growing
17:10
matcha, it just wasn't very well known and they've had been doing
17:14
this since the Song dynasty. I mean that is just objectively
17:17
false. They clearly met someone who
17:20
told them this story, which is fantasy and entirely
17:24
historically inaccurate. Modern matcha production in
17:27
China is entirely contemporary. It is not a continuous practice,
17:31
but they bought into these narratives.
17:34
And if you're not questioning what you do, the secondary
17:37
implications of that is you have this sea of misinformation for
17:41
people to sort through, and it leads to a lot of contradictory
17:45
stories floating around out there.
17:48
And it makes it really hard to form your own judgement because
17:51
let's say you're coming into macho with relatively little
17:53
context. How do you know who to believe?
17:56
Like you? That's a lot of sorting to do.
17:59
Yeah. How do you learn?
18:01
And then how do you learn on top of that when you can't even rely
18:04
on what you perceive as an objective truth?
18:08
Like this tea is Nishio matcha. This tea is yame matcha.
18:12
This tea is Shizuoka matcha, which we learned about until
18:16
relatively recently. A lot of Shizuoka cha actually
18:20
had a very large percentage of Kagoshima blended into it.
18:23
Now, I don't think it can be labeled that way because they've
18:25
changed the regulation rules, but even for things that you
18:28
would think are safer are not. It's not an objective truth.
18:33
It just happens to be where that tea is being sold from, but it
18:35
has nothing to do with where it was grown.
18:38
Exactly. I mean, like, you know, tea
18:40
blending is a very, very old industry and just not not just
18:45
matcha, but you know, also other teas and also not just only
18:49
Japan, but also, you know, Korea, China widely exists in
18:53
all kinds of, you know, tea categories who are ulong cha,
18:58
red tea or black tea. You know, it's and people,
19:01
contemporary consumers are overfitting this single origin,
19:05
single caliber concept that's relocated from coffee and wine
19:08
onto I guess, like if we want to be more solution oriented, like
19:14
who should adapt to who? Or should we change the
19:19
definition of origin into something that's more adaptive
19:24
to the reality of what he is? Like if we are trying to find
19:29
some like less changeable, less flexible anchors in the world of
19:34
tea, let's use matcha as a example, a shiage factory.
19:38
That's a place that people are usually moving their tea to, to
19:43
do processing. And they usually have their own
19:46
style and their own equipment that that that that that will be
19:50
inputting into the the outcome of the and flavor profile of a
19:54
certainty. That's almost like a more
19:57
correct Geo definition of a tea other than the tawad itself.
20:03
Like the weather change every year.
20:05
Like a different usage of fertilizers would really really
20:08
change the profile of the tea. Like using a geolocation as a
20:12
definition or as part of the definition for a certain flavor
20:16
profile is almost wrong when it comes to Marsha Tashi.
20:21
Doesn't tend to change that much and they have the pretty, you
20:24
know, rigid lineage to pass down knowledge.
20:27
So that's another anchor. Like I'm making some wild
20:31
claims, but it's almost probably more accurate if we label
20:35
something as single chashi or single shiage factory.
20:39
Could. Be actually more representative
20:43
than you know, a single cultivar or a single origin.
20:47
Yeah, no, I agree with that. And Origin has all of these very
20:51
complicated things. It's not just terroir, it's the
20:54
blending style, it's the processing style, it's all the
20:57
hands that touch the matcha that lead to it's very unique and
21:01
interesting flavor characteristics.
21:03
So that concept of single origin needs to be revised, linking it
21:07
back. To but that's the question that
21:09
people keep asking. Like people keep asking about
21:12
single origin, single cultural life.
21:14
Like it's really not representative.
21:17
No, yeah. Yeah, so.
21:20
So it's, it's really a misalignment of questions and
21:23
answers. And you know, like you are, you
21:26
are almost trying to start a lawsuit to a different entity
21:31
using a different agreement. Like like people are signing
21:37
different contracts, like the language is is not aligned, the
21:41
definitions are not aligned. Well, I guess that's part of
21:44
creating trust though. It's creating that alignment and
21:46
even making sure that you're talking about the same thing.
21:49
I mean, there's a lot of producers too that care a lot
21:52
about the way their tea is marketed and to like, like are
21:55
very specific. I want this to be very well
21:58
known that this is actually from Uji grown Tensha, for example,
22:02
or we're proud that this is Wazooka tea.
22:04
I mean, we want it to be sold as such.
22:07
So I mean, it is moving into a way where we're getting closer
22:10
to objective truth about it. You know, you see all of these
22:13
single cultivars, we trust that when we buy things that people
22:17
aren't mislabeling them. But it's these really soft spots
22:20
that become a real, real problem spot.
22:23
But there's a lot others in the industry too.
22:25
I mean, a huge one is the people who have the final control over
22:30
the matcha itself. When you sell Matcha as a brand,
22:33
you have to trust that the person preparing it is going to
22:37
do right by your brand and make it make make it, you know, in a
22:42
quality way. Much is super easy to mess up.
22:45
It can be comfy. You can have no foam.
22:47
You can use too hot water. The water quality can be low.
22:50
And there's a really interesting story here is that James
22:54
Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle, back when when Blue
22:57
Bottle was very cool, I think it was around 20/15/2016, had
23:02
announced that they were walking away from all of their
23:05
wholesale, which represented 20% of their revenue.
23:09
So in other words, Blue Bottle would supply their coffee to
23:12
cafes, cafes would brew it and advertise that they have Blue
23:16
Bottle coffee, which represented very non negligible portion of
23:19
their business. Very similar to a lot of the B2B
23:22
matcha companies that exist that are brand owners.
23:25
But these brand owners also have to trust.
23:28
Are they going to represent my macho well, my brand well?
23:31
That currency of trust also really matters.
23:34
And we've seen James from no bad matcha drop accounts, very
23:38
probably good profitable B to B cafe accounts who are not
23:42
preparing the matcha well. We're not doing anyone justice,
23:46
not doing the farmers justice. Jack, the name of Japanese
23:49
matcha justice or you know, his brand justice and he dropped
23:53
them. That's like another huge thread
23:56
of currency of trust in this industry, just because it's so
24:00
easy to mess up. Oh, yeah.
24:01
I mean, it's just like coffee, right?
24:03
It's not a finished product. And they are being skeptical, I
24:08
would say rightfully so because, you know, like the ways of
24:12
prepping matcha is just, you know, so different than, you
24:15
know, what's traditionally being done in Japan nowadays.
24:19
How in the world and they like and that's really just one end
24:25
of or one segment of this long, long currency of trust.
24:29
Very interestingly, we learned recently that a lot of the
24:32
farmers, everyone knows that producing Tancha is very
24:36
lucrative, but a lot of farmers are in Japan are still very
24:40
reluctantly switching to making Tancha because even making
24:44
Tancha is not a finished product.
24:46
Tancha gets blend into all of these larger batches all the
24:52
time. It's not representative to their
24:55
own definition or their own ways of making tea.
24:59
Like for them, you know, making Sencha, making Wakocha is
25:03
actually more representative because they have the capability
25:06
to create a nearly finished product.
25:09
But that's not the case for Tenscha.
25:11
It's a. It's a case for creative
25:13
expression. Yeah, like Tenscha is really a
25:17
ingredient in this long chain of product manufacturing.
25:21
And they have no control of the outcome either, which is very
25:25
interesting. And then, you know, like, and
25:27
for these tea makers, for potential manufacturers,
25:31
sometimes they're not even, they don't control also like
25:35
sometimes they control the fresh leaf supply either.
25:39
They end up beating Aracha from auctions and you know, turn
25:42
shiage and turn that into actual Tantra.
25:44
So they're not the origins either.
25:47
And then you go to the farmers. The farmers really sometimes
25:50
don't know where their teas end up going to.
25:52
There's a very, very long chain of of currency of trust, and
25:57
everyone on the chain is not really representative of the
26:01
end. Of Hong Kong, yeah, that's
26:03
interesting really is a collective mindset.
26:06
You do see like regulatory pseudo regulatory agencies.
26:10
I know that the Kyoto Tea Cooperative Association puts out
26:15
a very large set of guidelines. You can actually look it up on
26:18
their website. It's all in Japanese.
26:19
But there's a ton of documents over explaining the recommended
26:25
processing methodologies for creating uji matcha.
26:28
So there are like guidelines that people can follow.
26:31
You know, I don't know how well they're enforced.
26:33
I think they're like literally like educational resources for
26:37
for farmers or for new farmers probably to help them switch
26:40
over to tension production too, that if they're interested in
26:42
doing that. But the way the system is set up
26:45
is really weird, right. Because, you know, the currency
26:49
of trust gets concentrated in certain places because so many
26:53
people cannot access large parts of this value chain.
26:56
Yeah. And this is like even more
26:58
problematic, right? Like it's a guideline.
27:01
It's not even like a, a well defined or a a legalized term,
27:07
right? Like you're starting a lawsuit
27:08
without even a law. How do you even, like, how do
27:12
you even, you know, how do you even trust the currency of trust
27:15
itself? Like, does that actually exist?
27:18
Yeah, well, it's interesting because there's a lot of actors
27:20
too. For our listeners that don't
27:22
know, there's something called, I think it's called Mogacha.
27:25
Excuse me if I mispronounce that.
27:27
And it's basically filler matcha.
27:30
And what they do is they basically use Sencha processing
27:33
equipment, but they turn off the rolling function when you get
27:36
something that sort of resembles tensha.
27:38
And apparently it really doesn't taste like much and it's just as
27:42
remarkably good filler where you can use it, especially when you
27:46
blend and like maybe you input in about 10% and then you layer
27:50
some stuff on top of it. And so, you know, there's a lot
27:53
of that type of stuff going on in the industry too, like, and
27:56
not to mention, even things like chlorophyll, which in some
27:59
countries doesn't even need to be labeled because it is a
28:02
naturally occurring substance and tea by some countries
28:05
labeling laws. If you'd go deep enough on the
28:07
Japanese Internet, there are entire companies that are
28:10
dedicated to adding chlorophyll to matcha, not the natural way
28:15
by shading, might I? They're also companies that very
28:18
specifically specify in the filler matcha and that, you
28:22
know, that gets lost along the chain, which makes it really
28:25
hard to trace. And I think the biggest problem
28:27
with traceability and building any sense of currency of trust
28:31
all the way from a plant in the dirt, in the ground, all the way
28:36
through your cup is that so many people are barred from very
28:40
large parts of the value chain. And it has to be funneled
28:44
through many, many, many different places.
28:46
And I can, I'm just going to give you one example of like the
28:49
supply chain. Like there's, there's a company
28:52
that sells a lot of tea to cafes.
28:55
We know that they're buying from someone in Japan.
28:59
We know that that person in Japan is buying from a blending
29:02
house in Japan. That blending house is probably
29:06
purchasing it at auction, which and you know, depending on the
29:10
size of that blending house, they may or may not be sending
29:12
it out for refining, for shiage refining and depending on their
29:17
milling capabilities, they may or may not be sending it out for
29:21
milling. So you add a lot of people
29:23
within the supply chain going all the way back, but the people
29:27
who are allowed to purchase set auction are incredibly limited.
29:31
It depends on the prefecture. Kagoshima, very, very, very few
29:35
people. Apparently she's woke us a
29:37
little more open. And then it just goes from
29:39
middle mound to middle mound to middle mound to middle man
29:42
before it gets to the consumer. And these middle men add value
29:46
for some reason or another. Maybe it's because they have
29:49
relationships. Maybe it's because they really
29:52
know how to import, export things.
29:53
Maybe they have a very large resilient supply base that they
29:58
can pull from, give people a lot of optionality, but it really
30:03
makes the chain of trust hard to trace back if you care about
30:08
objective truths about the product.
30:10
Yeah, almost impossible I would say.
30:12
And, and I think the outcome of that, of this practice is that
30:17
if you are actually very serious about matcha, you are going to
30:21
get a very unreliable product. Yeah.
30:26
Like the the flavor like would really change depending on
30:30
whichever factor that decided to make a difference on that year.
30:35
And you have no idea what happened to this tea.
30:38
But you can cannot form a educated or well informed
30:42
association with these factors based on your own experience,
30:46
which is very painful as a consumer.
30:49
I would say if you are serious about matcha, like if you end up
30:52
dumping it into milk or oat milk, you know, it's probably
30:55
going to taste about the same year by year.
30:57
But if you want to actually dive deep into get to know your
31:03
product and form a association with whatever factors that you
31:07
care about, whether or not it's cultivar, whether or not it's a
31:10
it's a brand or whether or not it's a geographic region, it's
31:14
almost impossible to form a accurate association of things
31:19
that you like to a factor that you care about.
31:22
And that's really a shame because it would lead to such a
31:25
rich and interesting world, just how you have.
31:28
Like totally agree. I could say like a famous Baker
31:31
who makes like the best baguettes in Paris.
31:33
They're talking about where their wheat is from, the amount
31:36
of the humidity of the day and how they change, you know, the
31:41
water ratio or how much salt that they add.
31:44
Or you hear about like noodle companies, like ramen companies
31:47
are totally changed their recipe every day just based on the
31:51
weather and the way that like gluten forms in the noodles.
31:54
Like these are some really sophisticated craft, goes on
31:58
behind the scenes to making great products and all of that
32:02
just gets like vanishes. Obscured away.
32:05
So like this is this is also where you know, this chain of
32:09
trust and this currency of trust has negative consequences
32:13
because you just trust that someone has done it well and you
32:16
aren't serious enough to say how do you know that?
32:20
Or is this really what you mean or why was it like this?
32:25
You can't ask those questions here, especially in Japan where
32:29
it's a much more implicit culture and it is all trust
32:32
based the. Yeah, I'm particularly cynical
32:36
today because my currency of trust has just been broken.
32:39
Well, let's hide this much as sitting in front of me.
32:42
Let's talk about that. This is a really, this is a
32:45
really interesting point. What happens when the chain of
32:48
trust is broken? Let's talk about it literally in
32:51
the most intimate way. Consuming much?
32:54
As a consumer, I will stop buying this much in the future,
32:57
which I'm not going to name it, but you know, I really, this is
33:01
almost like my gateway matcha. Like I really, really, really
33:05
loved this plant a year ago when I first tried it and just this
33:10
phenomenal, phenomenal olive oil, spice, spicy notes that,
33:16
that that was so impressive at the time that, you know, I, I
33:21
was all into it and I'm sitting right in front of this Macha a
33:24
year later. This is a different T.
33:26
Different batch, but it's a different T.
33:29
It's a different T This is like this is not that and I we paid a
33:36
pretty significant amount. We paid double.
33:38
We paid double the amount that we did.
33:40
It's a $90.00 can for 20 grams. Yeah, and we paid real currency,
33:45
Ryan, to, to, to back this trust.
33:49
And this trust has been broken. It's a different tea.
33:52
And I'm only buying this tea because of really because of
33:57
this label actually, you know, I I have no idea what's in this
34:01
tea. I have no idea how this tea was
34:03
processed. I have no idea, you know what
34:07
went wrong with this T Like it's all rooted upon this poetic name
34:12
that basically 0 information about what this T actually is.
34:16
So as a broken hearted consumer, have no I, I cannot even like, I
34:22
don't even know who to play. Yeah, that's interesting.
34:27
Like what? What Like it's like the
34:31
ingredient or the tashi or like the milling house or different
34:35
Shiagi factory? Did it get forgotten on a truck
34:38
somewhere and sit in the hot sun?
34:40
Exactly this. This is like really frustrating
34:44
and painful. Yeah.
34:46
Well, I mean, that's a huge currency of trust.
34:48
And arguably the most important currency of trust historically
34:52
is the relationship between the consumer and these traditionally
34:56
blended products. In a former episode, we highly
34:59
recommend everyone listening to our poetic matcha names.
35:02
Harmful. You know, these traditional
35:03
companies don't give you any detail.
35:05
You don't know the cultivar, you don't know where it was from.
35:08
It's some blend that's supposed to taste the same every year,
35:11
and the quality is supposed to live up to its reputation.
35:14
And with the matcha shortage, now we see price increases.
35:17
This tea is literally doubled in price since one year ago.
35:20
Even we were here six months ago and it increased another, I
35:25
think ¥30,000 from the last time that we saw the price for it.
35:30
And I've heard rumors that it's going to go up another.
35:32
So it would have effectively tripled within the span of about
35:36
18 months. Less than 18 months actually,
35:39
which is insane. When I'm not paying for that
35:41
right? But that's the thing, when the
35:44
currency of trust is broken, especially when matcha prices
35:48
are getting higher and higher and higher, the only way that
35:51
this works in anyone's favor is if consumers have lower
35:55
expectations and are like literally willing to spend
35:58
double the price. And it just like didn't
36:00
translate. So all of the best, highest end
36:03
matcha, especially for Uji matcha that we've ever tasted
36:07
has tasted better as koicha than as usacha.
36:11
And this is a very koicha grade matcha.
36:13
This one tasted better as usacha than it did koicha.
36:17
Very disappointing. We're also like, we're not
36:19
totally like random people tasting matcha.
36:23
In our prior career. For me, it was for eight years.
36:25
For Sam, it was five years. We worked at the intersection of
36:28
AI, flavor and sensory analysis or the analysis of taste.
36:32
So I've literally done like 10s of thousands of flavor analysis
36:37
reviews on a wide variety of different products.
36:41
So sensory is not something that's very new to us when we
36:44
took a lot of notes and this tea and the same blend from a year
36:49
earlier, it's a different tea. I would say I took a lot of
36:52
notes of the same blend a year ago.
36:56
Not a lot of notes for this one sitting in front.
36:58
Of me. That's funny.
36:59
The lack of complexity is real, and the lack of character is
37:04
real. Yeah, it, I mean, it's, it's
37:06
shocking. It's from a very well known,
37:08
reputable brand. It's a poetic name that's
37:11
particularly popular and prized and revered and you know, is it?
37:17
You know, my hunch is actually that these types of need about 6
37:21
months of rest to blow off the green note when you pick T and
37:26
there's something there's a bunch of compounds that have are
37:29
associated with green flavors like cucumber, like grassiness,
37:33
etcetera. And historically you age it for
37:35
about 6 months underground in a chatsu ball and you open it up
37:39
on the Japanese tea ceremony. Holiday will be rocky in
37:42
November and after that it's had some time to mature.
37:45
You have some degradation of catechins and you have
37:48
preservation of amino acids. So you reduce the bitterness and
37:51
astringency and you make it still retains its sweet umami
37:55
character when you have some rebalance.
37:57
And we are in September right now.
38:00
So we're still two months away from the rogue Rocky holiday.
38:03
And this is probably from this year.
38:05
And maybe there's just so much pressure to get these products
38:09
out that they're releasing them a little bit before that they're
38:11
ready, but we don't know. We don't know.
38:14
All could be overheating issues. So we're relying on someone's
38:18
judgement who is has a brand promise.
38:22
Every poetically named product is a brand promise, especially
38:25
from a large blind house and doesn't taste the same.
38:28
Now, is this the end of the world?
38:29
No, like I mean we're sitting here like in a relatively we
38:36
have nothing to complain about, right?
38:38
I don't know 90 bucks on account of matcha.
38:40
I felt like the end of war for me for a while. 5 minutes this.
38:44
Really was your your gateway matcha, your aha moment.
38:47
Yeah, my aha moment. We don't know where that flavor
38:50
came from or how you can find it again.
38:52
And I mean, this is my criticism of the industry and this
38:55
currency of trust. The more context and knowledge
38:58
that you have learning about matcha, the more you realize
39:01
that you everything has. You have to assume that
39:03
everything is fake until it's verified.
39:06
And it's nearly impossible to build preferences to understand
39:09
where flavors are coming from because you can't get access to
39:12
the reference samples or, and no one tells you, you know how
39:16
these flavors are created. If we knew that this year,
39:20
there's way more Sami Dodi in this blend than there was last
39:24
year, right? Maybe that explains some of the
39:27
variation. But in an industry where
39:29
everything is masterfully crafted and always presented as
39:32
perfect, no one selling intentionally flawed tea, then
39:37
there is no way to learn. And by the way, one person's
39:40
flaws might be someone else's. Oh yeah, only possible.
39:44
Like these flaws in the idea of quality is actually a relatively
39:49
socially constructed arbitrary concepts.
39:52
You know, maybe these bitter floral things might just turn
39:56
into this crazy ridiculous flavor profile that's incredibly
40:00
fragrant when the moment it hits oat milk.
40:03
Problem is, is that the old Japanese man who do the sorting
40:06
and the grating say defect, defect, defect.
40:09
I'm going to use this and blend out this flavor.
40:11
Aren't thinking about that. Potential outcome, and I mean,
40:14
this is a great example of a lack of diversity in the
40:17
creation of these new products. You have a lack of imagination,
40:21
you have a lack of world experience, you have a lack of
40:23
curiosity, you have a lack of understanding of other people's
40:26
preferences. Now who are we to judge a hot
40:29
several 100 year old industry just the way that it is here?
40:33
But it is a real missed opportunity, especially as the
40:37
international consumer base of Mata is is growing.
40:40
I totally agree. And I think that's a very
40:43
difficult problem to solve because of the reality of how
40:47
segmentized this whole chain is for Mata.
40:51
Like the the manufacturer, the farmers and the brands, they are
40:55
all being separate away from each other and from the end
40:58
consumer by so many different layers of middleman and making a
41:04
very healthy consumer feedback loop quite impossible.
41:08
So I guess this is not very a solution oriented complaint, but
41:13
it is the reality that we are facing today is that as a
41:16
consumer you almost have to adapt yourself into the current
41:19
system because it's really difficult to make any changes at
41:23
the moment for Matcha. And you know, the best way to
41:27
navigate in a world where the primary currency of bringing
41:31
matcha to market is trust, not money, because there's
41:34
overwhelming demand. These farmers have no problem
41:37
selling their products to these middle men have no problem
41:40
selling their products. The way you build up this trust
41:44
and the mental model to judge of what other people are saying is
41:49
to arm yourself with this much context, text and as much
41:53
knowledge as possible, right? To have the framework.
41:56
When you say this is uji matcha, does that mean it's from uji
42:00
grown tensha, right? Anyone who has that, right?
42:03
That's a great question. And then people, a lot of people
42:07
are actually very honest. They say, Oh no, this is from
42:11
blank. OK, great.
42:13
You know, in fact, I would love to sell it as blank and not as
42:17
Uji Matcha. Yeah, or just lower your
42:19
expectation. Yeah, heartbroken moment will be
42:22
less painful. I mean, I mean, let's talk about
42:24
the objective truths for like people who work in this industry
42:27
and are trying to bring stuff to market.
42:29
It's about asking the right questions and about
42:31
understanding what people mean. And the only way you can build
42:34
trust in your own judgement to the conclusion that you come to
42:39
is to understand the context of other people.
42:42
Be transparent to this whole mess thing is one way of
42:46
building the trust as well. Just show what you don't know
42:50
about it and actually educate the consumer that how
42:54
complicated this whole situation is.
42:55
I think, you know, at least get some alignment with someone in
43:00
this very, very long chain of relationships.
43:03
Yeah, and just being more straightforward and you know,
43:06
that's what we intend to do. And I'll tell a story to to
43:08
conclude this episode. We're sourcing a bunch of
43:11
tension at the moment and we're making our first real like large
43:14
scale, large issues scale for still very tiny player potential
43:19
purchases at the moment. And some farmers or some
43:22
producers are willing to tell us a whole lot more than others.
43:25
We even have like the exact fertilizer recipe for some of
43:29
our sources. And in others we know next to
43:31
nothing. And you know, as we like think
43:33
about like labeling these and putting up a website, we know
43:37
more about some of the products that we source than others trust
43:41
them. We ask for chemical pesticide
43:43
residue reports. Like there's all this type of
43:46
thing that we trust. But like if we want to know the
43:48
exact number of case shaded or the blend composition, cultivar
43:52
blend composition or the fertilizing practices or the
43:58
shading methods or processing methods, we just don't know.
44:01
So what do we say? And then you anticipate these
44:04
things like consumers asking, oh wow, you had all this great
44:07
detail about this one product, why don't you have it for this
44:10
other? And the reality is well.
44:13
We don't know. We don't know, and we don't know
44:15
the person that we bought it from well enough to ask it.
44:19
And in fact we were really just lucky to get this at all.
44:22
And we don't really have the cultural or social capital to go
44:26
back and ask what are sometimes perceived as relatively
44:31
intrusive questions. People in this industry are not
44:34
used to being asked all of this detail.
44:37
It almost sounds like we're spies, like with my list of
44:40
questions Like can you please provide the fertilizer, the
44:44
processing, processing style, shading style, number of days,
44:47
shading, exactly where the tea was from?
44:50
OK, you math agent, I'm a lawful farmer.
44:53
But I mean, sometimes the truth is that it's just like we don't
44:56
have the cultural or political capital, yeah, social capital to
45:02
extract this information without potentially damaging the
45:05
relationship. Yeah, it's quite, quite
45:08
difficult. And also like it's quite
45:10
difficult as a consumer because you learn some information from
45:14
one specific T, but that information is not necessarily
45:18
transferable to other T's because you just don't get those
45:21
parameters from the other teas. You learned about this
45:24
fertilizer composition from this specific tea, but the other tea
45:29
they don't provide you with the with the same information.
45:31
Like how do you do like comparative?
45:33
Tasting. How do you know what's causing
45:35
what? It's extremely difficult.
45:37
Very difficult. And the reality is you can, and
45:40
this is a awkward way of putting it, but the only way that you
45:45
can do that is if you work with rich farmers, specifically
45:50
farmers that are wealthy enough and successful enough to invest
45:55
in their own over control over their own processing.
45:59
As Sam said, you don't have tensha is not really a finished
46:02
product and very few cases does a farmer oversee it all the way
46:08
from a plant that's in the dirt in the ground all the way
46:12
through a can of matcha. And the ones that do have gotten
46:17
very famous, They don't take any clients.
46:20
They're the only ones that really can give you that
46:23
information because it might be perceived as intrusive or
46:26
impolite at anyone on this value chain, or even be perceived as
46:32
breaking trust in this environment.
46:35
Am I questioning the judgement of my chashi?
46:38
Am I questioning the judgement of my buyer?
46:41
Am I questioning the judgement of my farmer?
46:44
Am I questioning the judgement of the person at the Co-op
46:47
processing facility? When we ask this type of
46:50
questions, there's no culture of wondering what goes wrong and
46:54
why. And like asking this batch
46:57
tastes a little weird. Did you like accidentally
46:59
oversteam like? Yeah, it is like ultimately
47:02
there's no entity or entity with leverage that can hold them
47:07
accountable. There's no regulation or
47:10
regulators and there's no like a consumer union that can, you
47:16
know, hold them, hold them accountable.
47:18
Like it doesn't exist. There is.
47:19
There isn't even a law or like a well defined term sheet that we
47:24
can point our fingers at. Like this is or is not tension.
47:28
This is can or cannot be labeled this way.
47:31
It's all these weird trains of trust.
47:33
And these trusts are sometimes positive, meaning I trust you
47:36
and you trust me, and we can do business together.
47:39
You know, hopefully we understand each other's contexts
47:42
so we're not talking over each other, so I'm not
47:44
misrepresenting this thing and that you're really answering the
47:47
questions that I'm asking, like using the uji cha, for example.
47:50
But trust can also be a blinder. There's actually I think it's a
47:55
famous case. I think it was a Korean pilot.
47:58
Excuse me if I misremember, but there was a nasty aviation
48:02
incident is a couple decades ago where there is an older pilot
48:06
and the copilot was much younger and I believe they were Korean.
48:11
And within Korean culture and Korean language, it's relatively
48:14
unacceptable to question the judgement of an older pilot or
48:18
of anyone who's older than you. And like basically the younger
48:22
pilot realized something was going wrong.
48:24
They weren't able to effectively communicate it to their quote UN
48:27
quote authority on time, especially within their native
48:31
language. And they, I think the plane
48:33
ended up crashing or something. But I think now all commercial
48:37
aviation international pilots are required to speak English
48:42
because in English we don't have all of these weird formality
48:45
rules. And Japan definitely has like,
48:48
if you like, know anything about learning the Japanese languages,
48:51
all these rules about formality, about what you call whom and
48:55
which honorific titles. Yeah, it's built in into the
48:58
language, the hierarchy, yeah. And that very much is true with
49:02
this chain of trust too, because being perceived as not trusting
49:07
someone is probably so socially unacceptable that who knows?
49:13
Like how these slip UPS happen, whether or not they're
49:16
processing defects, whether or not they're mistakes and
49:20
creating the sample for a pesticide residue report,
49:23
whether or not they're what we label certain things as that get
49:28
lost among this chain of trust also so has some negative
49:32
consequences in an implicit culture and society.
49:36
It's an interesting thing to think.
49:37
About Yeah, it's the ultimate theater of cultural collision
49:43
that we are seeing right now. Yeah, pretty interesting.
49:46
But you know, we will see how it goes in the future.
49:50
But one thing that is certain that is that the consumers are
49:54
gaining more leverage day by day in the future.
49:56
The concept of all these things that we are care, we care about
50:01
is slowly being cascade down back to Japan.
50:03
It it might convert at some point throughout the process, we
50:07
have to deal with this mess for the time being.
50:10
Yeah, well, maybe calling it a mess is a little bit unfair.
50:13
I mean, it's complexities that we are just beginning to
50:16
understand. That's true.
50:18
To our outsider perspective, collision is like a mess.
50:21
Collision is a mess. Collision is a mess.
50:23
Collision is mess. Collision is absolutely.
50:25
A mess. Current situation shows a lot of
50:27
these factors, especially his knowledge about matcha becomes
50:31
more ubiquitous. But 10-15 years ago, Pete, the
50:34
conversation was not about cultivars.
50:36
The idea of asking that question like just wasn't fair.
50:40
Same thing with like where is this matcha from?
50:42
Well, it's UG cha, these things. No one cared about that.
50:45
And now people do care about that.
50:48
So it's, you know, it's all new and it shows some of the
50:51
existing differences, I guess, or I don't want to call them
50:54
cracks, but it shows some of the the real differences between
50:58
these different types of approaches and the way we build
51:00
up trust and the, the human messiness that comes from that.
51:05
But I think actually this proliferation of knowledge is
51:09
going to do really good things because, you know, it's not only
51:12
a currency of trust, but there's also these undercurrents of
51:15
power and who holds the power, both hard and soft.
51:18
I mean, ultimately now the buying power has shifted from a
51:23
largely domestic market to a largely foreign market, right?
51:27
That is a form of power. And that changes how we trust
51:32
people and the questions that we asked and the axes on which we
51:36
build trust, in which consumers build trust, thinking that
51:40
they're learning about the origin of a place, you know, all
51:43
of or whether or not we can label these things are telling
51:47
the correct stories about historical accuracy.
51:50
Very true. The consumers outside of Japan
51:53
is now the new Daniels. Knowledge is power.
51:57
Knowledge and you know, like buying power is power.
52:00
It's ultimately what what influence, you know, tea has
52:05
been manufactured and been made in Japan for hundreds of years.
52:09
Is this a new form of neo colonialism or is this something
52:12
else? I would say this was always in a
52:14
semi feudalistic system in which you had incredibly concentrated
52:18
wealthy powerful people in the auto period and the barons and
52:23
oil tycoons and railroad tycoons of the Meiji period with tons of
52:27
buying power. And then you had these upper
52:29
middle class Japanese housewives that learned tea ceremony as
52:33
part of the quote good wives and wise mothers policy in Japan,
52:37
which created many generations of new tea ceremony
52:41
practitioners. Right now it's just changing
52:43
again, right? These who holds this type of
52:46
purchasing power? Yeah, it's really still very
52:50
much a hierarchy system that we're seeing right now.
52:54
The structure hasn't been changed.
52:56
Just because it's dislocated from outside of Japan, Yeah.
53:00
Is it fair that someone says and comes in and criticizes what
53:04
we're saying? It's like, why are we disrupting
53:06
the way things have always been done in Japan?
53:08
These are traditions. These traditions should stay
53:11
traditional within Japan. Like we don't want all these
53:14
outside influences in the space for disrupting the purity and
53:18
tranquility and respects and all waka say, Jakku, you know, if
53:23
you know if you know of this industry.
53:26
But it has already been disrupted.
53:28
But it has already been disrupted many, many times
53:31
throughout Different, you know, government governor agencies,
53:35
different shogunates from from different diamonds throughout
53:39
the Japanese history. Actually, the idea of wabicha
53:42
has already been disrupted the moment after senior DQ was
53:47
ordering to commit honor honorable suicide.
53:50
Wow, some would say it was a pseudo form of martyrdom and
53:53
help the wabi wabi cha wabi aesthetic live on, potentially
53:58
even stronger. Yeah, but I don't know, the idea
54:02
of this humbleness has, you know, like really never been
54:08
true. It's always about money and
54:10
label and hierarchy and power. When you really study these
54:14
histories, that'd be an interesting episode to do, is to
54:16
look at the undercurrents of the currency of power.
54:20
This can be a series currency of trust.
54:22
We can do currency of power. It's could be an interesting
54:25
one. Yeah, we might need some guest
54:28
speakers to to learn more from this.
54:31
Very interesting culture dynamic.
54:33
Yeah, I'd love to do an episode just like mapping the Matcha
54:36
supply chain, like really, really deep dive and look at all
54:40
of the different avenues that Matcha makes it to market, which
54:43
are actually just different business models.
54:45
Let's be honest here, like Matcha is a business too.
54:49
It's that often gets forgotten. Even the tea ceremony schools
54:53
are a business. It's a company.
54:56
The currency of money still definitely matters, but currency
55:00
of trust in the traditional industry like this really,
55:03
really holds a lot of power, which is worth investigating and
55:07
talking about. All right, thanks so much for
55:09
listening. And if you enjoyed this, please
55:12
consider sharing it with friend and we'll see you on the next
55:14
one. Thanks.
55:15
See you in the future.