Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / Are Poetic Matcha Names Harmful?

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Are Poetic Matcha Names Harmful? · Specialty Matcha Podcast

0:00
Hello, this is the Specialty Matcha podcast.
0:02
My name is Ryan. This is my Coho Sonjin.
0:04
Hello. Hello.
0:05
And we're the Co founders of Sanko Matcha products.
0:08
Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey,
0:11
Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.
0:14
And today's podcast is going to be more conversational.
0:17
But we really want to get to the bottom of why do we and so many
0:20
others out there dislike poetic matcha name so much.
0:24
I I guess for you Ryan, this this taste really started from
0:27
the very early days of your experience with Matter.
0:31
Yeah, no, I've hated poetic names for a long time.
0:33
To be honest, I still personally hate them.
0:35
I totally respect where they came from and the companies that
0:39
make them, and a lot of the products taste very good.
0:43
But I hate the poetic matcha naming convention.
0:47
So we're titling this piece, our poetic matcha names harmful, and
0:51
it's an opinion piece and we're going to try to, you know,
0:54
highlight both sides. But you know, I have an argument
0:58
that it actually, there's a lot of consumer harm by this naming
1:01
convention, and there's also a lot of harm to farmers.
1:04
Yeah, so, So what? Why do you dislike these names
1:07
so much, Ryan? Oh, it's so confusing to me.
1:10
It's been confusing to me since the very beginning of my matcha
1:14
journey, but I was first. When I first got into matcha, I
1:17
was in a Moto Senke student, which is a type of Japanese tea
1:20
ceremony school. And I remember we would arrange
1:22
trips to New York. We would go to ipodo, one of the
1:26
more traditional matcha blending houses.
1:28
They had a retail store in New York and they had all of these
1:32
matchas lined up by Price and they all had these very funny,
1:36
hard to pronounce names. Very vivid memory of one of my
1:40
friends ordering one and just stumbling through pronouncing
1:44
the name. I'll have the Hatsumukashi.
1:47
And I thought, wow, this is so confusing.
1:49
And there were very, there's very little guidance other than
1:53
price. We didn't know what they tasted
1:55
like. They, we vaguely knew what
1:57
usucha and koicha was at the time.
1:59
But most people, I mean, I imagine if you're not a tea
2:02
ceremony student, you have no idea what that means.
2:05
And we didn't know what we were buying.
2:07
So we literally were just guessing based on price, hoping
2:10
that the more money we spent, the more we would like it.
2:14
And then we would go back and taste some.
2:15
And some people had boozier preferences and budgets than
2:18
others. And we would try it.
2:19
And like, you know, the person who bought the most expensive
2:22
one, it wasn't always the best. So it's been a real source of, I
2:27
don't know, consumer pain. But now that we're in the
2:29
industry, we're learning a lot more context and I really have
2:33
come to the current belief that there is more harm than good in
2:38
this current system. You know, like calling it a
2:40
poetic name or poetic naming scheme is almost a stretch for a
2:46
non Japanese speaker because honestly it doesn't mean
2:48
anything if you don't understand Japanese.
2:51
Yeah, Hatsumukashi or Uji Noshiro.
2:55
It's so confusing. Sometimes you hear names of
2:58
regions like Ujis in these names.
3:00
Sometimes you hear cultivar names like Asahi in these names.
3:04
And then like, you go and ask someone and half the time the
3:07
person you're buying it from, whether or not it's in the
3:10
United States or even in Japanese retail stores, you go
3:13
to Uji and ask, what is this? They don't know other than,
3:18
yeah, there's no Asahi in this Asahi Noshiro.
3:24
And it's just mind blowing, the confusing for someone who
3:27
doesn't speak Japanese. It's really completely
3:30
arbitrary. And we're writing a couple of
3:32
blog posts about this topic, and I came up with this really nice
3:35
line. The current landscape of
3:37
traditional matcha products is a chaotic, green sea of hundreds
3:41
of arbitrary, hard to pronounce poetic names with remarkably
3:45
little transparency. That's how I feel the current
3:48
traditional matcha industry is for these 100, 203 hundred year
3:54
old blend houses that have now blown up.
3:57
They're all over Instagram, they're all over TikTok, YouTube
4:00
reviews. It is where consumers have gone
4:04
to find incredible value and they're going to the places that
4:07
have been doing it the longest. And now, like I'm sure the CEOs
4:14
of these companies or the blenders of these large
4:16
companies that have been around for so long could have never
4:19
envisioned that. So quickly the consumer base
4:24
changed and how global it is, how non Japanese it is, and how
4:29
people aren't doing anything related to Japanese tea
4:32
ceremony, which is how all of these products have been
4:35
traditionally framed and named. Yeah.
4:38
So we, we were really curious about like, is there a mechanism
4:44
or implication out there behind these poetic names?
4:47
So we, we, we were actually asking, you know, the same
4:51
question to a lot of people when we were visiting Japan.
4:54
And, you know, it was really disappointed.
4:56
There isn't any logical mechanism.
5:00
It is entirely or mostly entirely arbitrary, which was
5:04
very desperate for us to to to understand the the reality.
5:10
We're going to double click on that quite a bit more later on
5:13
about how confusing poetic names are, because this is one of
5:17
those things where you can go learn a little bit about it,
5:21
think that you've learned something, and then realize that
5:24
there's lots of exceptions. And then you realize again that
5:28
it's basically arbitrary as far as any non advanced tea ceremony
5:34
practitioner is concerned. I have done quite a bit of
5:38
research before this episode and put myself through a very unique
5:42
form of torture. I decided to write out in an
5:45
excel file across I think it was 5 different traditional blending
5:49
houses. Every single poetic name.
5:52
It was over 100 rows long. I think had I spent more time on
5:56
this I could have done even more.
5:59
And I put them all into one slide.
6:02
And for the life of me, I cannot possibly believe that anyone in
6:07
the world has any clue what's going on with all of these named
6:12
products. You know, I say I bought.
6:15
I don't know. Let me pick one.
6:16
Fuji no Shiro. Right where someone's going to
6:19
be. Oh, yeah.
6:19
I know exactly what that should taste like.
6:21
And then I'm. I moved to Uji no Mukashi.
6:24
Yeah. Someone knows exactly what that
6:26
tastes like and what company it's from and what the profile
6:28
is. And you, you know, you compound
6:30
this across 100 Matsu no Midori. And then there's also Matsu no
6:35
Shiro. Do those two things have
6:37
anything to do with each other? I don't know.
6:39
Like matsu means pine, but like, you know, it's, it's such a mess
6:45
and it's so confusing. And we think it does a lot of
6:48
consumer harm. So that's the first argument
6:51
around harm. And, you know, we're not arguing
6:53
that it's good or bad, right? These poetic names are not going
6:57
anywhere and they shouldn't go anywhere.
6:58
They're actually a very interesting cultural artifact of
7:02
Japanese society and of a traditional art.
7:07
And we think that's actually a very good thing.
7:09
And that needs to live on and be promoted and there needs to be
7:11
new tea ceremony practitioners. You know, that's where all of
7:14
this came from. But now that the consumer base
7:18
has shifted so drastically to non tea ceremony practitioners,
7:23
which are doing the vast majority of consumption, we
7:27
think there's a lot of consumer harm for the people that
7:29
actually drink it who can tries that majority.
7:32
And then having spent a lot of time now with Japanese tea
7:35
farmers and people who have interacted with Japanese tea
7:38
farmers, we think that there's quite a bit of farmer harm as
7:42
well, which leads us to question who does the current system
7:46
benefit? And then at the very end of
7:48
this, as a conclusion, we want to do like a, a cost benefit
7:52
analysis just to, you know, it's in the matcha industry, people
7:57
tend to over romanticize everything, especially for these
8:00
very traditional crafts. And we want to just really re
8:03
examine the assumption that everything traditional should be
8:08
revered and what the primary and secondary effects are of the
8:13
current systems that are in place.
8:14
So that's the intention of this podcast.
8:17
We're not trying to expose traditional matcha companies or
8:22
criticize them. We're happy that they exist.
8:25
Without them, there would be no much industry.
8:28
It doesn't make them immune from the fact that there could be
8:32
potential harm in the existing system to somebody, especially
8:37
as it's changing. Yeah.
8:39
Well, Ryan, going back to your original question, what does
8:42
this system like? Who does this system benefit
8:46
towards? I guess a more reasonable
8:50
question will be like who does this system serve?
8:53
You know, the the target has changed originally, you know,
8:57
like it served the IT served the nobles of back in the days.
9:01
And I think that's essentially why this poetic matcha naming
9:06
scheme has such a strong root, because, you know, it was not
9:10
for people to understand matcha. It's, it's for people to use
9:15
matcha in a coherent way with tea ceremony with Channel U to,
9:20
to coin a theme in Channel U to pinpoint a conversation topic.
9:26
It's usually why this, this chart tunnel, you get summoned
9:30
in the 1st place. It's for the samurai and for the
9:32
ruling class to have a space, safe space to have
9:35
conversations. So that's, you know, like the, I
9:39
guess the original reason why these names are created.
9:43
You have a lot of reference of these names coming from Ganjino,
9:47
you know, Monogatali, that's a very traditional Japanese
9:51
literature and many others. So for for people to actually,
9:55
you know, understand and the meaning behind these poetic
9:57
names, you need a lot of deep understanding of traditional
10:00
Japanese culture. But that's no longer the case,
10:03
right? In modern days, the the, you
10:06
know, the target of service has changed from monarch to regular
10:12
day-to-day consumers us and we don't necessarily have the
10:15
contacts and we don't necessarily need the contacts to
10:19
appreciate matcha. And you know, like the matcha is
10:22
not going into a 100 year old Tamil good bowl and instead it's
10:28
going to a paper cup, probably going to be mixed with oat milk
10:32
or milk and it still tastes good.
10:34
And that's the point of, you know, us enjoying or buying
10:38
these matcha in the 1st place. And that's problematic, right?
10:41
Like still using these names would not give consumer an
10:45
opportunity to understand the usage that they care, they care
10:49
about the flavor they care about.
10:51
You know, how can I better pair a matcha with either milk or
10:56
with either things that they are going to eat or drink along
10:59
with? And that's the usage of modern
11:03
day's matcha. Yeah, the context.
11:05
Has changed and the context has changed.
11:09
The context that you need to appreciate something has
11:12
radically changed from being this very, what I'll call
11:17
exclusive beverage. The average person, the amount
11:20
of Labor that it took to make matcha 100 years ago is almost
11:23
unthinkable. I mean, there are literally
11:25
people sorting out leaves with chopsticks, right?
11:28
Like this is like what much of production look like.
11:31
And that was just one very narrow, tiny little step in that
11:34
production process. This was not an every man's tea
11:38
and the context to appreciate is completely changed and these
11:41
older companies are adapting. I mean, you'll see traditional
11:45
blend houses make a macho latte blend, but the vast majority of
11:49
their offering is still has one foot or maybe 2 feet.
11:53
Very much firmly planted in the old world, where now the people
11:59
who are very interested in matcha and have a lot of
12:01
purchasing power are interested in contextualizing and building
12:06
preferences on a very different set of things.
12:09
It's around where it was grown, who, who grew it, what
12:13
processing steps made that thing unique?
12:16
Was it a particular cultivar that expresses certain flavors
12:19
and was there some type of intervention like honzu shading
12:22
where they use rice straw canopies versus the synthetic
12:25
ones? Was it the fact that they use
12:27
natural fertilizer versus chemical fertilizer?
12:30
Was it in regional production styles where you have the very
12:33
umami expressive tea in Kyoto Prefecture and in Fukuoka, and
12:39
especially in Yamai, you have the more roasty, toasty
12:41
profiles? We contextualize and appreciate
12:44
things very differently, and it's much less abstract and it's
12:48
much more real as all of us want to know where our food comes
12:52
from. But, you know, if you contrast
12:54
that with poetic names, if you're a traditional Japanese
12:57
tea ceremony student like we used to be and you were hosting
13:00
a tea gathering, typically there's a theme in the spring,
13:04
it might be springtime in the summer, it might be dedicated
13:07
to, you know, that season. I've been to tea ceremonies in
13:11
New York that the theme is New York and there's various little
13:15
references, whether or not it's a New York to Chowan or tea ball
13:20
or Mizu Sashi or all sorts of things kind of fun.
13:23
And you usually match the poetic name to the occasion.
13:26
That's kind of part of this appreciation and hospitality and
13:31
hosting someone and creating themes.
13:34
It's just so far from what most people actually care about in
13:37
today's use case scenario. And you know, there's this
13:42
interesting cultural trend both in the United States, but also
13:45
all over the world of going to of trying to not get a watered
13:51
down experience, trying to find the most traditional and
13:54
authentic thing possible. I did a very awkward moment.
13:57
I remember there's this Chinese take away place in my hometown
14:00
growing up. And you know, it's Americanized
14:03
Chinese food. And I remember standing there
14:05
waiting for my food and this middle-aged older gentleman come
14:09
comes in and he's a little ill mannered.
14:11
And he asks the owner in very condescending tone, is this
14:17
authentic? Are you serving authentic
14:19
Chinese food? And the poor owner, who is like,
14:24
clearly, like, I believe he's mainland Chinese and more recent
14:28
immigrants, Yes. How do you approach that
14:30
conversation? I mean, for anyone like else
14:37
who's like a little more culturally aware, I mean, it's
14:39
just an absurd question. There's no such thing as Chinese
14:42
cuisine. Chinese.
14:43
There's like 50 to 100 different styles of Chinese cuisine that
14:47
are as different as what you'll find, you know, in the Midwest
14:51
in Ohio versus down in Arizona. I mean, we're talking about
14:55
radically different cuisine styles across China.
14:58
But you know, there's this weird romanticization or fetishization
15:04
of the real thing. And I think that as much as
15:08
boom, that's why everyone's going to these traditional
15:10
companies and that's kind of now that they're there, this current
15:15
system is resulting in quite a bit of consumer harm and I think
15:18
could really harm Matcha more broadly and for more consumers
15:22
wanting to adopt it based on frustrating experiences.
15:25
Yeah, I mean like, you know, for for these, there's no problem
15:28
for me, like for, for these, you know, traditional houses and
15:33
poetic matcha name to exist. I, you know, like I see the
15:37
problem being the lack of, you know, the transparent labeling
15:42
out there to content balance or to, you know, guide consumers
15:47
from beginner to a more educated and more experienced consumer.
15:52
Like the the path is so vague. Like for for a lot of people the
15:57
entry point is the poetic matcha name, which is not really a good
16:02
starting point to begin with. Absolutely.
16:05
You cannot draw a straight line from the poetic name to what is
16:10
inside at all, and we're going to go into that pretty soon here
16:13
about why poetic names are so bad.
16:16
Yeah, why don't we start from there, right?
16:20
OK. The first thing to understand
16:21
about matcha is that there is very little standardization
16:25
behind matcha names and there are very little rules so long as
16:28
you're not committing fraud. And so you can basically call
16:30
anything, anything. You could get the bottom of the
16:32
barrel matcha and advertise it as super ceremonial grade single
16:36
origin, single cultivar. Technically in theory you could
16:40
do that or give it any of these poetic names.
16:43
So there's very little standardization and the matcha
16:46
names are you can basically consider relatively arbitrary.
16:49
They don't give any descriptive detail other than giving this
16:52
feeling or sense. So something like white pine is
16:56
one of the translation of these. It's much more abstract, but
17:01
it's for people, especially people don't speak Japanese.
17:04
It's arbitrary in the sense that it gives no descriptive detail.
17:07
And some of you might be thinking if you're a little more
17:09
experienced in matcha names, is, oh, no, there actually is a
17:12
naming convention where you can add mukashi at the end of the
17:16
name or shiro at the end of a name.
17:18
If you go to one of these traditional houses in Japan and
17:21
you know, you ask them to explain their matcha offerings,
17:24
they'll say that mukashi, anything that ends in mukashi,
17:27
is generally meant for koicha and can be consumed as thick and
17:31
so much more concentrated, right?
17:32
So if it's very bitter, it's going to taste disgusting.
17:35
So usually it's a less bitter tea, usually more umami.
17:38
And anything with the name shiro is generally lighter and more
17:41
suitable for usucha. The problem with this rule is
17:45
that it's completely inaccurate. There are exceptions left, right
17:50
and center, and we've been to places where the cheapest tea on
17:53
the menu had mukashi in the name.
17:56
And even more confusing is that some of the same names are used
18:01
between vendors. So Hatsu Mukashi is the really
18:05
famous example where there's many examples of different
18:10
traditional blend houses using this name.
18:12
Some of them recommend that it's used for usicha or thin tea, and
18:17
they price it very low. I think YPOTO prices there's
18:21
around six U.S. dollars. And then you have other
18:24
companies using the term Hatsumukashi and they're pricing
18:29
it 30 to $40 and recommending it for koicha.
18:32
So I mean, imagine you're just a random consumer and I don't
18:35
know, pick your country, let's say Germany.
18:38
And you're getting into matcha, you're looking through these
18:40
houses, you're trying to build preferences and learn what's
18:43
good, what's bad. And you get this can in a tatsu
18:46
mukashi, you really love it. And then you go buy it from a
18:49
different company and you realize that this is not the
18:51
same product at all. So from a consumer standpoint,
18:55
the name of the matcha between vendors is a it's a faux zemi.
18:59
It's a false friend. You cannot use it to produce
19:02
predict whether or not you'll like something else.
19:04
So unless you're learning and memorizing both the name and the
19:08
producer together and the flavor profile that came along with it,
19:13
that's the only way you can build preference.
19:15
So you have to go across all of these hundreds of products if
19:18
you want to build a set of complex preferences about what
19:21
you like and dislike. And there's very little
19:23
predictors and additional information on any of these
19:26
products to go off of other than the name.
19:29
So it makes it really hard to form preferences like you can in
19:33
something like wine. For example, you might know that
19:36
you love the Pinot Noir grape, right?
19:39
And if you have one in California, you might want to
19:41
try one from France, or you might want to try one from, you
19:45
know, I don't know, Zealand, the finger likes, or New Zealand,
19:48
right? Or you might know that you don't
19:50
like Cabernet Franc, like me. I don't like Cabernet Franc.
19:53
I've tried it for many different countries.
19:55
And the reason that I'm able to develop that preference is
19:57
because I'm aware that that is in the product.
20:01
But in matcha, you're not aware of anything.
20:03
When something is just called hatsu mukashi, they don't tell
20:05
you anything about it. I cannot form.
20:09
It's not helping me become a more educated consumer where I'm
20:13
able to buy something that I know I will like, other than
20:16
arbitrarily memorizing all of these very foreign sounding
20:20
names to me that are hard for me to pronounce.
20:24
Yeah, I guess one of the ways that you can kind of solve the
20:27
problem is to stick with one vendor.
20:29
So you just keep buying, you know, Hazu Mukashi from, you
20:33
know, let's say Hori Ishii Million and, you know, then,
20:36
then you might be able to have a more predictable experience in
20:40
the future. But I recently learned that it's
20:43
not necessarily the case either. Saying matcha blend from the
20:46
same house can change name too throughout history.
20:51
That that's, that's very, you know, it's really not good.
20:55
There's a very interesting cultural artifact that we wanted
20:57
to talk about on this. So a lot of these poetic names
21:01
are actually because it's a blend favored by a grand mouse
21:06
master of some institution. So you have the large tea
21:10
ceremony schools like a Mottasenke and Urdasenke.
21:13
You also have some temples as well where they work with these
21:18
blend houses to have these preferred blends that are it's
21:22
the Urasenke blend, Amoto Senke blend, Mushina Koji Senke blend.
21:26
Excuse me if I mispronounce that.
21:28
And they encourage all of their students to buy it.
21:31
And they were the traditional consumers, right?
21:35
It's like being, you know, a really big buyer of some company
21:39
and you know, you can work with them for some customization.
21:41
And so it's a similar thing. But it turns out between
21:44
generations of Iyamoto's or grand masters of these
21:47
institutions, the same blend can change poetic names.
21:53
So if there's a leadership change, the poetic name might
21:56
change. And there's some examples of
21:58
that that will post an article that we found.
22:00
It's a really informative to read through more about the
22:04
confusing aspects of understanding poetic names.
22:07
You know, the barriers to entry just to even understanding
22:10
poetic names are super high even on a single product basis.
22:16
It's like. Be a China youth student to to
22:18
follow the news essentially and more the information and have
22:23
the, you know, taste reference of all of these products.
22:26
It's, it's certainly an obviously, you know, a art, you
22:31
know, like it's, it's artificially created information
22:34
barrier. And you know, you know, it's
22:37
channel you, right. That's how you, you, you
22:41
demonstrate this exclusivity and separate you from regular, the
22:46
date consumers essentially. So you know, that's, and that's,
22:50
you know, that that's the point of why these barriers are
22:53
created in the 1st place. And, and, and you know, for, for
22:57
us, the reality has definitely changed.
23:00
We are not coming from that side of the world anymore.
23:03
And we and a lot of the regular date consumers, you know, we, we
23:08
are buying much enough for not for China view, not for going to
23:12
study tea ceremony, but for consuming the matcha itself.
23:17
As a specialty product, we want to learn what is the inherent
23:21
variation between regions and between cultivars and really
23:24
discover the same world as like craft and specialty coffee or
23:29
bean de bar chocolate or wine or anything else in the world.
23:32
Matcha has such a rich and interesting specialty component
23:36
to it that's completely obscured by these poetic names and
23:40
traditional houses. Yeah.
23:42
So I guess the change really needs to happen, you know, by
23:46
eliminating the current naming scheme, but you know, create a
23:50
new one. I think that that that will be a
23:52
much healthier future for Matcha as a whole.
23:55
And, you know, it already exists.
23:57
I mean, you see a lot of companies now or they tell you
24:01
that what were their descriptive names for the product?
24:04
Like the product is named after the region or named after the
24:07
cultivar. And then they'll tell you
24:08
exactly what's in it, right? This is blank and blank Farmers
24:13
blend, which is 80% Yabukita, 20% Siamidori.
24:18
And it was from, you know, the last year's harvest.
24:21
And they only did a single harvest that year and it was not
24:26
handpicked and it was shaded for 30 days like that.
24:29
That thankfully that does exist. And we have these two naming
24:32
systems alongside one another. But what makes it even more
24:36
confusing? So let's talk about consumers
24:38
now that are in the middle of their journey.
24:40
And I guess there's no endpoint, but let's say someone who's not
24:43
a beginner, someone who's heard of a a few cultivars or
24:46
cultivated varieties, You know, just like apples and grapes can
24:50
have different expressions, like a Granny Smith versus a Red
24:53
Delicious. Same thing in matcha.
24:55
One of the first things you learn when you really want to
24:57
get into matcha are a few cultivar names.
25:00
So Yabakita is the most common. Asahi is like super ultra lux
25:05
premium. You also have things like
25:07
Siamidori, oki, midori, samidori.
25:10
There's a lot of others and it gets even more confusing.
25:14
So this is another point about why poetic names are harmful to
25:18
consumers. They sometimes will put the
25:20
cultivar word into a poetic name.
25:24
So we were in Uji a couple of months ago and we saw Asahi
25:27
Noshiro like oh that's cool right?
25:30
It's a blend that has Asahi in it.
25:31
Nope, 0% to Sahi and we had to ask and the the person we asked
25:38
didn't know they had to ask someone else.
25:42
Well, I mean, like, in their defense, Asahi is a very common
25:46
name in, in Japan means the morning sun basically.
25:50
So you have, you have a very, I guess, iconic imagery coming
25:55
from the name that you see that in beer, you see that in tea,
26:00
you see that in many other things that they will call it
26:03
Asahi. So maybe for Japanese people,
26:06
you know, this, this is just like, you know, a very ordinary
26:09
name that has a very broad and general cultural association For
26:15
us, you know, we, we know it's the name of a cultivar.
26:18
And in this, you know, tea or much of context, we obviously
26:23
would associate that back to, you know, something that we
26:27
learned or something that we're familiar with.
26:29
And that's a very different thinking mechanism because of
26:33
this cultural difference or, you know, the the lack of certain
26:38
cultural knowledge or exposure. Yeah, it's a form of cultural
26:43
exclusivity for those that are in the know.
26:46
But I even bet that those who are in the know might not be too
26:50
sure, and they might still have to ask or confirm whether or not
26:53
that has anything to do with the cultivar Asahi.
26:56
Yeah, yeah, very likely. I mean, the next level of
27:00
consumer harm is it just adds to the jargon.
27:03
The vast majority of the matcha consumers in the world are not
27:07
Japanese speakers. They don't know all these
27:09
Japanese references. And there is so much jargon to
27:13
learn to be a reasonably educated consumer.
27:17
And I remember very early on in my matcha journey, I, I remember
27:21
talking with you, Sam, and I was looking through a bunch of, I
27:23
bought like, I don't know, 20 poetically named products
27:26
thinking that I would learn something often to figure out
27:30
that I, I looked back on all of my notes and tasting notes and I
27:34
tried to capture all the detail of all the products.
27:38
I didn't learn anything. I learned a little bit more
27:41
about what flavors I liked and disliked, but I didn't learn to
27:44
taste for cultivars or for regions or for anything like
27:48
this. And there's just so much jargon.
27:50
I remember looking at one of these names.
27:51
I was like, Sam, is this name a cultivar?
27:54
And like you didn't know you had to look it up.
27:56
But thank, thank goodness you can read mostly read Japanese.
27:59
And you could you could quickly reference whether or not it was
28:02
so, you know, as a new consumer, a word like Oku Midori could
28:08
just as easily be a poetic name as it could be a cultivar.
28:12
And you compound this across all of the terminology you need to
28:15
know to be a regionally competent buyer.
28:18
Like Tazumi or handpick or hanzu, like the rice straw
28:22
shading or chawan or like even really or China.
28:27
You basic, basic terminology. It's really hard to like pin
28:31
down what is what just to wrap your mind around.
28:34
What am I buying? Yeah, I mean, as you progress in
28:39
this journey of learning matcha, like all of these become, you
28:42
know, interesting, you know, like they're they're always
28:44
history and story behind all of these jargons and and and
28:48
culture. But it made it very hard for
28:51
beginners, almost intimidating for beginners to to to progress
28:55
forward. So I think that, you know, like,
28:58
and also for us, we keep advocating for transparent and
29:02
more detailed labeling for Marsha.
29:04
It doesn't really necessarily contradict with the traditional
29:08
naming scheme. Like both things can exist very
29:11
peacefully together in harmony. So I can definitely see a future
29:16
of, you know, like both culture living very peacefully together
29:19
and everybody being very happy. There's no, you know, it doesn't
29:24
like these two naming scheme doesn't exclude each other.
29:28
And for me, I think it will be healthier for them to live
29:31
together. You know, they, they each
29:33
represent a very, very interesting segment of consumer
29:38
and consumer culture behind them, which I think, you know,
29:42
it's, it's very interesting. It's almost you can see a bridge
29:45
between the past and the present and the future.
29:48
Yeah. It's just a shame that it's the
29:50
entry point for so many new consumers, which is where this
29:55
harm comes from, but. Certainly agree.
29:58
Certainly. I agree with you, but I think
30:00
it's going to hurt the industry in the long run if more
30:03
companies do not start adopting descriptive matcha names and
30:07
transparent labels because as a consumer you're only willing to
30:11
get burned so many time. I mean, at the end of the day, I
30:14
mean people are cost conscious and people want to spend as
30:17
little money as possible for the best product possible, right?
30:21
And if you get burned on a $3040 can of matcha enough times,
30:28
right, you're going to fall off that bandwagon.
30:31
Yeah, the the tuition is certainly high for Mata.
30:34
It's extremely high at the moment, but like any of these
30:38
new blossoming specialty industries, you see that same
30:41
curve where that awareness and education, right?
30:46
It's just so insanely high. We are still learning it and we,
30:50
you know, we've been doing this full time for two years now.
30:53
It's really difficult to that learning curve is just so high
30:57
where you're separating poetic names from different regions,
31:00
from different processes from different cultivars, all in an
31:03
effort to figure out what will I like and what will this taste
31:08
like based on all of those criteria.
31:11
Because ultimately, taste is what wins.
31:13
And actually have a very good segue here.
31:15
So what do consumers do in this current paradigm?
31:19
Very few people could go through any of the traditional matcha
31:22
house's entire portfolio that can't afford to do that.
31:26
I mean, even if you did buy every single one in one order,
31:31
they're going to age at different rates as you consume
31:34
all of them. So then you don't even know was
31:37
it just too old or was it the tea itself?
31:41
Because it's a product that needs to be consumed fresh.
31:45
So what do consumers do? They use price as a proxy for
31:49
quality. So ultimately price is what
31:53
people are really making these purchasing decisions on because
31:57
there's literally nothing else to go off of but the poetic
32:00
name. It's a form of top down
32:02
positioning where the companies are deciding this is good and
32:07
these flavor profiles are worth paying for.
32:10
And these are the value products where you know, maybe it's a
32:13
more industrial process, but you don't even know.
32:16
You don't know how it was milled.
32:17
You don't know where it came from.
32:19
You don't know what harvest season it was, whether or not it
32:22
was first, second, third, maybe even 4th, let alone the cultivar
32:26
or any of these other aspects that are really important to
32:29
quality. Yeah, there's no point of
32:31
reference. I mean, like most of these,
32:35
these mystery powders sealing the canned are bland too.
32:39
And you, you don't know, like sometimes you know, it's, it's
32:43
good quality matcha, but you just don't like the taste
32:45
profile of that specific blend. It's very likely to happen,
32:50
actually. Yeah, people need to stop
32:52
talking about good or bad tasting matcha.
32:54
That's like such a reductive framework, right?
32:58
There is a large variation of what people would consider quote
33:02
good quality matcha and some of those flavor profiles you might
33:05
really like and some of them you might really hate for reasons
33:09
that have nothing to do with the very arbitrary concept around
33:13
quality. Which leads me to the next point
33:16
that we have written here is that there's a preference
33:18
quality and price misalignment in traditional matcha.
33:22
So what do I mean by that? When you look at this price
33:25
lineup of different arbitrarily named matcha products, and in
33:30
some cases it's 3040, fifty different products, all
33:34
different blends of matcha. When you look across that whole
33:37
range, who is the end customer? In a large percentage of them,
33:42
it's the Iyamoto or the Grand Master of the institution that
33:45
it was made for, who in nearly all cases, and I think it's
33:50
100%, it could be wrong. There might be a few exceptions.
33:54
It's all old Japanese men, almost exclusively men who are
33:59
deciding what these blends should taste like and then
34:02
dictating down which to their students or to the institution
34:06
that they should buy these things.
34:08
And so you have tea blenders who are also, by the way, almost
34:12
entirely men, old men, old Japanese men, nothing against
34:17
old Japanese men, but you have old Japanese men making things
34:20
for old Japanese men that now have decided what this quality
34:25
standard is. And that's creating this
34:28
priceline up that we're that everyone else in the world is
34:32
now using as a proxy for quality.
34:35
And it that also, you know, harming consumers.
34:39
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a, it's a
34:43
long talked about, you know, historic legacy of Japanese
34:47
society, a very patriotic social structure that you can find the
34:52
origin from, you know, hundreds, thousands of years ago.
34:56
And, you know, this is really a piece of living fossil that we
35:00
are experiencing right now. Yeah, with the good and the bad
35:04
of the past and typically people really romanticize the good, but
35:09
it's really worth thinking for a moment, you know, about how that
35:13
fits into a modern context. I mean, try discussing your
35:17
pronouns with one of the Iyamoto's of these large houses.
35:20
I I don't think you're going to go very far.
35:22
I listening to a very interesting podcast.
35:24
I think it's called T life of a bunch of students who did
35:27
Midorikai, which is a program put on by Era Sankay that you
35:33
can go live and breathe and study Chan OU for a whole year.
35:37
And it takes in a lot of foreigners.
35:39
And they were saying that. And typically the people who go
35:42
to this midorikai have been studying for quite a while.
35:45
Sometimes it's a few years, sometimes it's a few decades.
35:48
And typically they're studying somewhere else in the world.
35:51
And then you can apply and then get invited to come study at
35:54
headquarters in Kyoto. And they were saying that during
35:59
the lessons, if you were a man, even if you had decade, 2
36:03
decades less experience than some of your peers, they would
36:06
be seated as first guest always. It is a very patriarchal, top
36:12
down institution whose values do not necessarily fit into modern
36:16
day society. Yeah.
36:17
But you know, unfortunately for still a very large portion of
36:22
the matcha industry, they are are still in charge being a
36:26
point of authority and also a predictive buyer.
36:30
And much of these industries still relying on them, which,
36:34
you know, makes it very difficult for for people to make
36:37
a change because, you know, they, they don't necessarily
36:40
like much of the industry still serving them, not serving, you
36:44
know, other people who, you know, care about different
36:47
things. But luckily, we're seeing a
36:49
change right now. You know, the dynamic has been
36:52
shifted a little bit, but the for, you know, for the current
36:56
days and for the near future, you know, we, we will still
36:59
unfortunately, you know, see this as the, the, the status
37:02
quo. Yeah, absolutely.
37:04
And there are change makers within this institution.
37:07
In that same episode it was very interesting.
37:10
There was AI think it was in UCLA there's an RSNK program and
37:14
in China you there's gendered movements and so the way you
37:17
walk and there's some other things where you're supposed to
37:20
act and behave and make certain gestures in a particular way,
37:24
whether or not you're a man or a woman.
37:25
And you know, the one teacher allows her students when they
37:29
start to pick their gender. So a woman can pick masculine
37:34
gestures or a man can pick feminine gestures and they
37:38
cannot switch once they they've made it because, you know, you
37:41
have to learn in a particular way and there's so much muscle
37:43
memory. But they let their students pick
37:46
their gendered gestures in. So, you know, it will probably
37:50
change. And apparently there was almost
37:52
a woman Iyamoto and Ersenge, but that didn't end up happening.
37:56
There was a woman in the line. I guess the world wasn't quite
37:59
ready for that yet. All I know a lot of tea ceremony
38:01
practitioners were rooting for that.
38:03
It didn't happen. The world has ready.
38:06
Maybe Japan has not. Yeah.
38:10
So it is getting better, but it is still a very old world system
38:14
and I think a lot of consumers don't realize that so.
38:18
It's very interesting to see the whole structure being almost a
38:22
manifestation of the society in Japan.
38:26
You know, like for the matcha industry, you, you have the
38:29
farmers and you have the processors, the processing
38:32
factories and you have the, the blend houses, essentially the
38:36
buyers of all of these products. And then you have, you know, the
38:40
Yamotos, the, the, the ultra buyer of the finished product
38:45
being sitting on the very top. And, and they dictate based on
38:50
their own preference and their own usage of what this matcha,
38:54
what of these matchas needs to be, needs to be looked like,
38:57
needs to be packaged and needs to be named.
39:00
And nowadays you have consumers like us outside of Japan that
39:05
doesn't care about, you know, that original usage or the the
39:10
channel usage of these tea, essentially.
39:12
On the other hand, we care about, you know, where it's
39:14
coming from, how it was made and processed.
39:17
You know, we care about the farmers.
39:18
We care about the other end of the spectrum, which has
39:22
historically been the very bottom of, you know, the
39:25
Japanese society. Yeah, the Western value system's
39:29
so different. Very.
39:30
We care much more about farmers and where the food came from and
39:34
how it was grown. That's our value system.
39:37
Not the poetic gesture around how well it meets the theme.
39:41
And that, you know, the grandmaster told us that this is
39:44
good, so this is what we're buying.
39:47
Yeah. Well, not talking about which
39:49
one is you know better or than which, but this is difference
39:53
that we are seeing right now. True, true.
39:56
It just so happens that the majority who represents the
39:59
consumers has shifted. Yeah.
40:01
And as you were talking about, you know, like, you know what, I
40:03
think it almost had a female. Yeah, Moto, they are changing
40:06
too, but they're changing much slower than our consumers
40:10
outside of Japan. Consumers, you know, change very
40:13
fast in general. The adaptation will finally meet
40:16
together. But you know, one is certainly
40:18
faster than the other. That's a great point.
40:21
Yeah, that's that makes sense. And you know the and that, I
40:25
think, is why so many people idolize this traditional aspect.
40:29
Change is intentionally slow, and they're not rushing into
40:32
things. There's probably a lot of
40:33
collective wisdom there around the pace of change and the
40:37
process of change. I mean like channel view is not
40:42
anti change right? Like each motto has the freedom
40:45
of making one change in the culture.
40:48
In their life. In their tradition, in their
40:50
life. So they're not anti change.
40:52
They're changing, certainly. Slowly.
40:54
All right, so just to summarize the case for consumer harm for
40:58
behind poetic poetic matcha names, the 1st for non Japanese
41:03
speaking matcha consumers. The poetic matcha names are
41:06
basically arbitrary. There are rules that people try
41:10
to educate consumers on how to buy like the mukashi and Shiro
41:15
naming conventions which are not true.
41:18
Different companies we use the same name have complete and the
41:21
products inside are completely different.
41:24
You sometimes have cultivar names that are embedded inside
41:27
the poetic name that have nothing to do with the cultivars
41:32
used in the product. There is a cultural exclusivity
41:36
around poetic naming intentions about what you're supposed to
41:41
gather from that flavor profile of that matcha, and that if you
41:45
don't have the cultural reference, which is I'd say 99%
41:48
of consumers, you will not appreciate appreciate it, which
41:51
is a form of cultural exclusion. And to add to the confusion,
41:55
poetic names can change between emotos when they're custom
42:00
blends for these large traditional institutions.
42:03
And last but not least, it adds, sorry, there's two more.
42:06
And next, it adds to the jargon that you have to learn and to
42:10
navigate and really just exponentially increases the
42:13
amount of terminology that you need to wrap your brain around
42:16
as a non Japanese speaker. And last is that what ends up
42:20
happening is that people use there's an over reliance of
42:24
price as a proxy for quality. When these people, those buyers,
42:30
whether or not they're in California, Ohio, Arizona,
42:33
France, Germany, UK, the Philippines, pick your country.
42:37
It is not made for them. The person who's clicking buy on
42:41
the other side and they're using price is a proxy for quality,
42:44
which sometimes it is, but really these products are not
42:47
intended for them. So there's this top down
42:50
positioning of being told what is good and what is bad, which
42:52
is dictated by price, which is ultimately old Japanese men
42:56
doing things for other old Japanese men.
42:59
This is a reductive argument, but it is largely the case.
43:03
That is just the reality of it. And that's my case for consumer
43:06
harm of the current naming scheme.
43:09
Yeah, very true. But we are seeing changes, so we
43:14
let's stay tuned and be hopeful. We also wanted to discuss the
43:18
harm to farmers as well in the fact that it totally commodifies
43:22
their production when they're farming tea and it gets put into
43:26
this nameless blend. These blend houses are very
43:29
secretive. So say you're laboring all year
43:32
to make the best Hansu shaded Asahi cultivar tea you can.
43:37
You're trying so hard and you have to sell it to the blend
43:40
house cuz that's, you know, your only buyer for X percentage of
43:44
the crop of that tea. You have no clue where it goes.
43:48
Does it go into the highest end product that they offer?
43:51
Is it a blend component? You're just a nameless supplier
43:55
where it completely commodifies what could be a really specialty
43:59
product that has, you know, interesting provenance and
44:02
process and descriptive detail about it is now being completely
44:06
washed out. And you're basically an
44:08
interchangeable part in service to all of this poetic blend
44:13
system. Yeah.
44:14
The problem about Japanese matcha industry is that each
44:18
segment is very, very segmentized.
44:22
They are very different group of people that are essentially not
44:27
related to each other at all. And you know, for us, sometimes
44:30
we make the correlation between matcha farmer to a wine farmer
44:35
or a wine grower in, in, in, in the West, but it's essentially
44:40
not the case, right? Like for for a lot of these wine
44:44
makers in the West, they would essentially produce the finished
44:49
product. They own the vineyards, they own
44:53
the Chateau that makes the wine and they have the freedom to
44:55
control what they will be. But that's not the case in
44:59
Japan. For a lot of the tea farm tea
45:02
farmers in Japan, they do not own the processing factory.
45:07
They, they didn't sometimes even own the refinement factory.
45:11
They they'd have to send their other shop for a local refiner
45:14
to to get processed. So they have very little control
45:19
of their creation that they have almost no power to make a
45:23
narrative at all, which is. No power to create any
45:26
narrative. Their voice is completely lost.
45:28
I mean, imagine you're a young person in Japan who grew up in a
45:32
rural area where there's tea farming and you see how hard
45:36
your parents work, or you know, all these people working on all
45:39
this tea production. What is the incentive for them
45:43
to have that lifestyle versus moving to Tokyo and getting an
45:47
interesting job in tech? For example, who wants to be a
45:52
nameless interchangeable supplier?
45:54
The incentive system is also a little perverse.
45:56
Now, another thing is that there's very if, if, if you are
46:00
exclusively selling to these blunt houses, which is a large
46:03
percentage of Japanese tea farmers, then you have very
46:07
little incentive to do anything innovative or anything
46:10
interesting. Optimize across the buying
46:13
criteria, which is flaw minimization.
46:16
So there's scores for bitterness, astringency, for
46:19
umami, for color, for uniformity of color, all of these things.
46:24
And you're only optimizing what is measured.
46:27
And what's measured is what these blend houses care about.
46:31
Yeah, you are creating. A ingredient.
46:33
Essentially it is a self fulfilling.
46:37
Prophecy that all that there will be a homogenized taste
46:41
because if you look at the economic incentives of the
46:44
system it actually there's a secondary outcome of this is
46:49
that it results in very little innovation right.
46:53
It there's a, there's not really a targeted demographic of we
46:57
heard that people in Europe love these very nutty profiles of
47:03
matcha when it tasted like roasted hazelnuts or walnuts.
47:07
No one's optimizing for that on the scale.
47:10
And that they could be because of this existing system
47:13
resulting in less innovation and resulting in over optimization
47:17
for an incredibly narrow target demographic, which are all
47:21
Japanese men. And there's probably all sorts
47:24
of assumptions around what people will like and dislike in
47:27
this industry. And there's actually a lot of
47:29
very interesting examples if you look at other industries around
47:33
assumptions that are made that turned out to be completely
47:36
wrong about what people will like and dislike.
47:39
There's this really cool new olive oil company called Graza
47:42
that sources a special cultivar of olive oil, of olive to make
47:46
olive oil in Spain. And apparently in Spain, all of
47:50
these olive farmers believed that Americans would not like
47:53
the taste of that cultivar of olives.
47:55
And I guess it wasn't based on much.
47:58
And they ordered some samples, started having people taste it.
48:02
Everyone loved it. Another very successful company.
48:05
And you could make the same case for like the specialty coffee
48:07
movement and these more acidic coffees.
48:11
There's probably lots of old grandpas, you know, in the
48:13
States thinking, oh, who would ever like this?
48:16
Who are the head of some old, you know, traditional coffee
48:20
house that burns their coffee to ash, thinking who is ever going
48:24
to like this? Turns out now it's like a ten,
48:27
$20 billion industry, specialty coffee, largely serving what are
48:31
more acidic profiles or kombucha.
48:34
There's probably a lot of people in before the kombucha boom
48:37
across the world that could not possibly understand how anyone
48:42
would like the taste of kombucha.
48:44
And very likely there's some matcha cult, you know, tea plant
48:49
cultivars in Japan. They could be turned into matcha
48:51
where people assume that people wouldn't like it or certain
48:54
processing steps that people assume people didn't like or
48:58
certain flavor profile of blends.
49:00
There is such a lack of innovation by the fact that the
49:03
craft of creating the product is centralized and it's centralized
49:08
and trapped inside this traditional conformist Japanese
49:12
society, versus letting innovation happen and having the
49:17
craft of producing that product fall into a much more diverse
49:21
set of hands could be a much more interesting industry.
49:25
Yeah, it certainly would. And right now?
49:27
We are, you know, seeing changes too, outside of Japan.
49:31
We have people like Mark from Oika, you know, trying to milk
49:35
matcha in America. And we have, you know, Brian
49:40
from Matsumacha and trying to make their own blends in
49:43
Singapore. These people out there are, you
49:46
know, starting to, you know, gather agencies to make a
49:50
change. And I think the right now the
49:53
problem is that the acquiring such agency is so expensive
49:56
outside of Japan and it has been expensive even inside of Japan
50:00
too. That's so one of the core reason
50:03
why a lot of these farmers or smaller scale producers do not
50:08
necessarily have the capacity to do more innovation because it's
50:12
just so expensive. It's expensive to buy the
50:14
machine, expensive to acquire lands, expensive to construct
50:18
the plant. It's even the knowledge.
50:22
Barrier is expensive, just being educated and ask the right
50:25
questions and it's a very good. Example of Matthew Effect,
50:30
because you know, it has not been expensive in the past and
50:33
the winners happens to be able to accomplish all of these back
50:38
in the past. And right now it has gotten so
50:41
expensive that you know, the the the later commerce just do not
50:45
have the resources to compete. Yeah, it's.
50:50
But you know, there's hope. We're starting to see more and
50:53
more value added steps of craft, the craft of producing the
50:56
product, leaving Japan's borders.
50:59
Whether or not it's people like Brian who are blending their own
51:02
matcha and listening to their customers in Singapore about
51:05
what they like and dislike and trying to create flavor profiles
51:09
to better match the preferences of his consumers.
51:12
Or people like Mark who are doing radic transparent sourcing
51:16
and then milling it fresh, offering a radically different
51:19
product to consumers and not giving it a poetic name, but you
51:23
know, incredible descriptive detail.
51:25
So there's really, it's changing, it will change.
51:28
We would like to be part of that change into the future with our
51:32
mill that we're currently working on that can mill much
51:34
afresh. We think the ability for people
51:37
to source different tensha, blend it themselves and create
51:41
new products or keep it a single origin, single cultivar and keep
51:45
all the transparency and then milling it fresh much closer to
51:49
the consumption point of the consumer can provide some
51:53
infrastructure to lower the barriers of being a contributor
51:58
to crafting products that people will like.
52:00
Yeah, I guess we need to solve the.
52:02
Problem one by one for very important part of these
52:07
obstacles is the infrastructure, as you say, the machineries that
52:11
required to, you know, do all of these jobs and we're starting
52:16
from the mill and you know, in the future we will be working on
52:19
other things to lower the bar even even further.
52:23
Absolutely. That's our goal.
52:24
So Zhongjun Sam, as we wrap up, if we were to do a very quick
52:29
cost benefit analysis around poetic matcha names, who does it
52:33
help and who doesn't hurt? Well, as we.
52:36
Were talking about, you know the the origin of these poetic
52:40
matcha names it helped to preserve a living culture.
52:44
Certainly it was rooted upon that living culture, which is a
52:48
channel you or tea ceremony in Japan and it's created to
52:53
demonstrate exclusivity and power within that system.
52:57
So there's no pros and cons within that culture.
53:00
But you know, for us outside the system, it certainly confuses
53:04
us. It's not helping people outside
53:06
of Japan, people not studying channel you to enjoy and
53:10
appreciate and, you know, learn more about matcha.
53:13
So I think they're are essentially two groups of
53:16
consumers out there that, you know, coexist together right now
53:21
and will still coexist together in the future.
53:23
And these two naming system will also coexist in the future.
53:28
But one system doesn't really necessarily serve the other one.
53:33
So that's my take from today's conversation.
53:38
I mean, it's just old. World and New World type
53:40
thinking. Now we have all the respect in
53:42
the world for these traditional blend houses.
53:45
I mean they were the original budget companies.
53:47
None of these transparent sourcing companies existed and
53:51
there there would be no foundation to work on had they
53:53
not existed. But the pace of change is very
53:56
different and consumers are going to them because they don't
53:59
want to water down experience. So we thought it was very
54:02
worthwhile and we're a very consumer minded company and we
54:06
thought it was worthwhile to dig into the negative externalities
54:09
of this existing system. So anyone that's listening knows
54:13
more about this topic than us or has a very different
54:16
perspective. We would love to hear from you.
54:18
We'd love to record even an updated version of this.
54:22
Maybe we'll do that in a year from now as we learn, as we grow
54:25
and as we even better understand these systems.
54:28
So you can take this very much as a snapshot in time reflection
54:33
of the current system as we understand it.
54:35
But we really like to get this dialogue started around,
54:38
especially as new matcha companies enter the fold.
54:41
It always kills me a little bit when I see a new matcha company
54:44
come out with a few different products and they're all
54:47
poetically named and I'm like, no, come on.
54:51
Like we don't need, we don't need to continue this tradition.
54:54
Let's let's let's put on modern value, the dark side, Ryan the
54:59
dark. Side it's you know, everyone's
55:02
going to. Do their own positioning and you
55:03
know, you need companies. We need a diversity of new
55:06
companies. But, you know, I think a lot of
55:08
people just do it, you know, because they want to sound cool
55:11
or traditional or, you know, have a frame their their value
55:16
out in positioning of making traditional Japanese society and
55:20
crafts like this more accessible to other people.
55:24
But we should reexamine what the externalities are and if there's
55:28
any harm in that, which is what this was an attempt of doing.
55:31
Yeah, I guess essentially. We need to clarify who are we
55:37
selling these muster to eventually, right?
55:39
For traditional Channel U users, we already have a very large
55:45
group of, you know, blend houses serving them.
55:47
And for all of these new consumers outside of Japan or
55:51
sometimes even inside of Japan too, newer generation Japanese
55:54
consumers, they want to learn more about matcha.
55:57
They want to study matcha from a very different aspect and using
56:01
a different naming scheme, using a transparent labeling naming
56:06
scheme, but will certainly help all of these new beginners to
56:10
learn more to, you know, stay tuned to enjoy matcha in the
56:14
future. And they will essentially be a
56:16
very large group of people in the future.
56:19
And you know, you have more people, you have more money and
56:22
cascading down, you have more power to craft a new narrative
56:26
of matcha. And you know, that's, I think
56:28
that's very important absolutely that.
56:31
Couldn't have been better put, and anything that gets in the
56:33
way of consumers predicting whether or not they'll like
56:36
something is a barrier that's going to destroy the potential
56:41
future for matcha as a specialty product.
56:43
The future of specialty matcha really depends on people.
56:47
Being able to determine am I going to like this when you have
56:53
a sea of arbitrary names is almost impossible other than
56:58
using price as proxy, which has all these other negative
57:02
externalities. So just like any other industry,
57:05
if you're flying blind, you can't develop a very interesting
57:09
set of consumers with interesting preferences.
57:12
So it's just this weird world of poetic names that, you know, we
57:17
don't want to see that continue in new matcha companies.
57:21
You know, we want to see a new thriving industry of
57:23
transparency that's human focused about the farmers and
57:28
the product and where it came from and that whole and
57:31
celebrating the fact that there's natural variation and
57:35
what that is and being able to pinpoint what you like and don't
57:39
like. That's what we get excited
57:41
about. Yeah, well, changes.
57:44
Are happening and they're happening fast.
57:45
So yes, we might end up doing a another episode of this way
57:51
earlier than we think. I hope so.
57:54
I hope so. And you know, we hope to find
57:57
more like minded people and invite them on and really turn
58:00
this into a community based conversation.
58:02
All right, I think that's all we have time for.
58:04
So thanks so much for listening and we'll see you on the next
58:07
one. See you in the next episode.
58:10
Bye.