The Future of Specialty Matcha: Fresh Milling, New Origins and a Changing Industry

Interview with Ryan Ahn, co-founder of @sanko_matcha and Specialty Matcha Podcast. Ryan also represents Zongjun Li.

Ryan & Zongjun

Introduction

Matcha may be one of the fastest-growing beverages in the world, but behind the colourful lattes, ceremonial-grade labels and social-media boom sits a supply chain that has changed surprisingly little.

For Ryan Ahn, co-founder of Sanko Matcha and co-host of the Specialty Matcha Podcast, this is precisely where things become interesting.

His path into matcha did not begin with a consumer brand. It started at the Tea Institute at Penn State, where he studied Japanese tea ceremony and participated in research around tea and sensory perception. That work eventually led him into artificial intelligence, consumer sensory data and food and beverage product development — before bringing him back to tea from a completely different perspective.

Today, Sanko is developing technology for fresh matcha milling, including a temperature-controlled countertop mill designed to bring part of the production process closer to cafés, businesses and ultimately the consumer.

We spoke about what freshness actually means for matcha, why milling may be far more important than consumers realise, the limits of the Japanese supply chain, the rapidly evolving Chinese matcha industry, and whether specialty matcha could one day develop an ecosystem comparable to specialty coffee.

1. Ryan, you met with Zongjun through the Tea Institute at Penn State, and you started working professionally with AI, sensory science and food and beverage development. How did those worlds eventually lead you back to matcha?

The Tea Institute wasn't simply a place for cultural exchange or learning how to prepare tea. There was an active research component.

One of our early projects was about flavour. Could we measure sensory characteristics in tea and use the data to predict something? Could a model distinguish a green tea from a black tea without being told what they were? Could it identify something about the age of a pu’erh?

Once those models started working, we realised that the applications extended far beyond tea. That research eventually spun out into a company. We went through an accelerator, raised venture capital and moved to New York. We worked across tea, coffee, beer, wine, ready-to-drink products, snacks and many other food and beverage categories, primarily helping companies understand what consumers were likely to enjoy.

To train those models, we had to recruit real consumers and have them taste products. I personally travelled to close to 20 countries, sometimes working with hundreds or thousands of consumers at a time.

And we started seeing matcha everywhere.

For me, matcha had previously been associated with Sunday mornings sitting in seiza during Japanese tea ceremonies. Suddenly I was seeing it in specialty coffee shops in cities all over the world.

At the same time, we were seeing that the demand for “better-for-you” products and beverages with perceived functional benefits wasn't disappearing. It looked much more like a permanent consumer shift.

That combination made us start looking at matcha differently.

2. Sanko describes its mission as creating the technology infrastructure for higher-quality matcha consumption. What does “infrastructure” mean to you?

One of our biggest projects is a countertop matcha mill with an active cooling system.

It allows the user to regulate temperature and control the pressure between the two milling plates. Traditional stone milling essentially relies on gravity: the pressure is determined by the weight of the stone. We wanted to separate those variables so that we could control them.

The larger idea is to make it possible to mill matcha anywhere.

Traditional stone mills are expensive, extremely heavy and slow. Their entire lifecycle is also designed around an infrastructure that exists in Japan. If you damage a stone or it needs to be resurfaced after years of use, you either need access to someone with very specialised knowledge or potentially have to move a huge piece of granite.

We tried to rethink that.

From the tea leaves' perspective, we're not trying to fundamentally change what needs to happen during milling. We still need to control heat. A traditional stone mill does that partly by rotating very slowly and partly because such a large mass of granite absorbs heat.

We're simply solving that problem differently.

Our milling surfaces are much thinner and replaceable. If one becomes damaged, replacing it is far easier. It also means the system can evolve: we can experiment with different materials, patterns and geometries.

That makes the machine much more adaptable

3. Why has there been relatively little innovation around matcha milling until now?

When we started, even defining the objective was difficult.

What exactly are you trying to achieve when you mill matcha? What should the particle-size distribution look like? How important is temperature? What happens to the particles as they move through the mill?

It took months simply to understand what questions we should be asking. There are many variables. You have particles ranging from extremely fine material around a micron to much larger particles above 20 microns. You need to think about how long the tea remains inside the milling mechanism, the migration path, the grooves in the milling surfaces, where those grooves intersect, and the shape and concavity of the two faces.

It is much more complicated than it appears.

The other difficulty is that knowledge within the Japanese matcha supply chain is highly specialised and segmented.

A tea producer may not actually mill their own matcha. Milling may be somebody else's expertise entirely. Despite running the Specialty Matcha Podcast and travelling to Japan numerous times, we still haven't been able to sit down directly with a traditional stonemason and ask all of these questions.

There is a lot of knowledge, but it is distributed between very specialised people. So I think part of the reason innovation is difficult is that milling remains something of a gated art.

4. Freshness is central to Sanko's proposition. How much does matcha actually change after milling?

A lot. The problem is that practically nobody can mill matcha fresh today, so the existing supply chain has had little incentive to emphasise freshness.

There is research showing significant degradation of compounds such as EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate) when matcha is stored at room temperature. To preserve everything perfectly, you would need an almost flawless cold chain, and the reality is that this is extremely difficult to maintain throughout an international supply chain.

There is also degradation of chlorophyll. People notice that visually because the bright green colour begins shifting towards yellow and brown, but it isn't purely an aesthetic change. The sensory characteristics change as well.

You can experience this yourself simply by opening a tin of matcha. Taste it when you first open it and then taste it again after it has been exposed to air for some time. It is not the same product.

Fresh milling sounds innovative today, but historically it really isn't.

If you go back far enough, you weren't necessarily buying matcha as a finished powder. Tencha was the product and milling happened much closer to consumption.

Many things we now think of as “traditional matcha” are actually relatively modern developments: electrified mills, nitrogen flushing, modern cultivars and synthetic shading materials.

There is a lot of romance around matcha that can become disconnected from how the modern industry actually works.

5. You told me that “matcha is born at the mill.” What have you discovered about the effect of milling parameters on taste?

That has probably been the biggest revelation.You can take exactly the same tencha and create two completely different sensory experiences simply by changing the milling settings.

For example, we can take a Samidori tencha from Kyoto and mill it at a relatively low speed. You may get something refreshing and umami-driven, with vegetal notes, creaminess and very good foam. Then you can take exactly the same tencha, maintain the same pressure and change the milling speed.  The matcha can look virtually identical. The colour can be the same and the texture can appear the same. But the flavour intensity changes significantly. It can become considerably more bitter.

At the same time, you've increased milling efficiency. That creates interesting possibilities because you might actually want different milling profiles depending on how the matcha will be consumed.

For a latte, perhaps you want something bolder that can maintain contrast against milk. For usucha, you may want something softer and more nuanced.

This means that milling is not simply a mechanical step at the end of production. It can actively shape the product. And that's why I say matcha is really born at the mill.

6. Your ambition is eventually to see fresh milling in specialty coffee shops. Could this really change the way matcha is sold?

Our goal is very ambitious: we would like to see a mill in every specialty coffee shop. In coffee, it would now be unacceptable for a serious café not to grind coffee to order. Matcha is arguably even more delicate, yet we accept a completely different standard.

An enormous amount of work goes into producing matcha, only for much of it to sit as a powder for months.

If fresh milling becomes accessible, it could raise expectations around what consumers consider fresh or stale.

But the bigger transformation would be the supply chain.

Imagine a coffee roaster in Dubai, Paris or another city having direct conversations with customers about what they enjoy. Perhaps their customers prefer one cultivar, or perhaps they enjoy more roasted or vegetal characteristics.

The café could source tencha and start adapting the finished matcha itself. Of course, people are going to make mistakes in the beginning. It is easy to make a bad cup of matcha, and it will also be possible to create bad matcha at the mill.

But over time, you could give matcha brands, cafés and people closer to the consumer greater creative agency.

Right now, most matcha brands are essentially purchasing and repackaging somebody else's finished product.

They can add branding, storytelling and perhaps create an exceptional supply chain, but they have relatively little ability to change the product itself.

Fresh milling could change that.

7. But most matcha consumed in cafés today is served with milk, sugar, fruit or other ingredients. Will consumers really care about fresh milling?

I think there are two sides to it.

First, freshness isn't purely a sensory proposition. Consumers are attracted to matcha partly because of its perceived health benefits, so preservation and freshness can matter even if the matcha eventually becomes a latte.

The second part is sensory preference acquisition.

Something really interesting is happening demographically. Matcha brand owners tell me that their consumers are getting younger and younger.

Traditionally, one of the first “adult” relationships people developed with caffeine was through coffee. You became a teenager, started drinking coffee and gradually acquired a taste for it.

For an emerging generation, that first relationship with caffeine can be matcha instead.

And people don't necessarily start drinking coffee black. They begin with cream, sugar, frappés, pumpkin-spice drinks and other accessible formats. Over time, some become interested in coffee itself.

Matcha could follow a similar trajectory.

Today the average quality of matcha served globally isn't necessarily good enough to stand alone. In many cases, it needs the milk and sugar around it.

Improving freshness and increasing access to better tencha could help change that equation.

It will take time, but I think the market can develop.

8. Global demand is putting enormous pressure on Japanese matcha supply. What do you think will happen to the Japanese industry?

It is difficult to predict.

One issue is the demographics of Japanese tea agriculture. Many farmers are older, and that's not necessarily the stage of life when someone wants to take on major debt, build new infrastructure or make large speculative investments based on a consumer trend.

There is also scepticism about whether this new demand is reliable.

Is matcha going to remain this popular? Is it worth converting production and investing heavily, or could consumers move on?

So producers are moving relatively cautiously, and I think that has both positive and negative consequences.

Exceptional producers doing genuinely interesting work will thrive. There are remarkable producers in Uji, Yame, Nagasaki and elsewhere whose products have distinctive sensory qualities and strong stories.

But I think the middle of the market faces much more pressure.

For the average matcha latte, other origins are becoming increasingly competitive.

We've visited tencha production outside Japan, including South Korea, and we've followed what is happening in China. The quality is improving extremely quickly.

If somebody can produce a matcha that works excellently in a latte at half or one-third of the price of a comparable Japanese product, that changes the economics considerably.

9. China still faces resistance from consumers who associate premium matcha almost exclusively with Japan. Do you think that perception can change?

China has had a bad reputation for reasons that aren't entirely imaginary.

There have been problems around quality and fraud, and five years ago there were far fewer producers doing genuinely good work.

But that story is changing very quickly. China is clearly capable of producing high-quality tea. It has enormous scale and a level of investment that allows production to develop very rapidly.

There are also compelling social and agricultural stories emerging from some of these producing regions. Matcha production is taking place in relatively poor rural communities and can create meaningful economic opportunities.

And the quality itself is improving.

One of the most important factors is that the best matcha customers are often businesses rather than individual consumers.

A café isn't necessarily putting “Japanese Matcha Latte” on the menu. It simply says “Matcha Latte”.

If a business can source something that performs extremely well, potentially even better for its application, at a substantially lower price, that is a very strong proposition.

There is already Japanese involvement in tea production outside Japan, and I think we will see more complex international supply chains emerge.

Paradoxically, this could also benefit Japanese specialty matcha. If cafés that simply need a good matcha for lattes can source elsewhere, that reduces pressure on the Japanese teas for which origin genuinely matters to the consumer.

Over time, I think some of the anti-Chinese sentiment will fade as quality improves. And China could eventually develop its own specialty-matcha world rather than simply trying to imitate Japan. We have already encountered Chinese producers working with Japanese cultivars as well as locally hybridised plant material. Some of those teas are genuinely exciting.

There is no reason that specialty matcha has to mean only one country.

10. After more than 100 conversations through the Specialty Matcha Podcast, what has changed most in your own understanding of matcha?

Probably our biggest shift is around terroir.

When we started, we brought assumptions from other kinds of tea into matcha. But after talking to so many people, it became increasingly clear to us that terroir sits much further down the list than we initially thought.

Matcha is an extremely processed tea. Many of the characteristics people prize are strongly influenced by shading, fertilisation and processing rather than simply the land itself.

That changed the way we think about places such as Uji. Uji is extraordinary because of the accumulated knowledge and talent of the people working there — not simply because there is something magical in the soil that automatically creates exceptional matcha.

And that makes me optimistic about other regions.

If quality comes from agricultural knowledge, processing skill, milling and human decisions, then interesting matcha can potentially emerge in many places. That's also what I hope specialty matcha becomes over the next ten years.

Today, someone can sit in a high-end coffee shop and pay a substantial amount for a Panama Geisha. They may discuss the farm, cultivar, processing and extraction method. There is an entire language and culture around appreciating why that coffee is special. I hope matcha develops something similar.

How do we create a community that values the things that genuinely make a matcha interesting — the agriculture, cultivar, shading, fertilisation, processing, producer skill and freshness?

That would actually represent a new culture, because even within traditional Japanese tea ceremony, the conversation often centres much more on the bowl, the artist, the calligraphy and the ceremonial environment than on analysing the tea itself in this way.

For me, the specialty matcha revolution would be the creation of that market. A market built around freshness, transparency and the things that genuinely make the product good — rather than simply the beautiful language used to sell it.

And ultimately, I hope it brings the conversation closer to the reality of agriculture and the human effort behind every bowl.

Credit Pictures: Sanko Matcha