OUR FARMS
Partnered with leading Chinese tea growers
Origin: Zhejiang Province
We develop our matcha alongside leading Chinese tea growers based in China's Zhejiang province. We have deep, exclusive partnership relationships with two suppliers, focused on creating the best growing conditions for premium cafe optimized matcha. The Zhejiang region is China's most established matcha producing region, with historical cultivation experience, paired with great growing conditions.
Climate
Zhejiang province's temperature, humidity, rainfall and sun coverage conditions are all very inductive to creating high quality tea leaves, leading to high quality matcha. They are very similar to Japan's core growing regions like Uji and Kagoshima.
Cultivars
Matcha is ground down, powdered green tea leaves. Our matcha products come from a variety of different green tea plant cultivars (species) and we use both Japanese and Chinese originating cultivars on our Chinese farms.
Many matcha companies market "single cultivar" as a high quality indicator. It's not. Using a combination of cultivars gives gives us the levers to finely tune taste and color profiles, and to also be resilient against unexpected weather events that may hurt a specific cultivar.
Soil Conditions
Zheijiang has great soil conditions for luscious tea leaf growth, including good PH, moisture and nutrient levels. We have both organic and non-organic farm locations (non-organic farms using fertilizer), each managed for optimal soil conditions for growth.
Shading
Following ~2 weeks of shading the tea trees to induce chlorophyll production (vital for producing matcha's vibrant green color and taste notes), the leaves that are eventually ground down to matcha, are harvested.
Tea leaf quality is highly dependent on the specific time inside a harvest a leaf is picked. The earlier the leaf is picked, typically the more expensive the end matcha product becomes. We combine leaves from different times throughout each harvest period, to achieve the desired taste-color and commercial mix required by our cafe partners.
Harvesting
China is a leading matcha equipment manufacturer, including the production of harvesting machines. Our partners also have relationships with Japanese harvesting machine companies.
Our farms mostly use ride-on automatic harvesting machines and sometimes manual human pickers for the small percentage of hillier terrain. Automatic harvesting is preferred to minimize cost and ensure the most commercially strong product for our cafe customers. Both methods are high quality and consistent.
