When John Harrison brought matcha to North America, his Japanese supplier doubted the market would take to it. Fast forward some 15 years and matcha has become a global beverage and ingredient.

One thing John Harrison remembers of his time growing up in Japan is a sense of independence and a cohort of multicultural friends at his international school in Omori, a suburb of Tokyo. After moving to Canada, he felt the pull of wanting to reconnect with Japan. Today, through his brand DoMatcha, he has retained this link.

The matcha pioneer began his business career in the health food sector. With his Japanese friend Kenny, he “kicked around some ideas” about products to import to Canada from Japan. The pair alighted on matcha, and Kenny mentioned he knew some people.

“There were two different suppliers: one was 400 years old, the other was 300 years old. So these two companies had 700 years of history between them. Canada at that time wasn’t even 200 years old. The history is difficult for people to comprehend in this part of the world,” says Harrison of the candidates.

At the time, neither supplier had an export market and felt what Harrison wanted to do was risky. To assuage their concerns, he had to develop a personal relationship, he recounts. “They wanted to meet me. They could see that my great granddad had been in Japan and started Andrews and George in 1892, and then my grandfather was there. I still spoke some Japanese. I went out there and spent six, seven days with these guys and we never once talked about matcha. It was all about the dog, the family, while walking around.”

Satisfied, they agreed to sell to Harrison, although they had some reservations, he recalls. “They were very honest. They said they felt that matcha was much too structured and too Asian in its approach. Americans and Canadians were always in a rush to do everything quickly – the faster, the better – so they really didn’t think this was going to be successful at all.”

Introducing matcha

Harrison first had to win over Whole Foods, a large grocery chain based in North America that specialises in organic produce. “They have a huge section of tea. Of course, everything there was a teabag and most things were priced at CA$2 to $5 per box. I come in with a $25 tin and the head buyer asks, ‘How do you expect me to sell tea for $25?’”

He urged them to take it on consignment and then hatched a marketing campaign for Whole Foods’ three stores in Vancouver. “I came up with an idea of putting the matcha into a jet spray and putting it in vanilla almond milk. At the end of the first day, every store sold out.”

DoMatcha spent a year devising interesting ideas for cold drinks, which Harrison knew was “completely away from what Japan did with this product”, but which hooked the market. The health angle helped a lot, he adds. “People understood the Japanese lived a long time and they attributed some of this to green tea consumption.”

Then by stealth the brand re-introduced matcha as a hot drink. “We created a little video and some information cards and handed those out and said, ‘this is how it’s actually made in Japan.’ And people went to the hot drink and they became purists. I think now much of the people that are buying matcha are using it with a whisk, a bowl and doing the preparation. I would say over 50% are doing it the traditional way themselves.”

DoMatcha’s success soon extended to North America. “I got a phone call: ‘I hear you’re the matcha king.’ And I go, ‘who is this?’ ‘I’m the head buyer for Whole Foods in the US and we want your matcha.’” Harrison turned them down temporarily, knowing that he had to talk to Japan about supply first. “I said, ‘it’ll take three months’, and he said, ‘I’ll wait’.”

Innovating a traditional product

That was 15 years ago. Today, matcha is a global product, available in venues like Starbucks, to “cookies and cakes and hard candies,” Harrison lists. “That’s a pretty neat kind of legacy to look back and say, ‘wow, this transformed the tea industry’.”

While DoMatcha dominated the early uptake of matcha outside Japan, it is not complacent. As competitors began to grow in number, Harrison quickly realised they needed to innovate to stay relevant. “That’s when we saw a market for decaf.”

Decaffeination by water extraction is a standard process, but it took four years to develop a decaf matcha product with a satisfactory flavour profile. “The supplier was not going to release this product unless it was perfect in their minds,” Harrison says.

He then admits the initial launch of the product didn’t meet expectations. “I had actually miscalculated. It was a tough sell. We had had people asking for decaf but once we had it there wasn’t much demand.” It was almost two years before decaf matcha found its niche. “We had to find another group of people who weren’t necessarily coffee or tea drinkers because they were sensitive to caffeine. They didn’t even know this existed, so they didn’t look for it. So we had to find that group and then attach them to us somehow.”

Harrison’s own tea practice is a blend of Japanese and North American styles. “I really enjoy my traditional hot matcha in the morning,” he says, “but the afternoon I have a cold matcha. I put it into a blender with either oat, almond, or hemp milk, and I throw in ice cubes and a couple of drops of vanilla stevia.”

And his favourite part of running DoMatcha? “I have met so many interesting people along this journey. From retailers to consumers, to competitors that reach out and just want to have a chat. Hearing their stories about what matcha has done for them are real highlights for me.”

This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 2 September 2021. Mailchimp no longer allows external links to the original newsletter.