🟧 Mass matcha vs. craft matcha
Designing a new matcha brand requires setting yourself apart.
Today, a look at the crowded landscape of fun beverages as a new globalized “craft” matcha brand tries to blossom with a deluxe NYC cafe.
Kyle Chayka: Green is the new black, at least when it comes to caffeinated beverages. Whenever I happen upon a new cafe these days, the matcha beverages seem to get more promotion than the cappuccinos or cold brew. The bright-green hue is eye-catching and unmistakable. It makes for better content in the era of shortform videos and as a flexing mechanism it stands out more than carrying a clear plastic cup of brownish liquid. Maybe matcha is just a great accessory. But the widespread embrace of matcha means it’s harder to stand out when even Dunkin is selling an Iced Matcha Latte. That was the problem facing 12 Matcha, a new consumer matcha brand and cafe that opened in Manhattan this spring. I talked to Min Lew, the executive creative director at Base, a design agency that helped to develop the new brand. “For a while, we’ve been seeing a Cambrian Explosion of beverages; there is a beverage for every mood and need and time,” she said. “I think the matcha explosion is part of that bigger move toward conscious drinking.”
12 Matcha was assembled starting around two years ago as a kind of group project, including a food science professor, the head of pastry at Noma, and the French interior designers behind Aesop. It just opened its first cafe in Manhattan, an architecturally elegant space where water is filtered by Japanese binchotan charcoal in glass jars, which is then hand-whisked with high-end matcha (first harvest, ceremonial grade). 12 Matcha uses 6 grams of matcha powder per cup, whereas the usual serving is 2 or 3 grams, Lew said, lending it a deeper color and a stronger flavor. She explained that the matcha market is separating into two distinct categories. The first is the Starbucks, Dunkins, and Cha Cha Matchas of the world — we could call it mass matcha — and the second is “classic Japanese,” Lew said. “What we didn’t see was a really high-quality craft matcha. We wanted to lead this craft matcha movement.” The cafe’s $7 matcha lattes are driving hours-long lines and many, many TikTok videos.
12 Matcha is attempting to build a vertically integrated high-end matcha brand. Everything is holistically designed, from the lava stone countertop in the cafe to the matcha whisks and the scoops. Soon, customers will be able to buy the 12 Matcha powder and the bespoke tools to make it at home. Another way to describe the brand is scalable: the name was chosen because it can be recognized anywhere, regardless of language. “It was always envisioned as a timeless international brand,” Lew told me. It’s a universal number: 12 hours in half a day, 12 months in a year, 12 Zodiac signs. The number of the logo dissolves into a haze of dots, riffing on the image of matcha powder and evoking the charge of caffeine. “We wanted the visual to make one feel as if one is drinking matcha with their eyes and feel the sustained energy,” Lew said.
In any new cultural fad there’s a tension between its scalability or virality and its sense of authenticity. A craft-focused brand is meant to connect to something deep and essential, with a sense of history. 12 Matcha is doing that, working with a Japanese family that has been growing matcha for 5 generations. “We thought it was important to know our cultural place and positioning ourselves as part of the lineage,” Lew said. But it’s also a kind of astroturfed authenticity (is there any other kind?), moodboarded with high-end collaborators, each aspect of the business given its own imprimatur, its historicity reverse-engineered. I asked Lew if the founders themselves were Japanese. “No,” she said. 12 Matcha was started by the Jiang family, which seems to include a relatively recent Cornell graduate named Alan Jiang. No more information about them was forthcoming, contrary to the usual startup founder’s thirst for notoriety. When the story is what sets a brand apart, you kind of want a better beginning.
Then again, caffeinated drinks are a form of entertainment. Creeping up behind matcha, I see cherry blossom and strawberry-flavored drinks, like La Colombe’s strawberry mocha draft latte. They are, of course, bright pink.
Best of One Thing
If you’re a new subscriber, look back through the archives for our greatest hits. We send out short newsletters on taste, authenticity, and recommendation culture every Tuesday and Thursday (plus some extras).
The Starbucks reboot: The company’s new CEO is trying to turn it back into a “third space” with friendlier baristas.
“Cutre”: On the special Spanish word for tacky roughness that can also be desirable, like a dive bar or a grumpy waiter.
Chore coat shopping in Paris: Kyle buys a Vetra double-breasted chore coat at an historic workwear store.
The new Storm King: The sprawling sculpture park is played out; go to Magazzino for some Italian postmodernism.
Our camera rolls, our selves: Phone camera rolls store every moment of our lives. What does this infinity of photography mean?
matcha will die out in a year 2 years tops -- surprised it hasn't already since I remember it popping up when kombucha was a thing which was like 2015