How a Japanese Founder Built a Digital Instant Tea Brand for Export
When Julie Taeko sat down with Akiko Murakami at a quiet café in Kyoto's Gion district last spring, the conversation quickly moved beyond the careful ritual of sencha steeping toward something more urgent: the future of Japanese tea abroad. Akiko is the founder of Haato, a Kyoto-based company that has spent the past three years developing what she calls "digital instant tea"—a line of single-origin sencha, matcha, and hojicha products designed for QR-code-triggered brewing experiences in homes, offices, and hotels across Asia, Europe, and Oceania.
Akiko's path into entrepreneurship was not straightforward. After a decade in marketing at a major beverage conglomerate in Osaka, she left in 2020 to care for her ageing father in Uji, the historic heartland of Japanese green tea cultivation. Watching small family farms struggle against bulk wholesalers and declining domestic consumption, she began imagining a premium export model that could put a real story back into every cup.
The Japanese tea industry has contracted sharply over the past two decades, with per-capita consumption falling as younger generations reach for coffee instead. Akiko's bet is that overseas markets, particularly in places where green tea has crossed from niche to mainstream, will pay a premium for transparency, provenance, and a touch of theatre—qualities that her digital format delivers in a way loose leaves cannot.
Her first major test came in late 2023, when she shipped a pilot container to Melbourne. Australia, she had reasoned, combined a mature specialty-coffee scene, a strong Asian-diaspora consumer base, and an openness to new formats like no other market in the region. The results, and what they have meant for Haato's roadmap, form the heart of this interview.
From Uji fields to boardroom: Akiko's origin story
Akiko grew up in a household where tea was never treated as a casual beverage. Her maternal grandparents ran a small genmaicha operation in Shizuoka, and family gatherings always began with her grandmother pouring from a kyusu she had used for forty years. That sense of tea as ritual, rather than refreshment, stayed with Akiko through university and into her corporate years.
When her father fell ill in early 2020, Akiko returned to Uji and began spending weekends helping local growers with harvest. She noticed something the marketing data rarely captured: these farmers knew their customers' faces, soil composition, and steam patterns intimately, yet received a fraction of the retail price for their leaves. "I kept thinking," she told Julie, "that the value was leaving the village and never coming back."
The pandemic accelerated her thinking. As hotels, restaurants, and gift shops closed, several Uji farms began losing contracts worth decades of steady income. Akiko pooled savings from her corporate severance, took a small loan through the Japan Finance Corporation's women-owned business programme, and registered Haato in late 2021. Her first hires were two former colleagues from Osaka who shared her frustration with how Japanese tea was being sold abroad—often as a vaguely "Asian" ingredient in sugary mixes.
Building a digital instant tea format
Haato's signature product is a slim, compostable sachet that contains finely milled tea along with a printed QR code. Scanning the code opens a short video showing the farmer who grew the leaves, the harvest date, and suggested brewing parameters. The sachet itself dissolves in hot water in under fifteen seconds, producing a cup that Akiko insists is indistinguishable from traditionally whisked matcha or properly steeped sencha.
The technical breakthrough came from a collaboration with a Kyoto Institute of Technology spin-off specialising in food encapsulation. Together, they developed a low-temperature drying process that preserves the colour and umami compounds that degrade in conventional spray-dried instant teas. Akiko's chief scientist, Dr. Haruki Endo, describes the result as "the closest thing to fresh leaves you can carry in your pocket."
For Akiko, the digital layer is not a gimmick. She sees it as a way to rebuild the relationship between producer and consumer that bulk export destroyed. "When an Australian office worker drinks our hojicha in their morning break," she says, "they are meeting the Tanaka family from Kagoshima. That meeting changes what the tea is worth."
Targeting the Australian market
Australia was a deliberate choice. Akiko spent six weeks in Melbourne and Sydney in early 2023, meeting with importers, specialty café owners, and Japanese grocery distributors. She noticed that Australians, particularly those who frequent the flat-white culture of inner-city Melbourne, were already comfortable paying premium prices for story-driven coffee, craft beer, and single-origin chocolate.
She also observed a generation of young Australians who grew up with matcha soft serves and chai oat lattes, and who treat green tea as a wellness product rather than an exotic one. According to data she cites from a Foodservice Australia report, green tea-based beverages grew at roughly twelve per cent annually in cafés between 2019 and 2023, outpacing black tea and many herbal infusions.
Retail placement was another consideration. Akiko's team met with buyers at several Harris Farm stores, which have a strong reputation for sourcing from small producers, and explored partnerships with the Melbourne-based tea retailer T2, which has its own global brand of accessible Japanese-inspired blends. The pitch focused on convenience without compromise: an office worker in Parramatta, a tradie having a quick brekkie in Footscray, or a university student in Carlton could all access genuine Uji tea without learning the ceremony.
Comparing formats: how Haato stands against traditional and other instant options
Akiko's interview included a candid comparison of her product against the alternatives Australian consumers are most likely to encounter. The summary below captures the trade-offs she described in plain numbers.
| Format | Brew Time | Shelf Life | Flavour Fidelity | Price per Serve (AUD) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loose-leaf sencha | 1–2 minutes | 6–12 months | High, depends on technique | $0.80–$1.20 |
| Conventional instant green tea | 5 seconds | 18–24 months | Low, often bitter or grassy | $0.40–$0.60 |
| Haato digital instant | 12–15 seconds | 12 months | High, with origin transparency | $1.50–$2.10 |
| Ready-to-drink bottled matcha | None (chilled) | 6–9 months | Medium, often diluted | $3.50–$5.00 |
Akiko acknowledges that Haato sits at the higher end of the price spectrum, but argues that the digital traceability component shifts the comparison from beverages to experiences. She points out that Australian consumers routinely pay $4.50 for a specialty flat white in a Brunswick café, and that her product occupies a similar value proposition for the home or workplace.
Export logistics and brand storytelling
Getting the product across the Tasman and into Australian warehouses required navigating a maze of biosecurity rules, food-labelling standards, and quarantine inspections. Akiko worked closely with a freight forwarder in Yokohama who specialises in Japan-to-Australia shipments, and her team developed bilingual packaging that meets both Japanese export requirements and the Australian New Zealand Food Standards Code.
Brand storytelling is treated as seriously as the tea itself. Each batch of Haato comes with a small card introducing the farmer, written in plain Japanese, English, and sometimes a third language depending on the destination market. For the Australian launch, Akiko commissioned a short documentary featuring three growers from Kagoshima, Shizuoka, and Uji, which is now embedded in the QR code experience.
Marketing in Australia has leaned heavily on partnerships rather than traditional advertising. Haato has run tastings at events such as the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, and has placed its sachets in selected office pantries in the Sydney CBD and Brisbane's Fortitude Valley. The response, Akiko says, has been humbling: "People write to us saying they felt like they met a farmer for the first time in their life. That is exactly what we hoped for."
Lessons for Japanese women in food entrepreneurship
Akiko is candid about what it means to build a consumer brand as a woman in Japan's food sector, where leadership remains heavily male. She credits the support of the JETRO Women Entrepreneurs Network and a small peer group in Kyoto for helping her navigate everything from supplier negotiations to investor pitches.
She believes the rise of digital export channels is quietly shifting the balance. "When you are selling through a screen to someone in Melbourne, your gender matters less than your story," she told Julie. "I have had Australian buyers say they chose Haato because they liked the sound of our company. That kind of soft decision-making is still rare in Japan."
Readers interested in broader patterns can explore additional profiles through Julie's ongoing Japanese founder case studies, which includes conversations with founders in miso, sake, and confectionery.
Looking ahead: new markets and sustainability commitments
Haato is now preparing for its second Australian shipment, expected to land in Adelaide and Perth later this year, and is in early discussions with a distributor in Auckland. Akiko is also piloting a subscription model aimed at office pantries, where a Brisbane-based start-up called Blend & Co has agreed to bundle Haato into its workplace tea service.
On sustainability, Akiko is pushing hard on packaging and carbon accounting. The sachets are already compostable, and the company has partnered with a Uji-based initiative to plant tea bushes on underused farmland, partly as a carbon sink and partly to ensure domestic supply for future blends. A full lifecycle assessment is planned for 2026.
Akiko's next trip to Australia is scheduled for the autumn trade show season, when she hopes to meet more café owners in Fitzroy and Surry Hills. Photographs from her previous visit and the broader research trip can be seen in the news gallery.
Haato's next milestone is the opening of its Adelaide warehouse in November, an event Akiko plans to document alongside early feedback from Perth cafés. Quarterly harvest notes from partner farms will continue to appear on the company website, giving readers a steady rhythm of updates as the Australian footprint expands.