Matcha has a type. Perfect green lattes. Served in a cafe, photographed up close, very much at home in the world of wellness influencers.
We have nothing against that world. We like a good matcha latte, too. Tatsu just came from pretty much the opposite place.
Ours is a world of mats covered in sweat, cauliflower ears, and the deeply-established fighting identity of Philadelphia that existed long before Rocky made it famous. It’s not exactly the world most of us picture when we hear the word “matcha”.
And the people behind Tatsu aren't polished executives who were looking at trend reports and deciding matcha was having a moment. We're longtime friends, fighters, coaches, and athletes who spent decades in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Who lived and trained with the Gracies and were at the birth of jiu jitsu in America.
So when we discovered and fell in love with the 800-year-old matcha ceremony while training in Japan, we weren’t thinking about coffee-shop flavors, we were thinking about fuel.
And a question began to form: What would matcha look like if you built a drink around what it can do, rather than around what people expect it to be?
We put our heads down and got to work, using what our training taught us – be efficient, use only what makes a difference, throw away ego, and improve constantly. Until finally we had something new. A drink that pairs premium matcha from a family farm in Nishio, Japan with electrolytes and essential vitamins in a light, non-carbonated drink with just 52 mg of caffeine. Energy, but not energy drink energy. Hydration without carrying around another giant bottle of something. Matcha without the milk, foam, whisk, or ceremony.
Tatsu is matcha escaping the latte. Treated as a performance fuel, because it can do a whole lot more than look pretty in your Instagram feed. It can show up at a 6 a.m. workout, in a gym bag, after a run, on a long drive, in the middle of a workday when another coffee sounds like a terrible idea.
And that idea has taken this little Philly company somewhere we still have trouble wrapping our heads around. This summer, Tatsu landed on shelves at Sprouts Farmers Market stores across the country. There was no giant beverage company behind it. No celebrity brought in to give the brand credibility. No massive marketing budget making sure everyone knew our name before we got there.
Just a small group of friends from Philly trying to build something we believe in. Which makes walking into a Sprouts on the other side of the country and seeing those white cans on the shelf pretty surreal. Because we know where they started.
Tatsu is the people who built it. The fight community that embraced it. The gyms that gave us a shot when almost nobody knew what Tatsu was. The fighters who grabbed a can after training. The friends who carried cases into stores, handed out samples, and told other people about this new matcha drink their friends were making.
There is a certain lack of preciousness to all of it that in just very Philly. We take the product seriously. Ourselves, considerably less so. And maybe that’s why the combination of fighters and matcha never seemed strange to us. Matcha doesn’t have to belong to one kind of person. And neither does performance.
Today we’re still very much the little guy. We’re sharing shelves with beverage companies with budgets, teams, and name recognition that dwarf ours. Most people walking through Sprouts have never heard of Tatsu. That’s the reality.
But now we’re on the shelf next to them. A small Philly-born brand created by people from the fight world, built around an entirely different idea of what matcha can be.
Not another latte. Not another energy drink.
Fuel.
And we’re just getting started.
