To accelerate the creation of a new track for tea beverages and tea foods, systematically promote the healthy development of the matcha industry, and drive the upgrading of Zhejiang Province's tea industry, the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, together with the Provincial Department of Economy and Information Technology, recently issued the "Ten Opinions on Supporting the High-Quality Development of the Matcha Industry." Here is an overview.
Cultivating distinctive advantageous production areas
Leveraging Zhejiang Province's industrial advantage along the 30°N golden tea belt, the plan calls for integrating resource factors and strengthening industrial coordination to rapidly form a matcha advantage industrial belt and growth pole. It aims to upgrade and develop advantageous production areas such as Yuhang, Yuecheng, and Wuyi to build a matcha industry highland. It also seeks to expand into several emerging production areas, build contiguous large-scale tea gardens, promote advanced and efficient production lines, and standardize production and processing techniques. By 2030, the province's matcha garden area is to reach 300,000 mu, with the comprehensive output value of the entire matcha industry chain reaching 10 billion yuan.
Developing high-end quality products for Yuhang matcha tea gardens
The plan calls for developing high-end quality matcha products that are high in theanine and chlorophyll, have prominent flavor layers, and are suitable for diverse application scenarios. It requires formulating and revising product, process, and quality control standards such as "Zhejiang Matcha" and "Technical Regulations for Tencha Processing," strengthening the promotion and application of relevant standards, and building a matcha standard system aligned with international standards. Relying on the unique bean aroma of Longjing tea and the distinctive fresh sweetness of albino (yellowed) tea, it aims to develop exclusive matcha products. It also calls for cultivating authoritative matcha (tencha) testing institutions and strengthening cooperation with internationally authoritative testing bodies.
Building green ecological bases
Guided by moderate scale, the plan calls for building green, ecological, high-standard matcha gardens through new construction and renovation upgrades. It promotes suitable matcha variety combinations and green environmentally friendly covering materials, carries out soil improvement and reduced fertilizer and pesticide application in tea gardens, optimizes shading coverage techniques such as high sheds, low sheds, and direct covering, and advances full mechanized management of cultivation, fertilization, and picking. It supports green ecological low-carbon system and Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) certification and encourages organic certification. By 2030, the province is to have built more than 100 large-scale contiguous green ecological matcha gardens.
Enhancing full-chain processing capacity
The plan promotes the nearby layout and capacity matching of tencha processing plants. It calls for accelerating the construction of clean matcha workshops and intelligent production lines, enhancing continuous production capacity, improving pre-production, in-production, and post-production fresh-keeping storage and cold-chain transportation facilities and equipment, accelerating the construction of application factories for matcha food, beverages, and daily necessities, and raising the level of high-quality utilization and deep processing. By 2030, the province is to have built more than 300 matcha (tencha) production lines.
Cultivating excellent production and operating entities
The plan calls for building a group of key matcha enterprises that play a collaborative and linkage role, supporting enterprises in laying out and building large-scale raw material bases and processing plants both within and outside the province, supporting authoritative certifications such as green food, HACCP, GMP, and organic products for matcha, and supporting applications for provincial-level special funds for small and medium-sized enterprise development. By 2030, the province is to cultivate more than 10 matcha enterprises with annual sales exceeding 100 million yuan.
Strengthening research and promotion of superior new technologies
The plan calls for carrying out the selection and breeding of matcha varieties suitable for distinctive flavors, researching and promoting special fertilizers for matcha gardens, new shading nets, and tea garden management machinery, and strengthening research on green precision pest control technologies and quality and safety risk factor control technologies for matcha gardens. It calls for accelerating the research, development, manufacturing, and intelligent upgrading of core matcha (tencha) processing equipment, and advancing the research, development, and application of technologies and equipment for flavor blending and intelligent brewing. It also calls for conducting training and vocational skills competitions in key technologies such as planting, processing, and quality control to accelerate the building of a matcha talent pipeline. By 2030, the coverage rate of main promoted matcha technologies in the province is to exceed 90%.
Enhancing and expanding brand markets
The plan calls for comprehensively building the "Zhejiang Matcha" brand image and constructing a brand matrix of "regional public brand + enterprise brand + product brand." It aims to strengthen regional public brands such as Yuhang Matcha and Wuyi Matcha. It encourages matcha enterprises and new tea beverage and new tea food enterprises to engage in brand cooperation, product cooperation, and production-marketing cooperation. It supports adding matcha as a key category of "Zhejiang Good Food" and encourages applications for national famous, special, excellent, and new agricultural products. Leveraging the advantages of overseas Zhejiang merchants, it supports matcha enterprises in registering overseas trademarks, obtaining international certifications, and expanding into international markets. By 2030, the province is to cultivate more than 5 matcha enterprise brands with international influence.
Inheriting and innovating matcha culture
The plan calls for deeply exploring Zhejiang's millennia-old matcha culture and its contemporary value, promoting the protection of intangible cultural heritage such as the "Jingshan Tea Banquet" and tea whisking, and relying on festivals and activities such as "International Tea Day." It encourages the creation of diverse experience scenarios such as "matcha banquets," "matcha cultural tourism," and "matcha spaces," and the construction of matcha strong towns, matcha parks, and matcha districts that integrate cultural display, immersive experiences, and leisure vacations. It calls for embedding matcha elements into cultural and sports activities such as "Zhejiang BA," "Zhejiang Super League," and "Village Run," making matcha culture perceptible, tangible, and consumable. By 2030, the province is to create 10 matcha industry strong towns (industrial parks) and 100 matcha characteristic spaces.
Achieving common prosperity by linking farmers and driving them along
The plan calls for improving the "leading enterprise + cooperative + farmer" cooperation model, encouraging deep participation in industrial collaboration through forms such as quantified collective asset shares, and improving linkage mechanisms such as quality-based pricing and order purchasing. It calls for promoting methods such as "famous premium tea + matcha" and "matcha + aromatic tea" according to local conditions, achieving multi-season mechanical picking, and broadening channels for tea farmers to increase income and become prosperous. It calls for building "common prosperity workshops," improving socialized service capacity, and providing tea farmers with employment opportunities close to home. By 2030, the average output value per mu of matcha gardens in the province is to exceed 12,000 yuan.
Strengthening policy and funding support
Relying on science and technology research and promotion projects such as "Spearhead," "Leading Goose," "Three Rural Nine Directions," "Major Collaborative Research," and "Tea Industry Technology," the plan calls for strengthening key technology research and achievement transformation across the entire matcha industry chain. It supports applications for projects such as modern agricultural industrial parks, modern agriculture "local specialty wealth" full-chain development incentives, agricultural "Double Strengthening," and agricultural industry strong towns. It calls for coordinating policies at all levels related to agriculture and enterprises to support the new construction and renovation of matcha (tencha) processing equipment. It also calls for improving tea industry insurance policies to promote stable production and increased income in the tea industry.
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