Today we’d like to introduce you to Joann Lui.
Hi Joann, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Every evening after dinner, my dad would bring out his tea set and quietly brew tea for our family. I didn’t fully understand it until he took us back to his hometown in Chaozhou province, where Gongfu Cha started and where families gather around tea sets at all hours, strangers invite you to sit with them, and tea is simply their quiet way of showing love.
When I moved to the United States as an immigrant, that tradition got harder to hold onto. The only options were mass-produced tea bags or matcha lattes filled with sugar. On his first visit, my dad brought his tea set from Hong Kong, and suddenly, this strange country felt like home again.
I went on to become a Registered Architect and founded the Women Architects Collective, an online community with over 5,000 women in architecture. But something kept pulling me back to my love of tea.
With my co-founder, Marc Falzon, who has been in the tea industry for over a decade, we started sharing our love of tea online and flying across the world to meet farmers and source directly. But tea has always been about in-person connection, and we knew we had to bring it into a physical space.
We began doing popups in 2018, and then in 2024 we opened our first physical café on Main Street in Lawrenceville, NJ, importing unground Tencha directly from Japanese multi-generational farms and stone-milling it fresh on-site. A year later, we opened our second location in Princeton, NJ, with the addition of Honzu, a kombini-style spot serving authentic Japanese onigiri and bento boxes. I run operations behind the scenes, and my architecture background shaped the minimal, intentional feel of our brand and spaces.
Ooika’s mission is to bring heritage matcha home. We travel to Japan, meet our farmers, sit with their families, try to understand their craft, and bring that story back to America in every cup we serve. It’s the same thing my dad did every evening at that little tea table: sharing the place you’re from with the people you love. We’re just doing it across an ocean.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Definitely not a smooth road. At first, I was building Ooika with Marc while working full-time as an architect, learning the operations of a small business through late nights and weekends. But even before we opened our doors, we hit a wall that nearly stopped us before we started.
No one would sell us Tencha.
Tencha is the unground tea leaf that gets stone-milled into matcha, and at the time, the idea of milling matcha inside a café in the United States was fairly new. Tea farmers in Japan had no reason to trust a young foreign company with a concept that had never been done before. Marc spent years building those relationships by flying to Japan, visiting farms, showing up again and again until they believed we were serious. Those relationships are now the heart of what makes Ooika possible.
Then 2026 hit. I lost my full-time job. And at the same moment, a pipe burst at our first Ooika location and flooded it. We had to close and rebuild from scratch. It was five months of construction, no revenue from that location, and no personal income to support the cash flow.
But we made the decision early on to keep our entire team, including our full-time manager, paid throughout the closure. What got us through was our customers. Some of them showed up every day at our second location to support us and even donated funds to help us get back on our feet.
That’s when we knew Ooika was more than a business. It’s a community. And that’s always been the point.
We’ve been impressed with Ooika, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Ooika (覆い香) means “the aroma of shade” in Japanese. It’s the prized scent that only comes from exceptional matcha that’s been deeply shaded before harvest. That name says everything about what we care about.
We were the world’s first specialty matcha café to stone-mill 100% of our matcha on-site, and the first to focus on single-origin matcha with complete sourcing transparency. Most people don’t realize that “direct from the farmer” still relies on processing middlemen, because most heritage farmers don’t own stone mills. We built our own milling operation so we could be truly direct. We import unground Tencha leaves straight from the farmers, mill it fresh in-house, and put a mill date on every bag.
We are also overwhelmingly thankful for the trust the farmers in Japan have in us. While “Ujicha” is fairly common, it’s a name that includes tea grown outside of Uji. Only 0.04% of Japanese tea is actually grown in Uji. To our knowledge, we maintain more direct relationships with growers in Uji than any other Western Matcha company.
Most of our customers discover us through a matcha latte in our cafes, more specifically our most popular strawberry matcha latte! But our very first product was actually Matcha Mill Club, the world’s first single-origin and education-focused subscription where members get to experience matcha from different regions, farmers, vintages and cultivars, milled and shipped within 24 hours. That’s where our roots really are.
The single-origin matcha we focus on is genuinely rare. Less than 5% of Japanese tea is hand-picked, and we work with farmers producing exactly that. Heritage matcha that most never get to taste. Through every matcha latte we sell, we directly support the multi-generational tea farmers that keep the traditional craft of matcha alive.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Nothing else to add. But thank you for this opportunity!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ooika.co/
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/ooika.co
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ooika.co/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Ooika
- Other: hello@ooika.co
