Meghan Markle Put Jam in Her Matcha
We Reviewed the Pitch Deck Behind
the Internet's Most Unnecessary Beverage Crime
A sweet collaboration. A raspberry preserve. A ceremonial whisk. A nation of tired women asking why their green tea suddenly needed a fruit filling. We read the deck so your tongue doesn't have to.
The internet had questions.
Primarily: why is there jam in the matcha?
Not beside the matcha. Not on toast, where jam has lived peacefully for generations, minding its sticky little business. In the matcha. Floating in the green liquid like evidence at a very beige crime scene.
The teaser arrived with the usual wellness-brand confidence: soft light, expensive silence, a spoon moving with the gravity of a woman signing a peace treaty. There was matcha. There was raspberry spread. There was the feeling that somewhere, just outside the frame, a linen napkin had a publicist and a non-disparagement clause.
At first, we thought this was merely a beverage. A strange beverage, yes. But still technically within the broad legal definition of a drink, the way a couch on the curb is technically outdoor furniture.
Then we obtained what appears to be the internal pitch deck.
Everything made sense immediately. Which is to say, nothing made sense, but in a more expensive font.
Matcha is grassy, bitter, mineral, elegant. Jam is sweet, sticky, seeded, and committed to toast. These are not complementary energies. These are two foods trapped in an elevator after a corporate off-site.
The deck opens with "The Intentional Morning Ritual Opportunity," a phrase that sounds like it was written by someone who has never been five minutes late for a dentist appointment. Which is to say: someone who lives in a different dimension from the rest of us.
This is not a product launch. That would be too simple. This is a strategic intervention into the ordinary human act of waking up and putting something in your mouth before your inbox finds you.
The premise is clear: people are drinking matcha without enough narrative and, apparently, without enough fruit pulp. They are whisking. They are sipping. They are moving on. Appalling behaviour. Borderline municipal.
The Crisis: People Are Having Normal Mornings
According to the deck, millions of people are currently consuming matcha in a state of quiet, unenlivened simplicity. They are not pausing to ask whether the whisk represents their values. They are not pairing bitterness with fruit preserve as a metaphor for resilience. They are not photographing condensation on glassware while thinking about who they used to be.
They are just drinking it.
This, apparently, is the gap in the market.
And honestly, as people who cover the wellness-industrial complex professionally, we have to respect the audacity. Not every brand has the courage to look at a perfectly good beverage and ask: Could this have the texture of a misunderstanding?
The Target Consumer:
The Aspirationally Intentional Adult
The deck identifies the core audience as the Aspirationally Intentional Adult, or AIA. This person owns a bamboo whisk they have used twice. They have saved seventeen morning-routine videos and implemented none. They have a Notes app folder titled "Reset." It contains one bullet point: "wake up earlier?"
They are not buying matcha. They are buying evidence that they could become the kind of person who uses matcha correctly, which apparently now includes treating jam like it has diplomatic immunity.
- They own a ceramic bowl with no clear purpose.
- They have considered buying a linen apron despite not baking.
- They believe a better spoon could change the direction of their life.
- They are one bad Tuesday away from ordering a gratitude journal with deckled edges.
The tragedy, of course, is that the AIA is all of us. We are tired. We are overstimulated. We have opened TikTok and been told that our cortisol is high by a woman selling sea moss from her guest bathroom.
So when someone offers us a morning ritual in a lovely little box, part of us wants to believe.
The other part of us wants toast.
Toast, notably, has never asked to be part of a brand ecosystem. Toast clocks in, does the job, and goes home.
Consumer insight, slide 5: Nobody wants to be marketed to. Everyone wants to be transformed. The trick is to charge them $68 before they notice the transformation is jam slowly dissolving into swamp foam.
The Product: A Beverage
With a Mood Board
The proposed ritual is simple, if you are unemployed in a Nancy Meyers kitchen and have lost the ability to distinguish between a beverage and a spread.
You dissolve matcha. You add raspberry preserve. You whisk again, now with regret. You photograph the result because evidence matters. You sit quietly. You consider whether this is enough. You consider whether you are enough. You wonder why your drink now has the mouthfeel of a scone accident.
The deck describes a limited-edition pairing presented with a handwritten card, a small wooden spoon, and a QR code linking to a four-minute video of someone making this in a very quiet kitchen while it rains.
This is where the pitch becomes art.
Because the rain is not weather. The rain is positioning. The spoon is not a spoon. The spoon is proof of seriousness. The jam is not jam. The jam is a small red warning label about what happens when a condiment gets promoted beyond its competence.
The Community Feedback Was,
Apparently, "Spirited"
One slide lists audience response as social proof, which is a bold interpretation of the comments section.
Selected feedback, as documented:
- "Who asked for this?"
- "Respectfully, what is floating in that matcha?"
- "This feels like parody."
- "The matcha doesn't need a supporting cast."
- "Toast died for this."
In lesser hands, this might be considered criticism.
But in the modern brand ecosystem, criticism is just engagement wearing a cheap coat. If people are confused, they are still looking. If they are annoyed, they are still typing. If they are typing, someone in a meeting is calling that "organic momentum" and adding it to a slide titled Community Heat Map.
This is how we arrive at the central thesis of the deck:
The Competitive Landscape:
No One Else Has Done This,
Which Could Mean Two Things
The deck notes that no other premium lifestyle brand has fully claimed the matcha-and-fruit-preserve category.
This is framed as a first-mover advantage.
A more cautious person might ask whether there is a reason nobody else has moved into this space. Perhaps the space is not empty. Perhaps it is haunted. Perhaps the space is not empty. Perhaps it is haunted. Perhaps it has been left untouched because matcha and jam do not go together. Sometimes absence is not opportunity. Sometimes absence is information. Sometimes absence is your ancestors trying to protect you.
The deck acknowledges this possibility with admirable restraint. The absence of competitors represents either:
- a significant untapped opportunity, or
- information.
We appreciate the honesty. Most pitch decks do not admit the market may be trying to warn them.
The Business Model:
Scarcity, But Make It Damp
The proposed revenue strategy is a limited-edition drop, carefully designed to sell out quickly, generate screenshots, and make everyone who missed it feel briefly inferior before remembering they own a spoon and can simply put jam wherever they want.
There are tiers, naturally.
- The Ritual Set, $68: jam, matcha, linen cloth, and a haiku about stillness. The haiku was not cheap.
- The Expanded Ritual Set, $124: everything above, plus a bamboo whisk and a second haiku that raises more questions than it answers.
- The Institutional Ritual Set, $340: four of everything, for people who confuse gifting with evidence of intimacy.
The waitlist, we are told, is not a barrier. The waitlist is the product.
This is bleak. This is accurate.
Somewhere, a person will sign up for the privilege of maybe buying a jar of jam that has been spiritually paired with a powdered leaf. They will receive an email that says "you're on the list," and for three seconds, before rent and laundry and the group chat return, they will feel chosen.
The Risk Assessment Is Where
the Deck Becomes Literature
The team has considered the risks. Both of them.
There is, first, the flavour profile. Matcha and raspberry preserve have not been universally validated as a combination because human civilization, for all its flaws, has retained some boundaries.
The proposed mitigation is that they have also not been universally invalidated.
Legally, this is probably true. Spiritually, it feels like finding a raisin in a salad you trusted.
The second risk is that nobody asked for this. The deck responds by noting that the original iPhone was also not asked for. It clarifies that these are not the same thing. It is merely adjacent to saying so.
This is the kind of sentence that makes a person close their laptop and look at a wall.
Risk: Consumers may perceive the ritual as unnecessarily elaborate.
Mitigation: Reframe unnecessary elaboration as intention.
Risk: Consumers may ask why there is jam in their matcha.
Mitigation: Ask whether they are afraid of joy.
Risk: The internet may say this feels like parody.
Mitigation: Accept compliment. Continue.
Risk: The jam tongs orientation may be questioned again.
Mitigation: There is no universally agreed-upon orientation for jam tongs. We have obtained a second opinion. The second opinion was also not sure.
The Real Product Was Never Matcha
Eventually, the whole thing becomes clear.
The matcha is not the product. The jam is not the product. The whisk, though very cute, is also not the product.
The product is the fantasy of becoming someone else before 9 a.m.
Someone calmer. Someone dewier. Someone who wakes up without immediately reaching for her phone like a raccoon locating a shiny object in a dumpster. Someone who owns a bowl specifically for whisking and does not use it to hold keys, receipts, and one mysterious button.
This is why the teaser works as a cultural object, even if the drink itself makes people quietly clutch their mugs and whisper, "absolutely not."
We are laughing at jam in matcha. We are also laughing at the pressure to turn every ordinary act into a performance of becoming. Two things can be true, unlike matcha and jam, which remain incompatible in both flavour and spirit.
Matcha survived centuries of ceremony. Jam survived generations of toddlers with butter knives. Neither deserved to end up in an influencer hostage situation.
Breakfast is no longer breakfast. It is a portal. Hydration is a ritual. Rest is content. A spoon is a brand asset. A quiet morning is apparently a market opportunity.
No wonder everyone is tired.
For the longer version of this argument — and the full receipts on how the As Ever brand got here — we've been tracking the California dream it all grew out of.
Final Verdict:
Let Matcha Be Matcha
Should you put raspberry jam in your matcha?
No.
That is the review. No garnish. No caveat. No "maybe with the right ratio." No "let people enjoy things" clause tucked into the napkin. Matcha and jam do not belong together. One is a finely milled green tea with centuries of ceremony behind it. The other is fruit goo waiting for bread. They can both be lovely. They should not be roommates.
People are free to make their own choices. Some people jump out of airplanes. Some people eat gas station sushi. Some people put raspberry preserves in matcha. Freedom is complicated.
We survived butter coffee. We survived charcoal lemonade. We survived the era when everyone pretended celery juice was a personality. Survival, however, is not endorsement.
Must every cup become a ritual? Must every breakfast come with a thesis? Must every woman with access to natural light teach us how to live while slowly spooning preserves into something that was already bitter enough?
Sometimes tea is tea.
Sometimes toast is toast.
Sometimes jam belongs exactly where it has always belonged: on bread, in a thumbprint cookie, or hiding quietly in the back of the fridge until someone discovers it has become a science fair.
And sometimes a brand asks green tea and raspberry preserve to pretend they have chemistry, and the rest of us have to intervene like responsible adults at a wedding with an open bar.
And sometimes, when a luxury lifestyle brand asks us to contemplate raspberry preserves as a pathway to enlightenment, the only reasonable response is:
