Sunharr Organic Website: The Rice Sommelier

All around the world, each local product has their own identity in term of tastes, color, profile, name, and all other characteristics. That differentiate their local products to any other product, which then allows them to sell the product at the premium segment. However, the product of THAI RICE, has never been studied and communicated in such way. If you ask people or even farmers, what is the character of each local rice, they will only tell that it’s so soft or very sweet. But no one really be able to describe the profile of thousands of rice that we have. So Rice becomes commodity, no Added-Value. The price constantly drops. Farmers don’t want to grow local rice anymore because there is no demand. Finally, we are left with only jasmine rice. Sunharr, A website that provides organic products, wants to lift up the value of rice varieties. So we created “The RICE SOMMELIER”, the first initiative that will make people really understand the rice identity. It’s a rice tasting session that simulated wine tasting. By incorporating with Farmers, (ชาวนาไทอีสาน: a small group farmers in Esan who specialize in growing local, and rare rice.) Thai cuisine chefs (Bo.Lan: Michelin-starred chef who is specialize in Thai organic cuisine), sensory experts ( Nose story: An expert who specialize in fragrant) and barista (Brave coffee, award winning barista), they all come together to help us design the tasting methodology and profile scoring system which included aromas, taste and mouthfeel. The pilot tasting is hosted at Bo.lan restaurant with top ten Thai Chef, then we hosted public rice tasting session at Sunharr Space, Dec, 2020. Hundred of rice enthusiasts has joined to taste the rice in in-depth session. Then after processing all data collected via online platform, we then turned them to each rice profile, identity which has published to mass media, and were appreciated by all. This is some of the example of Rice Profile: For example, SangYod, a brown rice from Pattalung, has a top note of sea water flavor, and some people can appreciate a seafood fragrant from the rice. That’s because it is a rice grown around foothill where rain comes from south sea surrounding that area. And from its unique character, chef has said that they were inspired to pair this rice with fresh Thai Seafood Carpaccio. Another example is Kiaw Num Nom, which was appreciated by Brave’s barista that he can sense a matcha fragrant from its freshness, so imagine you go into Starbuck tomorrow and order Kiaw Num Nom’s Matcha Drink. That’s only some imagination, this profile study has lots of possibilities to leverage the assets of our nation and make it more than just a rice as we knew. The platform is database of Thai rice, which features rice identity and profile available for public access where people, farmers and chefs can use as a basis knowledge and profile standard for their rice. The Rice Sommerlier is a long term platform, which will be hosted annually, and expanding the size of rice varieties and volume of taster, so it gained more credibility. Until it’s well acceptance, and become a standard endorsement of each rice. One day, we might go to supermarket and look at the rice’s packaging, read the rice profile in the same way we read a wine bottle. If the grape, the coffee beans, the meat, can do it, why not our rices?