News Release

August 6, 2020

A Quiz! Can you guess a drink, a tea, which became so popular especially among young people that even the Unicode Consortium has approved to include it into the new Emoji 2020?

You may have guessed, it is a drink commonly named Bubble tea, Boba tea, or tapioca tea, with the marble-sized chewy tapioca pearls at the bottom of the cup, making it a funny and addictive drink.

Wondering why we are talking about tapioca in Satake? As weird as it may sound, there is actually a connection between Satake and tapioca.

It was quite long before tapioca tea became popular when Satake started using tapioca. How come a machine manufacturer is making a tapioca drink? That question may intrigue you. But please do not get us wrong. Because here in Satake, tapioca is used in the process of Rinse-Free rice production.

To lead you more into the topic, let's talk about what Rinse-Free rise is. It is rice you don't need to wash before cooking. The remaining of bran and residues from the surface of rice grain after the milling process are removed, thus there is no need to wash prior to cooking, just add water and cook. It is not only time and water saving but it also helps to maintain the nutrients, flavor, and quality of the rice at the same time. The processing technology was developed and perfected by Satake in 2000.

So, you may wonder how it works. What does tapioca have to do with rinse-free rice processing? The answer is to make the tapioca granules remove the remaining bran from the milled rice grain. By adding a little amount of water into the milled rice, the remaining bran gets off from the rice grain easier. There, when the granule of tapioca (dry granule in a size of about 1mm of diameter) is added and mixed with the rice, the rice bran will stick to the tapioca. And the next step consists only of separating the tapioca granule from the rice grain and here we are getting totally rinse-free rice.

Before using tapioca, produce rinse-free rice was by virtually pre-rinsing the rice grain with water, drain the water, and then dry the rice grain. This process generated wastewater and affects the quality of rice products as well. That's where the idea of using tapioca to remove the remaining bran from milled rice grain was invented. There was of course a variety of ingredients that could do the function of removing the bran from the rice grain, and after countless tests and verification, we went for tapioca which successfully qualified all the 10 requirements.

Of course, this post has nothing to do with the today's tapioca tea's boom, but it can be said that tapioca has grabbed the heart of teenagers the same way as it grabs the bran from milled rice grain (lol).