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Last year, Japan’s tea industry got hit with a green tsunami—matcha demand skyrocketed, and supply struggled to keep up.
And guess what? It’s happening again.
It all started last fall when Kyoto’s iconic tea brands, Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen, slapped purchase limits on their matcha for the first time. Tourists and locals alike found empty shelves where their favorite powdered green gold used to be. And it wasn’t just any matcha—it was the premium first-flush stuff, historically reserved for tea ceremonies but now gulped down daily by matcha-loving consumers worldwide, per Japan Times.
Unlike your standard green tea, this high-end matcha is harvested just once a year, making it ultra-limited. Yet, demand is still raging for all types of matcha, not just the fancy ceremonial-grade.
At Kametani Tea in Nara Prefecture, production has been ramping up by 10% year over year since 2019, but even that’s barely making a dent. Jason Eng, who handles partnerships there, says his team is clocking overtime and even grinding through weekends to keep up.
The 2025 harvest, kicking off in April, will bring a temporary breather—but in the long term, it’s not looking great. Fumi Ueki of Ito En, Japan’s biggest tea company, warns that matcha consumption hit an all-time high last year, and it’s not slowing down.
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While Japan itself has been sipping less matcha over the years, the rest of the world can’t get enough. According to Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries, matcha production nearly tripled from 1,471 tons in 2010 to 4,176 tons in 2023. And here’s the kicker: over half of that is now exported.
Why the sudden obsession? A few reasons:
- Health Hype: Post-pandemic, everyone wants wellness in a cup. Matcha is packed with antioxidants and delivers an energy boost without the coffee jitters.
- Social Media Frenzy: If it’s Instagrammable, it sells. Matcha lattes, matcha-flavored everything, and influencers raving about its benefits have put it on the map in regions that barely knew it existed before.
- New Markets: The Tea company Yamasan in Kyoto has seen massive orders from unexpected places like the UAE, where matcha lattes and syrup-infused matcha drinks are all the rage.
It would seem the simple solution is to just plant more tea, right? But it’s not that easy.
Tea shrubs take up to five years to mature. Even if farmers started planting today, the extra supply wouldn’t be ready for years. Then, once harvested, tencha leaves (the pre-ground form of matcha) need to be milled into powder. Traditional stone mills, the gold standard for ceremonial matcha, are painfully slow—just 40 grams per hour (barely enough for a dozen lattes). Ramping up production means more mills, but each one takes at least a month to craft.
Additionally, Japan’s tea farmers are vanishing. In 2000, there were over 53,000. By 2020, there were just 12,353. Many are aging out of the business, and younger generations aren’t lining up to take over.
Switching from loose-leaf tea to matcha production is also a gamble. It requires new cultivars, expensive equipment, and a bet that matcha’s global craze won’t fizzle out before farmers see a return on investment.
The government is finally catching on, with whispers of new policies and subsidies to push farmers toward matcha production. But it’s a slow-moving machine, and in the meantime, companies are scrambling to diversify suppliers.
Yamasan, for instance, sources from multiple farms, ensuring they don’t get caught empty-handed when one supplier runs dry. And Kametani’s Eng predicts clients will order 20–30% more matcha in 2025 than last year.
So, will there be enough matcha to go around? Maybe, but it’s going to be tight. As Eng puts it, “This year will be an interesting one. We haven’t hit a point yet where we’re going to run out, but it’s going to be really tight this autumn— not just for us but for everybody. The demand is off the charts.”
Better stock up on your matcha while you can—because the world isn’t slowing down its addiction to the green stuff anytime soon.
[Source: Japan Times]
