Sunday, June 22, 2025

Will matcha’s popularity be its downfall?

The global matcha rush has led to shortages, bullying, and very, very long lines at coffee shops – and demand shows no signs of slowing down

BY KATHERINE LAIDLAW

Kimi Jayasiri planned her honeymoon in Japan around her favorite ingredient: matcha.

Over a few blissful weeks, she and her husband visited tea houses in Osaka, family-run shops in Uji, and a tea farm in Kyoto for a traditional ceremony. They went to 7-Eleven to load up on matcha-flavored KitKats and Haribo. They waited in lines for fresh, powder-filled tins, ate matcha ice cream and drank matcha parfaits.

Jayasiri returned to San Francisco in May with a suitcase brimming with pastel green and white boxes and jars, some to feed her own daily habit and others for gifts to friends and family.

She filmed the haul and uploaded the video to her 70k+ followers on TikTok.

The backlash was swift.

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Viewers accused her of everything from overconsumption to hoarding to appropriation. “This is why there is a matcha shortage in Japan,” one commenter wrote. “This is the greed they talk about in the Bible,” said another.

Matcha fans, who congregate on MatchaTok and Reddit, are certainly fervent. But they’re being protective of a tea leaf that’s become increasingly rare and expensive. As tea farms decline and distribution bottlenecks jam up, companies have raised prices and imposed purchase limits. Some buyers are loading up on matcha products to resell at large markups online.

If good matcha is so popular, why is it so hard to find?

Matchaholics

For the uninitiated, matcha is a form of specially grown green tea leaves, processed and ground into a fine powder and then mixed with water or steamed milk and whisked to create the drinks that have become a sensation.

Today, most of that tea is grown in Japan, though countries like China and Vietnam also boast matcha crops. Japan, though, is where the high-grade good stuff comes from.

Matcha’s role in Japan is ancient: First introduced by way of a Buddhist monk who brought tea seeds over from China in the 12th century, tea drinking soon spread from the monastery to the samurai and beyond.

In 1996, after years of trying to convince the suits in New York’s HQ, Häagen-Dazs Japan launched its first green-tea flavoured ice cream based on matcha. It was a hit. Ten years later, Starbucks added a matcha latte to its Japan offerings.

Matcha has hit the dessert market, growing in popularity as an ingredient in ice cream, cake and cookies. (Photo by Oratai Jitsatsue/Getty Images)

Since then, its popularity in North America has grown steadily. By 2015, Forbes magazine was asking: “Is matcha the new coffee?”

It contains less caffeine than coffee, and some suggest it has health benefits, which appeals to the wellness crowd. Its vibrant green plays well on TikTok. And as Japan welcomed a record-breaking ~37m international tourists last year, matcha makes one of the country’s most sought-after souvenirs. 

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts now have matcha offerings on their menus year-round. And the soft green powder’s reach is expanding beyond food, too. Last month, beauty company Laneige introduced a matcha flavored version of their wildly popular lip mask and balm.

So if everybody wants it, why can’t we just make more?

For starters, producing matcha is a slow, laborious process. Here’s how it works:

• Shading: About six weeks before the annual harvest begins, tea plants are covered from above to block out light and slow photosynthesis
• Harvesting: In May, the annual harvest begins and tea leaves are hand-picked, steamed and dried
• Sorting: The leaves are sorted for quality (or “grade”), destemmed and deveined
• Grinding: The resulting leaves, called tencha, are ground by stone mills into the fine green powder we call matcha

Add to that a population of aging farmers, and supply chain bottlenecks at every stage of production, from grinding to stone-milling to packaging.

Rows of tea leaves at the foot of Mount Fuji. (Photo by Andia/Getty Images)

“In short, there simply aren’t enough tea farmers to keep up with the growing global demand,” says Anna Poian, co-founder of the Global Japanese Tea Association.

• Similar to the decline of traditional occupations in other countries, the average age of Japan’s tea farmers is 60+, and younger generations aren’t keen to take up the business.
• Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) reported that commercial tea farming households were down from ~54k in 2000 to ~12k in 2020. 

On top of that, pivoting a farm to focus on tencha means taking a huge risk, Poian says.

“Farmers face a tough question: is it worth abandoning high-grade, traditional teas like sencha and gyokuro for matcha, just because it’s currently trending?” Poian says.

“What if the matcha boom fades?”

Olivia Heller/The Hustle

Despite the risks, a shift is underway. The Japanese government is introducing subsidies to help farmers meet demand, and MAFF reported a nearly 3x increase in matcha production in 2023, up to 4k tons from the 1.5k tons produced in 2010. 

It’s still not enough. These limitations on the supply side are being challenged by unprecedented demand.

What’s causing this shortage?

As Ian Chun sees it, the demand is driven by two things: travel and TikTok. Chun is CEO of Yunomi, a wholesale tea platform based in Tokyo that sources from 150+ tea farms and factories.

Last year, Japan saw record numbers of international visitors, many of whom descend on regions like Kyoto to buy high-grade matcha rarely available overseas.

The tourism rush has been so great that shops have imposed customer limits, and still visitors find ways to circumvent them. One shop owner told Chun that whole families come in so each person can buy a tin. Another said that the same man came to his shop in five different outfits on the same day to try to get around it.

That desire, in concert with the TikTokification of matcha (#matcha has 160m views), is in turn driving an increase in cafes and across the global food service industry.

“One demand drives the other,” Chun says.

Prices are decided annually at auctions like this one in Shizuoka, Japan. This year, they hit record highs. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images)

The rush for matcha is playing out across North America:

• A cafe chain owner in Toronto told the business newsletter Milk Bag that matcha has outpaced coffee to become his greatest revenue driver.
• Square reports that Canadian matcha orders are up 114% since last year.
• Customers in Los Angeles, New York, and Toronto are waiting hours for their own perfectly whisked drinks.

Chun is seeing chaos in the supply chain turn lead times of one month into three months then five. “We’re rationing it out, a little bit here, a little bit there, trying to be as fair as possible to all our clients,” he says.

“The demand has spiked beyond control.”

At cafes across North America, matcha drinks are outpacing coffee. (Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

As an ancient, traditional industry collides with social-media-fuelled enthusiasm, customers can expect prices to rise. One company, a 320-year-old grower and distributor named Marukyu Koyamaen, just reported a price increase of ~1.5x. Another premium grower, Hekisuien, is raising prices by ~150%.

“It’s a great situation for anybody who has supply,” Chun says.

But not so great for anyone else.

Matcha production in Japan is made up of a complex chain of businesses. First, the farmers cultivate the tea leaves. Once picked, those leaves are typically bought by a wholesaler who handles steaming, drying and storing the crude tea. From there, it’s milled into matcha at stone-mills, which has created another bottleneck: a traditional mill produces just 40 grams of matcha per hour.

The tea wholesalers oversee another part of the process, too, where a third bottleneck is bottlenecking: packing. Most high-quality matcha is packed by hand, because it’s so delicate, and there aren’t enough hands or tins right now to keep up with all the orders.

Finally, there’s a snag at distribution too. Huge clients like Starbucks and Häagen-Dazs eat up the majority of the supply, leaving smaller cafes and chains out of luck as an entire industry tries to get their international logistics business up to speed.

“Anybody who is producing matcha, they’re very thankful but they’re all very stressed,” Chun says. “Nobody on the production side of this industry is very happy.”

Will the popularity be its downfall?

Experts agree the demand has yet to peak, which means longer wait times, higher prices and, ultimately, a potential decrease in the quality of product that’s widely available.

As Japanese matcha exports grow, ready-to-drink tea is becoming more popular domestically. (Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)

If cafes can’t restock it fast enough, Chun says, they’ll likely turn to stock from countries like China and Vietnam that’s produced at a lower grade.

And while the matcha market will reach an estimated $5B by 2028, according to Forbes, that’s a drop in the proverbial mug when it comes to the coffee market’s $138B, per Mordor Intelligence.

Meanwhile, back on MatchaTok, the debate over TikTok’s role in the matcha boom rages on. Back in the fall, as burner accounts left hateful messages under Jayasiri’s ASMR-esque videos, Jayasiri, who declined an interview request, took to the platform to defend her habit.

“Matcha is my love language,” she told her viewers. “And I just have so much respect for the art of tea and the whole craft.”

She was just one 27-year-old girl, she said. Besides, she went on, shouldn’t someone’s choice to consume matcha stay between them, their wallet, and their caffeine tolerance?

“Is the solution that I just stop spreading this matcha love? Because I’m not sure that’s something that I want to do.”

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