Matcha wasn’t ready for this. A-frame signs hawk Grinch-tinted carrot cake lattes. Your daily dose of collagen now comes in green. There’s matcha deodorant. Matcha patches for de-puffing your under-eye bags. Home cooks can whip up a disorienting-looking batch of matcha hummus. Obviously Dunkin’ has a green tea-dusted donut. And, as Ellen Cushing writes in The Atlantic, “possibly millions of young people on TikTok” are out there wistfully “decanting green sludge from one vessel to another.”
I’m not done! In Los Angeles, you can now visit a matcha-centric diner, where the highball glasses carry tea-spiked ginger fizzes. Oregon-based fanatics line up for viral, TikTok-born drinks like the “Coconut Cloud” — a towering, double-layered swirl of coconut milk and matcha purée — at Portland’s Project Matcha. Inside 12 Matcha, an austere jewel box in New York, baristas in lab coats host ceremonial tastings and dish out mossy soft-serve from a Noma pastry chef. And Seattle’s Matcha Magic combines two buzzy cultural staples in its “Purple Rain” latte (ube, lavender, and matcha cream). It’s not just an ingredient anymore; matcha is an aesthetic.
Demand for the stuff is “accelerating at a pace the industry has never seen before,” says Jason Eng, who has spent six years working in business development and partnerships for Kametani Tea, a producer and distributor based in Nara, near Kyoto. And the hype train is starting to run into matcha’s real-world limits. High-grade tea “can’t be rushed,” Eng warns.
Traditional matcha is, by nature, slow. The finicky production process takes devotion and patience, and the drink itself was historically cherished as a moment of tranquility. In 2025, matcha has become something else — although not entirely. Dropped into the blender of modern wellness, the tea has been churned up and spat out as yet another engine of capitalist acceleration. We’re all stressed out of our minds, obsessed with Japan, and looking for something that will soothe our addled nervous systems. And matcha arrived at precisely the moment Americans decided they wanted calm focus instead of coffee crashes. (Just this afternoon a cute blonde at my co-working space called the celadon latte she was clutching her “safe caffeine.”)
Of course, the market profits off of our anxieties. The matcha industry — valued at $4.3 billion in 2023 — is expected to nearly double by decade’s end. Shipments of tea from Japan to the U.S. jumped 200.9 percent in value in the past year, and domestic retail sales are up 86 percent in three years. The international café chain Blank Street went so all-in on matcha this past summer it dropped “Coffee” from its name and saturated its branding and website in milky green; drinks made from the powdered tea now account for roughly half its business. Starbucks also reported a 40 percent jump in matcha sales in early 2025, fueled by its tricked-out lattes and hypersweet signature Frappuccinos.
More access to matcha might seem like a straight boon. But the downside to all of this is that demand has now vastly outstripped both supply and comprehension. For most new drinkers, “matcha” refers to anything green, whisked, or sweet. Even though the product is closer to wine — shaped by harvest season, terroir, and craft — it’s morphed into a flavor and a vibe as much as an ingredient. Aspirational wellness culture has collided with matcha’s agricultural reality, opening the door to chaos: global supply shortages, price spikes, ersatz powders masquerading as premium grades, and producers scrambling to keep up with a craze its original growers never saw coming.
The Great Matcha Shortage
The method for making tencha — the Camellia sinensis leaves that become matcha once milled — has barely changed in nine centuries. After a Zen Buddhist monk brought tea seeds from China in the 1100s and introduced the idea of tea as devotional practice, Japanese growers refined a precise choreography: shading the shrubs to concentrate chlorophyll, plucking only the newest spring buds, steaming to halt oxidation, and stone-grinding the leaves into a verdant powder that behaves like an inky watercolor when whisked with hot water.
Naturally, such a fastidious process yielded small quantities. Even today, despite technological advances, matcha accounts for only 6 percent of tea grown in Japan. And for most of its history, it wasn’t an everyday drink. Matcha fueled monks through meditation, signaled status among samurai and aristocrats, and later anchored the tea ceremony, a kind of finishing school where flower arranging, pottery, cuisine, and calligraphy converge, says Atsuko Mori, director of Camellia Tea Ceremony. Chadō, “the way of tea,” centered less on the drink than on the Zen ideals behind it: a moment of stillness and connection in a world that rarely offers either.
Today’s feeding frenzy is antithetical to matcha’s original purpose. And almost no one has watched it unfold as closely as Zach Mangan, the founder of Kettl, a Japanese tea company started in 2011 with flagship cafés in Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Over the past decade, matcha curiosity followed a steady upward curve. Then, starting in 2023, demand became “something we weren’t expecting,” Mangan admits, citing TikTok as the phenomenon’s primary driver. And it’s not only the U.S. fueling the craze: Kettl, also a matcha wholesaler, now ships its products to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Mexico, South America, and Iceland. “Everyone” wants it, Mangan explains.
“Farmers are adapting, but these shifts make an already delicate process even more sensitive.”
The market is so hot that buyers will “take whatever grades they can secure,” Eng says. “Even brands that once insisted on specific quality ranges are now far more flexible.” His team at Kametani plays matchmaker: steering clients making cookies or lattes toward later-season, bulk-grade harvests to protect the finite supply of truly high-end matcha that has traditionally always been sipped with water alone. (The much-touted “ceremonial grade” — a marketing invention of the U.S. — means little in Japan, where teas are classified by harvest season, region, and shading technique.) But even the best sourcing strategy can’t defy basic math. Supply is so crunched, Eng says, “that it’s simply not possible to guarantee everything the way we once could.”
A global infatuation isn’t the only challenge facing Japan’s matcha industry. Climate volatility is reshaping tea fields. Mangan describes “erratic” swings — frost one week, 86 degrees the next — that jolt plants out of rhythm. As southern regions warm, viable matcha zones are creeping north. Heat during the shading period blunts sweetness and umami, Eng says, and sudden storms can tear down shade structures. Meanwhile, warmer winters disrupt dormancy, leading to uneven budding and unpredictable spring harvests. “Farmers are adapting,” he adds, “but these shifts make an already delicate process even more sensitive.”
Labor poses an equally stubborn threat. Japan has the oldest population on Earth — 10 percent of people are over 80, with an average farmer age of 69, according to 2024 predictions. As growers retire without successors to take their places, tea fields are abandoned even as demand surges. The government is offering subsidies, larger firms have been consolidating acreage for efficiency, and those farming other teas are switching to tencha. Still, Eng warns, any real increase in supply is years away. Japan’s demographic squeeze reverberates through the entire supply chain — tin manufacturers, bag-makers, printers — many of them small, aging businesses now under strain. As Mangan says, “it’s a fragile ecosystem.”
Enter: Total Market Anarchy
Global matcha demand has hit historic highs, and the market is warping. Mori, who runs three teahouses across Kyoto, can still secure the powder at the center of her business — but only because her longtime wholesaler works exclusively with local clients and “protects our supply very carefully.” Still, from 2024 to 2025, the average price of Kyoto’s first-flush tencha — the most prized harvest for high-end matcha — nearly tripled, and Mangan says this fall’s more modest grades cost roughly five times what they did two years ago. The surge is rippling outward. “Because all teas come from the same plant, producers are suddenly focused on matcha and less on other types,” Mori says, making those more expensive, too.
From New York, Takuma Watanabe can also feel the shake-up. At Martiny’s, L’Americana, and Midnight Blue, the Tokyo-born owner and beverage director says his matcha cocktails are now among each bar’s top sellers. But using it across his venues isn’t cheap; Watanabe insists on 100 percent pure, premium matcha from Kyoto or Yame. “If the quality isn’t good, you won’t taste it in the drink,” he says. For now, he hasn’t faced true shortages, but Watanabe sees demand mounting from “basically any café or restaurant” in New York.
With costs high and supply slammed, things are getting sketchy. As The New York Times reports, producers in China, Kenya, and Australia are racing to produce matcha. And because labeling is almost entirely unregulated, it’s easy for sellers to pass off ground-up green tea — “a dull yellow dust,” writes Pete Wells — as the real thing. A gray-market economy has sprung up to fill the gap: resellers flipping tins on Amazon and Facebook at inflated prices like limited-edition sneaker drops and counterfeiters packaging third-rate tea in look-alike tins. For centuries-old Japanese firms, this has meant years of legal battles to keep their reputations from being dragged into the glop.
Mangan’s seen the pandemonium from the front lines. In market reports, he’s noticed the famed matcha from Uji supposedly being sold at volumes that exceed what the region actually produces. Meaning: Scarcity has encouraged shortcuts. A powder called moga-cha — sencha that’s quickly dried and milled — is increasingly blended into, or outright sold as, matcha. And because many consumers are new to tea, they can’t tell the difference between that and legit tencha. “You can’t have both — you choose quality or you choose quantity,” says Mangan. But “people are going to try and take advantage.”
For all the mayhem, experts closest to the industry don’t think this rocket ship ends in a crash. Eng sees matcha’s trajectory aligning more with coffee or wine — a niche ritual turned global habit. Demand may plateau, but we’re “past the point of it being a fad,” Mangan adds. Matcha’s endurance, he explains, stems from something few wellness ingredients can offer: an effect you can actually feel. One bowl carries less caffeine than coffee but more than most teas, along with polyphenols (plant compounds with antioxidants) and L-theanine, an amino acid believed to steady the mind. The real question isn’t whether matcha is here to stay, or whether Japan can produce enough to go around. It’s what, exactly, we’re doing to matcha in the process.
Beyond the Green Rush
The tea now lives a double life. One is about craft: plants shaded for weeks and tended by aging farmers who, Eng tells me, often wince watching their life’s work poured into plastic cups with milk and banana-flavored syrup. The other is about fantasy: matcha as a soft-green shorthand for serenity and productivity. In reality, “your average Japanese person is not taking five minutes every morning to go inside themselves and reflect and have a bowl of matcha,” Mangan says. But the ideals we project onto the drink — the connection to nature, the social harmony, the quiet respect — “do exist here,” he adds. It’s simply easier to order a frothy latte than reorganize our lives around them.
“As long as we stay consistent, Japan will continue to be the reference point for authentic matcha.”
Personally, I’m not above reaching for an emotional support beverage. I drink matcha, whisked at home, sometimes in a latte but often straight up, a few days per week. And I, too, am chasing a brief pause and chill alertness. But reporting this story has made it harder to ignore the contradictions that curdle together in the same cup, or the ways that Western wellness enthusiasts are very good at turning storied cultural staples into “superfoods” and very bad at looking back. We’ve done this with açaí in Brazil, quinoa in the Andes, moringa in South Asia — accelerating demand so quickly that landscapes, diets, and local economies have had to contort around our collective appetite.
Candice Kumai sits squarely in that intersection of nuance. The Japanese-American chef first tasted matcha in the ‘80s on Kyushu — the volcanic island where her mother was born — served by her grandmother and great aunt, both former Omotesenke tea-school students. As an adult, she became a major force in the American matcha boom: a 15-year Ito En ambassador who’s promoted the tea in her books, articles, and on national TV. But the cafés and skincare brands now claiming matcha represent, to her, an ingredient severed from its roots. Social platforms reward whoever is loudest, Kumai tells me, often people with “no education tied to matcha at all,” while true stewards are drowned out. And that’s how “cultural erasure” happens.
One of the more bizarre aspects of globalization is the boomerang effect; when products are sold back to their originators. Japan has spent decades undervaluing its own tea, Mangan tells me. Domestic consumption has been usurped by coffee and bottled drinks. But as matcha mania sweeps the world, its popularity is rebounding at home — “I’ve been seeing the lines forming outside places that sell matcha,” Mangan says — and not everyone I spoke to thinks that’s a pure loss.
Mori doesn’t see the global boom as an inherent menace. “Even if you frown at matcha-flavored beer and matcha chocolates,” she says, they’ve become “a gateway” that draws more people toward the tea ceremony’s history. In New York, Watanabe takes a similar middle path, using matcha for the “freshness and earthy flavors” it brings to cocktails while still whisking it by hand and sourcing exclusively from Japan. Eng is excited about the future: “As long as we stay consistent, Japan will continue to be the reference point for authentic matcha,” he says. And even Kumai isn’t trying to be the matcha police — she’s spent nearly two decades teaching Americans to embrace the ingredient in cakes and smoothies, and loves “being kawaii” — she just wants that enthusiasm grounded in the culture that made matcha possible.
This consciousness is translating. Mangan’s response has been to double down on education and people-first partnerships with growers so that the tea’s fanfare doesn’t flatten its history. This winter, he’s opening Kettl Matcha Senmon Ten in Brooklyn — a matcha-only shop where the menu will list farmers’ names and quarterly workshops bring experts from Japan to walk customers through the tencha growing process. The point, for him, is simple: Make sure global demand doesn’t “destroy the opportunity” for farmers to keep making the truly exceptional stuff, which already represents only a fraction of total production. “I mean,” he says, “if you stop preserving it, you’ll lose it.”
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