A global obsession with the green tea pushed prices to historic highs. But as droughts and extreme heat squeeze harvests, small farmers question how long they can keep up.

In the mid 2010s, London-based Claudia Boyer broke up with coffee and fell in love with matcha. 

Boyer, who ran her own marketing agency and has a background in nutrition, didn’t love how coffee made her feel. Encouraged by her husband Otto, who grew up in Hong Kong, she turned to matcha, which has deep roots in Japanese culture and tea ceremonies grounded in Zen Buddhist philosophy. “I was overwhelmed by how delicious it could be, how different I felt after drinking it,” she says. 

After struggling to find casual matcha spots in London, the Boyers launched JENKI Matcha in 2020. Their timing was perfect: A decade of wellness culture rolled out the red carpet for antioxidant-packed matcha, especially among a wellness-attuned, digitally native younger generation; the chain now runs three locations across London, with goals to expand nationwide and globally. It helps that matcha’s vibrant green color is instantly recognizable. “It’s a natural marketer’s dream,” said Boyer. “It comes with its own marketing.” 

If you’re on social media, there’s a bankable chance your algorithm has served you matcha in some form or another. It’s easy to picture the verdant powder, whisked to froth in glazed chawan before being tipped, streaming, into a glass of cold milk; or a domestic surface populated with small tins and at least one bamboo whisk—the prototypical post-Japan haul. On MatchaTok, you’ll see influencers whip up their foamy beverages in zellige-tiled kitchens, cramped hotel rooms, and even on long-haul flights.

But massive demand, extreme weather exacerbated by climate change, and new tariffs on certain Japanese imports have caused a massive global shortage and rising costs of the soft-after tea. 

Though the matcha hype was mounting for years, the inciting incident took place in mid-2024 when tourists’ TikToks featuring matcha sold by Marukyu Koyamaen—a Kyoto-based brand—went viral. The 300-year-old tea grower, procurer, and blender promptly sold out of a half-year’s worth of matcha in one month. 

Demand in the following months spread beyond Marukyu Koyamaen, spurring a tourist-driven buying frenzy that coincided with Japan’s popularity as a destination reaching an all-time high. But the frenzy also exposed the fragility of a system where slow, artisan-led supply chains—already strained by climate-driven crop losses—struggle to keep pace with viral, global demand.

Though matcha products are broadly sought after, the most coveted commodity is matcha marketed as “ceremonial,” which Ian Chun, the Tokyo-based founder of Yunomi Tea, equates with “premium.” Yunomi specializses in connecting small Japanese businesses with global shoppers.

In Japan, stock is depleted by tourists buying unprecedented quantities of ceremonial matcha and resellers vacuuming up the tea to list on marketplaces like eBay. Marukyu Koyamaen published a list of global unauthorized resellers on the company website, along with a contact form so people can name and shame others. 

“In November, all our suppliers said they had more than enough leaf supply until the next harvest,” Chun said, “but one by one, they started falling off the availability list.” In Kyoto, which is considered Japan’s matcha mecca, “we started seeing other shops run out of matcha by November, December,” Chun recalled, leaving them without stock until the next harvest in months, or up to a year. 

For local and global tea vendors, the matcha rush happened slowly and then all at once. Miro Tea founder Jeannie Liu, who started the Seattle-based business 18 years ago, remembers adding matcha to her tea house’s menu over a decade ago. “We were maybe one of two shops carrying stone-milled matcha from Uji, and we were also one of the first to put it in latte form,” she said. “Very few people understood and appreciated matcha. It was a very small portion of our sales.”

Today, matcha products (beverages, loose tea, and accoutrements) make up 30% of Miro’s sales, and overall sales have grown as a result. But the recent frenzy is a double-edged sword: Since Miro’s opening, the wholesale price Liu pays for Uji matcha has risen 250%, a reflection of matcha’s chronic shortage after years of stable pricing. Similarly in London, Boyer, who hasn’t dealt with substantial price variations until now, is constantly speaking to new farmers to try and meet demand. “There’s a rush to get matcha at all costs,” she said.

This is happening across the board. At nationwide auctions, which see wholesalers bid on batches submitted by farmers and co-operatives, prices have gone up by an average of 50%, according to Chun. In Kyoto, he saw auction prices skyrocket—sometimes reaching 300% to 400% higher than the previous year’s. These record prices also drove up the rates that wholesalers pay farmers directly, creating a ripple effect across the market. 

“The price per quality ratio for leaf became unhinged from the past,” said Chun.  

Current matcha shortages show what happens when an ultra-artisanal item goes ultra-mainstream.

Kyoto-based Masakazu Morii is a fourth-generation tea farmer and runs one of the few pesticide-free farms with his wife Tomomi and their daughter, who is training to take over the family business. Tomomi said she noticed demand rise at the same time as fuel prices last year, meaning production costs rose too. “We kept our matcha prices unchanged for a long time, but since May, due to limited supply, we too [were forced to] raise prices,” she said. 

Backdropping the friction between matcha’s slow supply chain and viral demand is an increasingly erratic climate. Like any crop, camellia sinensis—the source of all true teas—benefits from consistency; its yield is easily affected by heat waves, late frosts, and shorter rainy seasons. To adapt, the Morii family and their small team use special tea fans or cover fields with sheets to protect them from frost; amid rising Fall temperatures, they’re pushing back the timing of their final trimming (shiage), which prunes plants before the cold to prepare them for the spring.

The stakes are only getting higher: Tea brands are already working with a harvest 10% smaller than last spring’s, according to both Liu and Chun, due to droughts and the country’s hottest summer on record so far—a trend that’s likely to continue as climate change makes extreme weather events the norm, rather than the exception. Matcha leaves, known as tencha, are technically harvested several times a year, but quality peaks in the spring, meaning premium to high grade matcha, like the kind the Morii’s farm, is only harvested annually. 

“Some middlemen are pressuring farmers to produce matcha from the second summer harvest, but if tea plants are shaded during summer, they weaken. It’s bad for the plants,” said Morii, who lets her plants grow freely in the summer and fall. “We want to make matcha in a way that’s gentle on nature, the tea plants, and people. Our production depends on what nature gives us each year, and if we sell out, we ask customers to wait until the next harvest.”

Crucially, there aren’t enough businesses producing matcha leaves: the country is home to thousands of tea factories, but Chun estimates only a hundred or so specialize in tencha. In January, Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture announced subsidies for certain tea factories looking to convert to tencha production in a bid to increase the cultivation and supply of matcha in the face of extreme weather and extreme demand. But despite being subsidized, this process can cost millions of dollars, and would require small, often family-run businesses to take out disproportionately large loans. 

“Taking the matcha [away from] the ceremony, the culture—it’s so true to American form.”

Jeannie Liu
Founder, Miro Tea

Leaves aren’t the only bottleneck. Every stage of the supply chain is being strained. Ceremonial matcha is traditionally ground with stone mills, which only produce 66 to 48 pounds of powder per mill per hour, whereas a larger mass pulveriser can pull off more than 1 ton. Liu notes there are only 50 stone mill carvers in the country, many of whom are retiring with no younger apprentices primed to take over the business. The Moriis, for instance, were finding it hard to get stone mill bookings, and had to choose between buying their own—an expensive option that would take two years—and going electric. They ultimately opted for a high-quality electric mill. 

But not all farmers are adapting. “It’s unfortunate that this is happening in Japan, because as much as people believe it’s a futuristic country, the culture shifts very slowly,” said Liu. “Everyone values their quality of life and the consistency and tradition of the product. I’m sure they’re happy they can command higher pricing, but that doesn’t mean they’ll change the way they work—they’re perplexed, dumbfounded and sceptical.” 

Much of the confusion stems from the fact that the vast majority of Japanese people don’t drink matcha—at least, not in the way everyone else is now, in lattes spiked with strawberry jam and blanketed with creamy foam. 

Matcha as a flavouring—in ice creams, in coffee-adjacent drinks—only began in Japan in the 1990s when Western corporations like Haagen Dazs introduced products using lower grade matcha. “If you talk to an older Japanese person, they only drink matcha when they go to temple and there’s a special ceremony, like a wedding,” said Liu, adding that it’s mostly white yoga moms, rather than her Asian customers, who seek out matcha at Miro. 

Asian creators have already called out this dynamic time and again. In a TikTok video with over 91,000 likes, user @soapw1g urges: “Make matcha Asian again… What do you mean the white boy, white girl stereotype is having matcha in hand?” Some are using matcha fever to illustrate the glorification of Japanese culture, and erasure of Chinese history (powdered green tea originated in China during the Tang dynasty, before Buddhist monks introduced it to Japan); others compare the mainstreaming of matcha to chai, predicting Thai tea and Vietnamese coffee to be next in line for whitewashing.

As an Asian American founder who ran a bubble tea business with her family before launching Miro, Liu witnessed this first-hand. “Taking the matcha [away from] the ceremony, the culture—it’s so true to American form,” said Liu. She’s observed matcha’s detachment from its Zen origins in the West for decades, since it was first used to flavor ice creams and lattes. Now,  virality and growing demand for premium product is causing a slow agricultural ecosystem to be upended by overconsumption. 

The phenomenon isn’t all bad. Farmers are finally being rewarded for artisanal products that were becoming locally obsolete, and beyond bottled teas peddled by major conglomerates like Coca Cola, Ito En, and Kirin, the industry as a whole was on its last legs. “There wasn’t a lot of hope in the industry, then the matcha boom came along,” said Chun. Even so, most demand is coming from big buyers—the Starbucks, the Blank Streets—meaning bigger farms and co-ops are coming out on top, but the focus on higher grade powder still trickles down to old-school practitioners. 

“It’s not perfect for the industry,” said Chun. “But it’s better than nothing.”

Liu, Chun, and Boyer agree that matcha isn’t going anywhere: Already, matcha is being grown and processed in markets like China, South Korea, and Vietnam, but none are nearly as sought after as Kyoto-made teas. Between industrial matcha flavoring and high-grade powders, there’s room for demand to be met elsewhere using safe practices and quality crops, rather than short cuts like adding coloring agents to mimic premium matcha’s signature green hue. 

But addressing these pressures is also a question of equity. Farmers on the front lines of climate change often bear the highest costs of adapting to extreme weather, shifting markets, and exploitative supply chains. Shoppers can help by educating themselves on matcha’s roots and best practices, and by supporting equitably grown product—whether or not it’s made in Japan—so that the communities producing it can weather a hotter, more volatile world.

“As a seller of Japanese matcha, I take a contrarian viewpoint in that, if matcha is going to become a mainstream flavor globally, we do need countries like China to step up their game,” said Chun. “There needs to be more, and better, production for it to be sustained as a global mainstream flavour. There’s just not enough matcha to go around.” 

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