MATCHA SOLD OUT IN 15 MINUTES
The price of the hype: how the global matcha boom is pushing Japan's tea culture to its limits
Matcha drinks are now a standard item on many café menus, and the green powder generates high engagement on social media. At the same time, reports are mounting in Japan that traditional tea fields sell out within minutes of going on sale. What looks like a success story from the outside means the opposite for parts of Japan's tea industry.
When a year's harvest sells out in a quarter of an hour
In Kyoto, tea fields now sell out within roughly fifteen minutes of going on sale. At the same time, demand for classic sencha is pulling prices up: in some regions, markups of over 200 yen per 100 grams have been recorded within a few months. Several traditional tea houses have started rationing sales of their ceremonial matcha — a practice usually associated with the luxury goods sector.
A structural problem, not a temporary one
Matcha is made from tencha leaves, whose cultivation is labor-intensive, difficult to mechanize and heavily reliant on manual work. Converting a field from sencha to tencha takes at least five years — an investment many farms simply can no longer afford. Japan's agricultural workforce is aging, and successors are lacking in many regions.
As capacity is increasingly shifted toward matcha, production of sencha and gyokuro is declining — the teas that traditionally form the backbone of everyday consumption in Japan.
The result: retailers specializing in classic loose-leaf tea are under economic pressure, while tea processors are reporting record numbers of business closures — in the middle of the apparent boom.
Who benefits — and who doesn't
- Producers who invested early are growing along with demand.
- Smaller producers who reacted too late are losing ground, a situation worsened by cheaper foreign competition.
- Even tea ceremony clubs at Japanese schools report shortages of practice materials.
- Industry representatives are openly discussing whether the exported volume of "matcha powder" now exceeds the actual tencha harvest.
What this means for us
ORIZUMI sells matcha and therefore benefits, on the face of it, from the development described above. That is precisely why we think it's important to name the downside of the boom openly. Importing a product like this also means, in our view, taking responsibility toward the people who make it.
Direct trade instead of anonymous wholesale, selectivity instead of volume maximization, education instead of pure marketing.
According to industry observers, the current boom is unlikely to stay at this level. Whether it fades as a short-lived trend or develops into a more sustainable form of demand will also depend on how importers, cafés and consumers in Europe behave in the coming months.
Until the next issue,
ORIZUMI