Start with a number anyone can check. In May of 2025, at the Kyoto auction for tencha, the leaf that gets ground into matcha, a kilogram sold for 8,235 yen, about fifty-five dollars. That is a 170 percent jump from a year earlier, and it clears the previous record of 4,862 yen set in 2016, according to figures the Global Japanese Tea Association compiled from Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Reuters put those numbers in front of the world in June 2025. I keep them because an auction price is one of the few honest documents in this whole business. Nobody is trying to sell you a feeling with it.
Fifteen years ago matcha was a specialty item, a thing you brought back from a trip or found in one Japanese grocery. Today it is a permanent menu line at Starbucks, which added it for good in 2019, and at Dunkin, which followed in 2020. On TikTok the matcha hashtag has passed 160 million views. Gwyneth Paltrow was posting it to Instagram back in 2015; Zendaya and Hailey Bieber carried it from there. That is the arc, and it is real. The question worth asking is not whether matcha got big. It is where matcha sits in its cycle when the price of the raw material triples and the trade press has already started writing about the next ingredient.
The heat, and the farmers who quit
Here is the supply side, because that is what broke first. Tencha, the shade-grown leaf, is only about six percent of all the tea Japan grows. The rest is mostly sencha, the ordinary loose-leaf green tea that fills bottled drinks. So matcha starts scarce by design. Roughly a quarter of Japan's tencha comes from the Kyoto region, and Kyoto spent 2024, the country's hottest year on record, under severe heatwaves that weakened the April to May harvest. Masahiro Yoshida, a sixth-generation farmer in Uji, told Reuters that "last year's summer was so hot that it damaged the bushes, so we couldn't pluck as many tea leaves." His yield fell about a quarter, from roughly two tons to 1.5.
Weather is the visible cause. The structural one is that nobody is left to farm. Between 2000 and 2020, four of every five Japanese tea producers stopped, according to the Global Japanese Tea Association. More than seventy percent of the ones remaining are over sixty-five, and only about 1,500 are under forty-nine. You cannot conjure tencha bushes on demand either: a new field takes around five years to mature, and the agriculture ministry's subsidies to push farmers from sencha to tencha will not shorten that clock. Meanwhile the buffer that used to hide bad years ran out. Large blenders freeze prior-year tencha and mix it into the current crop; that reserve is gone, so the 2025 harvest had to carry the whole load, and it did not. The ministry and industry bodies estimate 2025 yield and volume at 80 to 90 percent of the year before. At the Zennoh Kyoto auction, tencha on offer fell from 10,216 kilograms in 2024 to 6,140 in 2025, closer to a 40 percent drop, by the tally of Ooika, a New Jersey milling firm that buys the leaf, so read it as a buyer's count rather than a neutral auction filing. Ooika's explanation is that companies are now buying straight from farmers at high prices rather than waiting for the floor.
So this is a genuine squeeze. Anna Poian, a co-founder of the Global Japanese Tea Association, told Time plainly: "For the first time in history, we are experiencing a matcha shortage, since autumn of last year." In October 2024, according to the Global Japanese Tea Association, Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen, two of Kyoto's best-known houses, did the unthinkable and capped or halted sales of certain matcha. Marc Falzon, who buys Uji leaf for the New Jersey milling firm Ooika, told Reuters he expected no relief: "I suspect we'll see even more dramatic price increases."
The shortage is only at the top
Now the part the shortage headlines skip, and it is the part I care about. Japanese tencha production has been rising for a decade. The agriculture ministry counts 5,336 tons in 2024, about 2.7 times the level of ten years earlier, up from 4,176 tons in 2023, figures Reuters drew from the ministry. Green tea exports hit 36.4 billion yen in 2024, up a quarter by value, driven by powdered tea. This is not a crop in collapse. It is a crop whose supply grew fast and whose demand grew faster, and the gap opened widest at the ceremonial top, where quality cannot be rushed and a stone mill grinds about forty grams an hour. The Global Japanese Tea Association, to its credit, said it was "puzzled by the international buzz" because decent matcha was still available from plenty of producers. A shortage of the good stuff at the good price is not the same as a shortage. That distinction is where the markup lives.
Follow the money and you find the usual chorus. Market-research firms value the 2025 global matcha market anywhere from 3.4 to 5.1 billion dollars and forecast compound annual growth of six to eleven percent for the next decade. Those are not audited figures; they are commissioned reports with different methods and a spread wide enough to drive a truck through. Japan has set an official target of 15,000 tons of green tea exports by 2030 and is chasing it. When a government sets a tonnage target and the analysts publish a hockey stick, you are no longer looking at a beverage. You are looking at an asset class with a whisk.
None of this is a change of subject. Matcha is sold as medicine as much as drink, so follow the molecule too, and price the gap between what the leaf actually does and what it now costs. The honest read of the science is narrow. The best-documented effect is the caffeine and L-theanine combination on alertness and focus, backed by real randomized trials. The heart and blood-sugar benefits are plausible but mostly borrowed from broad green-tea population studies, not matcha-specific ones, as Harvard Health lays out. The biggest marketing claims, cancer prevention, weight loss, dramatic antioxidant superiority, sit on the thinnest evidence, mostly test tubes and animals. My favorite receipt is the antioxidant boast, the "125 times the antioxidants of spinach" line. It traces to ORAC, a test-tube assay the U.S. Department of Agriculture withdrew in 2012 as no meaningful indicator of anything happening in your body. A gram of matcha carries about 35 milligrams of caffeine and a pleasant, mild, real set of effects. That is the product. Everything past it is decoration, and you are now paying record prices for the decoration.
The next leaf is already waiting
Which brings us to what's next. The answer is not a single ingredient. It is the churn itself. Read the 2026 trade forecasts and the successor is already staged: functional mushrooms, with lion's mane pulled out of the mushroom-coffee blend and rebranded as a "focus latte," benefit-led language replacing the ingredient. Adaptogens are moving from the supplement aisle into ready-to-drink cans, with the adaptogenic-drinks market pegged by the trade outlet FoodNavigator at around 1.5 billion dollars in 2025 and projected to nearly double by 2034. There is adaptogenic cacao now, ashwagandha and reishi stirred into hot chocolate so indulgence can wear a wellness label. Behind those, postbiotics wait to do to probiotics what probiotics did to yogurt, and colostrum has jumped from the gym to the immune gummy. Tellingly, the functional-mushroom boom is already facing a shakeout as of early 2026, FoodNavigator reported. The successor is cycling before matcha has even cooled.
Matcha will not vanish. It will fragment, which is the mature phase of any wellness commodity: ceremonial-grade for the purists, collagen matcha for the beauty shelf, protein matcha for the fitness one. The same powder, sorted into more expensive stories. I have watched this exact move before, in a marketing job I am not proud of, and the pattern never changes. You take something with a small, true core, a caffeine and L-theanine lift, a centuries-old craft, a farmer in Uji whose bushes really did cook last summer, and you sand away the context until it can carry any sticker you like. Then, when the price gets absurd and the shine dulls, you reach for the next leaf. The thing being sold was never the matcha. It was the reaching, the promise that you were becoming someone better one cup at a time. Keep your receipts.
