Historical note: This article documents the Japanese matcha shortage that became visible in late 2024 and intensified during 2025. It does not claim that every matcha is still scarce today. Availability, allocations and prices change by producer, origin and product.

The short explanation is familiar: demand rose faster than supply. The more useful explanation is that demand outran several different supplies at once—shaded leaf, crude tencha, particular auction lots, refining capacity, grinding time, packaging lines and the annual inventories of famous brands. A company could therefore possess tencha and still have no finished tins ready to sell.

This distinction explains why some products disappeared while other matcha remained available, and why a relatively modest fall in traded leaf could accompany an extraordinary rise in price.

What was actually scarce in 2025?

“Global matcha shortage” became convenient headline language, but it was too broad. The clearest shortage concerned Japanese matcha, and especially established Uji brands, particular blends and better first-harvest material. Matcha from other Japanese regions, other specifications and other countries did not all disappear at the same time.

The stock restrictions were nevertheless real. In October 2024, Marukyu Koyamaen placed quantity limits on all of its matcha after demand exceeded production capacity and threatened to exhaust the raw tea reserved for the year. In August 2025, Ippodo announced its own limits and price revisions, citing overseas demand, attempts to buy stock for resale and sharply higher Kyoto tea prices.

Those notices document shortages at two renowned companies; they do not prove that every producer, grade or origin was unavailable. A shortage of a named product can result from the producer's particular inventory and processing capacity even when some tea remains elsewhere in the market.

Demand rose faster than the Japanese supply chain

Social media, café menus, tourism and matcha's wellness reputation all helped its visibility. There is no reliable way to assign each of them a percentage of the boom, and private market forecasts do not tell us how many kilograms of real matcha changed hands. Customs data give us a firmer measure.

In 2025, Japan exported 8,718 tonnes of powdered green tea, up 71% from 2024. Its export value reached ¥60.4 billion, more than double the previous year. Shipments of powdered green tea to the EU rose from about 785 to 1,455 tonnes. Austria was a small market, but its recorded volume rose from 1.7 to 7.4 tonnes. The Japanese Tea Export Promotion Council publishes the full 2025 table.

One qualification is essential: the customs category is powdered green tea, not matcha alone. It also includes other green tea milled into powder. Export figures can include tea made from earlier inventories, so they should not be equated directly with one year's tencha harvest. Even with those limits, the figures show how abruptly international purchasing accelerated—and why small Japanese suppliers felt it.

From shaded leaf to tin: how tencha and matcha are traded

Matcha does not normally travel from one farmer's field straight into a retail tin. Japanese tea distribution separates primary production, raw-tea trade, finishing and product manufacture. The businesses can be vertically integrated, but the stages still have to happen.

The main stages between a tea field and finished matcha
Stage What happens Where supply can tighten
Fresh leaf Covered tea shoots are harvested and taken quickly to a nearby primary factory. Weather, field area, cultivars, shading labour and a short harvest window limit the leaf available.
Tencha aracha The leaf is steamed and dried without sencha's rolling process, creating crude or primary-processed tencha. Tencha needs dedicated drying and handling equipment; fresh leaf cannot wait indefinitely for a free factory.
Raw-tea trade Lots are sold through tea markets, cooperatives, brokers or direct contracts. Annual lots may already be contracted or bought by established tea merchants before new overseas buyers arrive.
Finished tencha Merchants cut, sort and dry the leaf, remove coarse stems and veins, and may blend several lots. A buyer needs material of the right quality, profile, origin and certification—not merely any green tencha.
Storage Tencha is held under controlled conditions until it is needed. Cold-storage space, working capital and the amount reserved for each blend determine usable inventory.
Grinding and packing Finished tencha is milled, checked and packed as matcha, often close to dispatch. Mills, temperature control, quality assurance and packing lines can lag behind orders even when leaf is in storage.

Auction does not mean a farmer sells tins of matcha

At the JA Zen-Noh Kyoto tea market, growers and primary processors submit lots of raw tea. About 100 approved tea merchants can inspect the samples, smell the leaves, taste an infusion and bid electronically. The regional office of Japan's agriculture ministry documented the process in May 2025. The same centre, opened in 2022, had already been designed to relieve collection and refrigerated-storage constraints as tencha production expanded.

Auction is only one route. Tea can also be bought through negotiated deals, cooperatives, brokers and advance contracts. In some integrated supply chains, a merchant specifies the required quality and agrees to buy a producer's output. Consequently, not every kilogram of tencha appears on a public auction sheet, and a spectacular Kyoto auction price is not a national average.

Why the trade stores tencha rather than piles of matcha

During finishing, crude tencha is repeatedly cut and separated by sieves and airflow. Stems and veins are removed, and lots may be combined to produce a consistent flavour, colour and behaviour in the bowl. These are not decorative steps: they turn agricultural lots into a repeatable product.

Matcha powder has an enormous surface area and loses aroma and colour more readily than intact leaf. ITO EN's production guide says finished tencha is therefore normally stored as leaf and ground shortly before the matcha is dispatched. This quality-preserving system also creates a bottleneck. A warehouse containing tencha is not the same as a warehouse containing sifted, tested and packed matcha ready for export.

Traditional stone mills are slow and remain important for many fine products, but not all matcha is stone-milled. Japanese trade terminology allows tencha to be made into fine powder with a tea mill or equivalent equipment. Industrial products may use other milling systems. The 2025 shortage involved both raw material and processing capacity; it should not be explained with the false claim that every gram had to pass through a granite mill.

Why this system amplified the shortage

  • Procurement was seasonal. Established companies acquired raw tea for a planned year of production. When sales rose far above that plan, another equivalent crop could not be ordered for delivery next week.
  • Tencha is not interchangeable. Harvest, cultivar, covering, origin and processing affect taste and colour. Substituting an arbitrary lot can change a long-established blend or invalidate an origin or organic claim.
  • Leaf and finished powder were different inventories. Raw or refined tencha still needed milling, testing and packing. A surge in small retail orders put pressure on different equipment than a bulk ingredient order.
  • Allocation made the shortage visible. Producers limited purchases so a few customers could not consume the remaining annual stock. Ippodo also reported attempts to buy products for resale. Rational stockpiling by individual buyers can make a tight market worse for everyone else.
  • Production decisions arrived late. Fields, covering materials, factory schedules and contracts were arranged before the full scale of late-2024 demand was known. Agricultural supply responded in seasons, while online demand moved in days.

The 2025 Kyoto harvest and the price shock

Weather did matter, particularly in Kyoto. Japan experienced exceptional heat in 2024; the Japan Meteorological Agency reported record annual mean temperatures in eastern and western Japan. Reuters later interviewed a Uji farmer whose 2025 tencha yield was 25% below his usual level and who attributed the damage to the preceding summer's heat. The July 2025 report captured conditions during the shortage.

Heat should not become a universal explanation for every missing tin. The most precise public figures are the quantities and prices handled by a particular market. Final JA Zen-Noh Kyoto data show the following changes:

Selected 2025 tencha transactions at the JA Zen-Noh Kyoto tea market, compared with 2024
Official market category 2025 quantity 2025 average raw-tea price
Uji tencha 8.0 tonnes, down 21.4% ¥47,096/kg, 2.35 times the 2024 average
First-harvest tencha 486.5 tonnes, down 8.2% ¥14,144/kg, 2.62 times the 2024 average
Second-harvest tencha 187.0 tonnes, down 4.8% ¥7,959/kg, 2.99 times the 2024 average
Autumn tencha 327.4 tonnes, down 16.4% ¥1,789/kg, 2.29 times the 2024 average

Source: Kyoto Prefectural Tea Industry Chamber, final 2025 market results. These are quantities traded through this market, not Japan's total production.

The comparison is revealing. First-harvest volume fell by 8%, while the average price rose by 162%. Second-harvest volume fell by less than 5%, while its price almost tripled. Lower availability contributed, but demand, depleted carry-over stocks and aggressive competition for lots clearly mattered too.

These are prices for tencha before the full cost of refining, blending, milling, packaging, storage, finance, freight, import, distribution and retail. A raw-tea auction price rising 2.6 times does not dictate that every European tin must rise by exactly the same factor. It does, however, explain why manufacturers could not absorb the change indefinitely.

Why supply could not expand overnight

Japanese tencha production had already grown substantially before the shortage. It reached 5,336 tonnes in 2024, about 2.7 times the level ten years earlier, but still represented only about 7.3% of Japanese tea production. Those figures come from the national production association and are summarized in a December 2025 research report by Japan's House of Councillors.

Some existing fields can be managed and processed differently rather than replanted. A complete shift is nevertheless not as simple as putting a shade cloth over sencha bushes. Cultivars respond differently to covering; shading adds labour and materials; and fresh leaf must reach a suitable tencha line. If a field is replanted with a more appropriate cultivar, stable harvests take about five years. That five-year figure applies to replanting—not to every possible increase in tencha production.

The primary factory and the finishing plant are separate constraints. The House of Councillors report counted 45 government-supported tencha primary processing facilities introduced over the decade to 2023, while also reporting a shortage of grinding equipment in 2025. A later Norinchukin Research Institute review of the boom identified longer equipment delivery times and stronger competition for grinding slots.

The workforce was shrinking at the same time. Among the census category of core workers in tea-specialised family farms, the number fell from 25,043 in 2010 to 11,644 in 2020, and almost 74% were at least 60 years old. Larger and more mechanised businesses can replace some lost capacity, especially outside steep traditional regions, but expansion still requires people with agricultural, processing and tasting expertise.

Conversion also has consequences beyond matcha. A field, worker or factory schedule redirected from sencha or bancha is no longer producing the original tea. Kyoto's June 2025 report explicitly noted that movement toward tencha contributed to lower quantities and higher prices for gyokuro, kabusecha and sencha. Matcha demand can therefore tighten the wider Japanese tea market rather than creating new supply from nowhere.

Was this a global shortage or a Japanese shortage?

It is more accurate to call it a Japanese matcha supply squeeze with global effects. International buyers were competing for Japanese raw material and finished products, so retailers and cafés around the world felt the result. At the same time, China and other origins were increasing their own production. A buyer who required a named Uji blend could not simply substitute another origin; a buyer who needed reliable latte matcha sometimes could.

Origin should be stated plainly. It is neither honest to sell non-Japanese matcha as Japanese nor useful to assume that every product from outside Japan is fake. Our main matcha guide explains how Japanese and Chinese definitions relate, while the matcha quality guide shows why an unregulated word such as “ceremonial” cannot replace traceability or tasting.

The shortage did create incentives for inflated grade language, vague origins and imitation packaging. That is a reason to ask who produced the tea and how it was processed. It is not evidence that every inexpensive matcha was adulterated.

What the 2025 shortage teaches consumers and cafés

  • Buy for the intended drink. Fine koicha material is wasted in a heavily sweetened latte, while a sound later-harvest matcha can be entirely appropriate for milk, baking or café service.
  • Ask for origin and process, not merely a grade word. Country, region, producer or blender, harvest period, milling method and certification are more informative than “premium” on its own.
  • Do not confuse auction price with shelf price. The former is one raw-material cost at one place and time; the latter includes every later stage of the chain.
  • Avoid panic buying. A reasonable reserve helps a café survive a delayed shipment. Hoarding retail tins or buying for resale turns allocation problems into empty shelves.
  • Plan professional demand by season. Cafés and importers should forecast annual volume, distinguish a raw-leaf commitment from a finished-matcha delivery schedule, and approve alternatives before the preferred product is exhausted.

The lesson is not that matcha must remain rare or that only hand-picked Uji tea is legitimate. It is that an agricultural product cannot respond to a viral demand curve like software. The 2025 shortage became severe because a seasonal, quality-sensitive trade was asked to behave like an unlimited on-demand supply.

Questions about the 2025 matcha shortage

Is tencha harvested only once a year?

Not always. Traditional hand-picked tencha for fine matcha may be harvested only in the first spring crop, but machine-harvested fields can also supply second and later crops. Kyoto's 2025 records contain separate first-, second- and autumn-tencha categories. Later harvests generally serve different quality and price segments.

Why could matcha remain sold out after the new harvest?

Harvesting creates fresh leaf, not a finished tin. The leaf still has to be processed into crude tencha, bought, refined, blended, stored, milled, tested, packed and allocated. If grinding or packing is the bottleneck—or the new lots are already committed—a harvest does not refill every shop immediately.

Did a 170% price increase at auction mean retail matcha had to rise 170%?

No. Reports also used “rose 170%” and “reached 170% of the old price” inconsistently, and different auctions covered different lots. More importantly, an auction price is the cost of raw tencha. It is only one component of a finished product's price.

Is this page saying that matcha is still scarce?

No. This is a retrospective about 2025. Present availability should be checked through dated information from the relevant producer or retailer. A continuing structural constraint is not the same as a permanent shortage of every product.

Sources and further reading