Why Matcha Keeps Getting More Expensive

Matcha is not a plant. It is a grinding step at the end of a much more demanding growing process: the bushes are shaded for weeks before picking, the picked leaf is steamed and dried into tencha, and the tencha is then stone-ground into powder. Every part of that is slower and more labour-intensive than making ordinary sencha from the same field.

That is why "Japan is running out of green tea" gets the story wrong. Food Dive reports that matcha is only about 7% of total tea production in Japan. The squeeze is on that 7%, and on the highest grades of it hardest, because ceremonial-grade matcha and the matcha going into a supermarket latte are not interchangeable products competing for the same leaf.

The cleanest measure of the squeeze is the Kyoto auction, where the first tencha of the season is sold. Ooika records the opening price rising from roughly ¥3,800 a kilo in 2022 to about ¥4,800 in 2023, about ¥6,000 in 2024, and a record ¥8,235 in 2025.

Food Dive puts the 2024-to-2025 move in Kyoto tencha trading prices at 265%, citing the International Tea Committee. Those two figures measure different things — one is the opening auction, the other is trading across the season — so they are not two readings of the same number, and neither is a forecast. What they agree on is direction, and the direction has not changed for four years.

Ippodo puts the constraint plainly in its own supply notice: a tea plant needs at least five years before it can be harvested. Food Dive reports the same five-year lag for new matcha plantings. Any grower who decided to expand at the peak of the boom is still waiting.

The grower base has also been shrinking for a long time. Ooika records the number of tea farms in Japan falling from 53,687 in 2000 to about 19,600 in 2015 and roughly 12,000 by 2024. Fresh Cup adds the weather problem: Adagio Teas chief executive Michael Cramer told the magazine that shortages are being driven by "both the surge in global demand and challenging weather conditions this growing season, which have reduced yields."

So the supply side is a slow crop, on fewer farms, in a hotter climate, against demand that moved in a couple of years.

This is the newest turn in the story and the least covered. In a notice dated February 19, 2026, Ippodo told customers it was discontinuing six products — including Gokujo Hojicha, Gokujo Genmaicha, Kuki Hojicha and Wakayanagi in 200g tins, plus specific teabag formats — effective March 1, 2026. One more, a hojicha drip teabag, went temporarily unavailable.

The reason Ippodo gives is a price gap. It cites Kyoto producer prices of ¥14,141 a kilo for matcha against ¥1,225 a kilo for bancha. At roughly eleven times the return, growers are converting fields to shaded tea, and the leaf that used to become hojicha, genmaicha and everyday sencha is not being grown. Ippodo says bancha production is expected to fall substantially and warns that further temporary suspensions or purchase limits may follow.

The matcha shortage is now a Japanese tea shortage. If you drink hojicha rather than matcha, this is the paragraph that affects you.

Fresh Cup reports average matcha prices in foodservice rising 14% year over year, and describes operators managing the shortage rather than absorbing it. Vinay Patidar of Panda Coffee House in Denver told the magazine he had switched suppliers three times in a year, was on a waitlist running into August 2026 for the farm he wanted, and had one supplier raise prices 150% in a single month.

Food Dive reports lead times for cafe owners stretching from one or two months to six, and adds a cost the crop has nothing to do with: a 15% US tariff on Japanese imports. It also notes that Ippodo and the 300-year-old Kyoto producer Marukyu Koyamaen have both introduced purchase limits, and that Marukyu Koyamaen has published a list of sellers it does not authorise, after resellers began bulk-buying to flip stock.

None of the sources here counts how many cafes have dropped matcha from the menu, so this page does not give a figure. What they do establish is that the cost and the lead times reaching an independent cafe in 2026 are considerably worse than they were in 2024.

No source in this article states an end date, and that is the honest answer. The five-year planting lag sets a floor on how fast supply can respond, and Ippodo's February notice reads as a company planning for the squeeze to continue rather than clear.

The scenario that resolves it fastest is not more supply but less demand, and nobody can date that either. Food Dive notes that lower-grade matcha from China, Kenya and India could take the pressure off latte volumes without touching the ceremonial grades. Anything you read giving a specific month when prices come down is not coming from a grower, an auction or an importer. This page will be updated if one of them says otherwise.