Why Japanese Matcha Is Running Out, and Why Prices Won't Come Back Down

In August 2025, Ippodo, the Kyoto tea house in business since 1717, reportedly ran through nine months of stock in a single month. By March 2026 it had begun discontinuing entire product lines. That is not a brand managing a busy season. That is a 300-year-old company watching its supply chain buckle.

What happened to matcha in 2025 was a collision: centuries-old farming on one side, 21st-century viral demand on the other. Here are the numbers, most of which never made it into English-language coverage.

What actually happened to supply

The Kyoto frost did the visible damage. In April 2025 a cold snap struck during the critical budding window, and Ministry of Agriculture figures, cited by Uji Matcha Tea, tell the rest:

• Hand-picked Uji tencha: 10,216 kg (2024) → 6,140 kg (2025), down 40 percent.
• Machine-picked first-harvest tencha: 529,960 kg → 434,521 kg, down 18 percent.

Kagoshima, now Japan's largest producer, grew its output and softened the national blow. But Kagoshima's leaf cannot substitute for Uji's premium tencha, so the collapse hit hardest exactly where the most prized matcha comes from. Some Fukuoka producers reported yields down 30 percent while their prices doubled (Tezumi).

Demand, meanwhile, did the opposite of retreat. Japan's FY2025 green tea exports hit 13,125 metric tons, up 42 percent year on year, with export value of ¥84.7 billion, double the prior year (One With Tea).

The prices, in full

This is where the story stops being abstract. From the Ministry data cited by Uji Matcha Tea, the 2025 auction season:

• Uji hand-picked tencha: ¥20,024/kg → ¥43,330/kg, up 116 percent.
• First-harvest machine-picked tencha: ¥5,402/kg → ¥14,541/kg, up 169 percent.
• The "Chatomeichi" final trading day on August 1, 2025 cleared a total of ¥9.629 billion, nearly double the previous record high.

Tezumi adds the human translation. When tencha first reached Kyoto's wholesale market on May 9, 2025, machine-picked leaf jumped 170 percent year on year and hand-picked roughly 220 percent. In their words, "machine-harvested tencha this year costs the same as handpicked tencha did last year." That shattered the old record set during the Häagen-Dazs matcha craze.

Ippodo's own March 2026 figures put producer prices at 2.6 times the previous year, with first-harvest tea around 2.5 times, effective March 1, 2026. At retail, One With Tea tracks ceremonial tins moving from $30 to $40 per 30 g in 2023 to $50 to $80 now, with wholesale tencha running 30 to 60 percent above pre-2025 levels.

Why supply can't just bounce back

This is the part that turns a price spike into a structural shift. You cannot conjure more tencha next season, for four stacked reasons:

• The farmers are gone. Japan's tea-farming operations fell from roughly 53,000 in 2000 to about 12,000 by 2020 — a loss of more than 40,000 operations in two decades (MAFF Agricultural and Forestry Census). Only a few hundred grow tencha well (One With Tea).
• New plants are slow. A tea bush needs 4 to 5 years to mature. Anything planted in 2024 or 2025 won't reach full production until 2029 or 2030 (One With Tea).
• The mills are a bottleneck. Stone mills grind at roughly 40 grams an hour. As producers rushed to buy them in 2024, both the mills and the stonecutters who resharpen them backed up severely (Tezumi).
• The buffer is spent. Major blenders drained their frozen tencha stockpiles during the 2024 surge (Tezumi).

Kyoto's prefectural government is paying farmers to convert sencha fields to tencha, but the same 3-to-5-year lag applies to every new planting.

What lit the demand fuse

Global matcha searches grew another 27 percent year on year, and social-media mentions rose 107 percent (Tastewise). A weak yen made Japan cheap to visit, tourists met matcha at traditional blending houses, and the cycle fed itself (Tezumi). TIME reported on the shortage in 2026. The squeeze even reached cafés, whose gross margins compressed from 70 to 75 percent down to 50 to 55 percent as costs climbed (One With Tea).

Who's rationing, and what it means for you

The oldest houses tightened first. Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen both reportedly sold nine months of stock in a single month during the surge (Kettl's characterization). By late 2024 and early 2025, Ippodo had imposed strict limits, often one 20 g or 40 g tin per in-person buyer, and pulled products from Amazon and third-party sellers. In March 2026 it formally discontinued six product lines, mostly hojicha and bancha, as farmer resources shifted toward tencha. As Kettl put it, "most major suppliers are carefully protecting their remaining stock."

What 2026 and beyond look like

The shortage is expected to deepen month by month through August 2026, when the spring tencha harvest sets the next inventory pool (One With Tea). After that, supply should ease somewhat as Kagoshima's expanded capacity fills the commercial-grade gap; full stock-outs aren't expected past the second quarter of 2026.

But the price floor has moved. Raw-material and energy costs have folded permanently into the cost structure, and elevated pricing is anticipated through at least 2027. The 2023 prices are not coming back.

If you're buying through all this, the buying guide covers how to spend well when everything is scarce, and the regions explainer covers why Uji took the hardest hit.

Key facts

• Uji hand-picked tencha harvest fell 40% in 2025 (10,216 → 6,140 kg); machine-picked fell 18% (MAFF data via Uji Matcha Tea).
• Uji hand-picked tencha auction price rose 116% (¥20,024 → ¥43,330/kg); the Aug 1, 2025 final trading day cleared ¥9.629 billion, nearly double the prior record (Uji Matcha Tea).
• Ippodo's March 2026 producer prices ran 2.6x the prior year; retail ceremonial tins now $50–80/30 g, up from $30–40 in 2023 (Ippodo, One With Tea).
• Supply can't recover fast: tea-farming operations fell from ~53,000 (2000) to ~12,000 (2020) per MAFF census, 4–5 year plant maturity, stone-mill backlog, depleted stockpiles.
• Elevated pricing expected through at least 2027; prices will not return to 2023 norms (One With Tea).