Matcha Shortage, or a Market Correction? (Part One)
This is the first part of a three-part series exploring the matcha shortage of 2025. We begin with scarcity itself, and what it reveals on a personal level.
The world wants more tea than Japan can give.
Bowls of matcha are whisked, blended, and frothed in temples, cafés, parks, kitchens, forests, and tea rooms across the world, each vibrant green cup promising focus and peaceful vitality. Yet behind every serving lies a deeper truth: true matcha is not fast food.
It has been a difficult year for tea sourcing everywhere, but this spring the messages from Japan carried a different weight. Our producer in Shizuoka wrote: “This is the toughest situation since I started my tea business.”
Harvests are down nearly thirty percent. Even the largest companies are struggling to secure supply. In Kyoto, tencha, the raw leaf for matcha, sold at record highs this May, nearly three times higher than the year before. Scarcity is no longer subtle; it defines this season. What happens in Japan is only half the challenge. By the time matcha reaches the U.S., tariffs and shipping have compounded costs, creating a ripple effect that makes scarcity even sharper.
I carry the words of tea on my body: wa, kei, sei, jaku — harmony, respect, purity, tranquility.
The Way of Tea.
My years of study and practice have not made me a master; they have made me a student who has unlearned as much as I have learned. As a Westerner drawn to Eastern philosophies since my early days, I had to stumble (rather ungracefully at times) through ego and arrogance, anger, selfishness, and the illusion that everything can be grasped quickly. Tea taught me otherwise. Tea taught me patience. Tea has also taught me love.
I love tea in all its forms. To me, bringing tea into different spaces is how we share and spread its way, offering tea to those who might never otherwise meet it. So I live with two sides.
I believe in the craft and reverence of pure tea, and I also love creativity. I love the purity of a carefully whisked bowl, and I also love the deliciousness of a Miami Chai Matcha Latte made with our tea syrup. Cooking with good wine makes a good meal; cocktails with good matcha make good drinks. Both truths can live together.
The trouble is not the latte, or even the innovation. The trouble is what we do with it. A balanced six-ounce serving becomes a sixteen-ounce sugar-laden spectacle. A line around the block forms, not for matcha, but for dessert cosplaying as matcha. As Americans, we supersize until we kill the very thing we say we love.
In Part Two, we’ll step back in time. To understand today’s scarcity, we must revisit the golden age of powdered tea in China and the devotion that carried it into Japan.
