Matcha Shortage, or a Market Correction? (Part Three)

This is the final part of the series. Scarcity, lineage, and modern markets converge here, asking us to reconsider how we value matcha in 2025. Make sure you read, Part One, and Part Two.

This is the paradox we face today. The world wants more matcha than Japan can give. New bushes require at the very least five years before their first harvest. The plants must be shaded for weeks. Leaves are steamed, dried, and rested for months into tencha. Only then do the stone mills turn, slowly and deliberately, grinding leaf into powder at a measured pace. None of this can be accelerated. Matcha moves at the speed of patience, while the world demands everything yesterday. For importers like us, the equation is even more complex. Tariffs, shipping costs, and geopolitical shifts all press against the leaf, amplifying scarcity beyond the fields of Japan.

Our first flush ceremonial grade spring harvest matcha allocation this year is capped at twenty kilograms. It is a precious harvest because of its rarity, and because of what it represents. The fact that it is a limited harvest has made it dear, but also sharpened its meaning. Later, we expect additional shipments blended with second harvest material, though details remain uncertain, and allocations unknown. Prices have risen sharply, but perhaps this is simply matcha finding its true value. A leaf that requires years to mature, weeks of shading, months of rest, and hours of grinding should never be cheap.

When I whisk a bowl this season, I will taste not only the leaf, but the patience of the farmers and producers, the echo of the Song court, the hum of mills in Japan, the clash of reverence and reinvention in our own culture.

I stand, as many of us do, between two worlds: harmony, respect, purity, tranquility, and the messy beauty of creativity. Both are true. Both are mine.

And perhaps this is the gift of matcha in 2025: to remind us that scarcity is not just economics. It is a lesson. Impatience asks for everything at once, but nature answers in its own time.

Epilogue

While editing this piece, I found myself thinking about my father. He has spent his life as a green coffee commodities broker and now, a consultant, watching harvests, weather, demand, and speculation all push and pull the price of coffee. From watching him, I think that what feels like a “shortage” can also look like a market correction.

Coffee, like tea, is connected to land, to labor, to weather, to politics. Prices rise and fall not only because of scarcity, but because the market has undervalued the true cost of production. When supply contracts or demand spikes, the numbers can look shocking, but often they are only catching up to reality.

Where market correction usually means prices drop, I see this as a correction in value; a recalibration of how matcha is seen and respected.

So I ask myself: is this the matcha shortage, or is it a long-overdue correction? For years, true Japanese matcha has been undervalued, treated casually, even disposable. But this is a leaf that is a complex tea to produce, it needs to mature, it must be shaded, rested, and ground carefully. Perhaps prices rising is not a crisis, but simply a recalibration.

Scarcity hurts. It limits access, it strains business, it frustrates those who love this tea. But scarcity can also clarify. It forces us to pause, and rethink matcha as more than powder that we add milk and sugar to to create a trendy beverage. It is also a powder that is a practice, a lineage, and requires devotion.

My father’s work reminds me that markets tell stories. For matcha, the story is clear: scarcity is asking us to treat this tea with greater respect.