The matcha shortage, in numbers

Is there really a matcha shortage? The short answer

The shortage is real, and it is in the makers' own notices. Ippodo reported in February 2026 that 2025 Kyoto first-harvest leaf traded at 2.5 times the previous year and second harvest at 2.9 times. Marukyu Koyamaen has limited its direct shops to one matcha item per person since 2024, withdrew all sizes of 100 g and above in early 2025, and closes its online shop between irregular sales. Behind the notices are export figures that grew by a quarter in a year and a supply that cannot grow at all for five. It will not catch up until fields planted now mature, around the end of the decade.

What the makers have published

The most useful thing about this shortage is that the two most respected houses in Kyoto documented it in writing, in Japanese, on their own websites. Here is the sequence.

Date	Maker	Notice
Nov 11, 2024	Marukyu Koyamaen	Purchase limits on matcha at all five directly run shops, citing extremely low stock
Dec 1, 2024	Marukyu Koyamaen	JR Kyoto Isetan counter stops in-store matcha sales entirely and moves them online, after crowds at opening time
End of 2024	Ippodo	Withdraws from Amazon US; its current Amazon listings are resellers
Mar 2025	Marukyu Koyamaen	One matcha item per person at direct shops; 100 g, 200 g, 500 g and 1 kg sizes suspended for all blends; 20 g and 40 g tins only, in limited numbers
2025	Marukyu Koyamaen	Notice describing groups assembled to buy for resale — children, taxi drivers, strangers recruited outside the shop — and stating that staff may refuse service
2025	Marukyu Koyamaen	Online shop and order form suspend matcha orders outright
Aug 1, 2025	Ippodo	Price revision and purchase limits; Kyoto matcha trading price in May “about 2.7 times” the prior year, over the president’s name
Aug 2025	Marukyu Koyamaen	Japanese online shop resumes matcha on an irregular schedule; one order per delivery address per month; no date-specified delivery; no shipping to hotels, forwarding companies or logistics warehouses
Apr 27, 2026	Marukyu Koyamaen	International Online Shop declines orders for business purposes — cafés, reselling, proxy shopping, group buying; 10% of order value withheld on refunds for purchases judged to be resale (policy since Nov 2024)
May 13, 2026	Marukyu Koyamaen	International shop stops announcing restock dates; matcha restocked at random on weekdays; destination countries rotated
Sep 4, 2026	Marukyu Koyamaen	Updated public list of unauthorized resellers and proxy services; counterfeit warning (Shopee Indonesia) published in July
Feb 1, 2026	Ippodo	2025 Kyoto first-harvest leaf at 2.5 times and second harvest at 2.9 times the prior year; purchase limits extended to bancha

Sources: the companies' own customer notices, Japanese originals, checked September 2026.

Three things stand out. The houses published the multipliers rather than hiding them, which is unusual for businesses that sell on reputation. The limits reached bancha — the everyday leftover-leaf tea — by early 2026, which means the shortage moved from the top of the market to the bottom. And Marukyu Koyamaen’s refusal to ship to forwarders is a policy aimed squarely at overseas buyers routing orders through Japanese addresses; the proxy route is closed on purpose.

The demand side

Japan’s tea exports have grown for a decade and accelerated sharply in 2024.

Measure	Figure	Source
Green tea exports, 2024, value	36.4 billion yen, up 24.7% on 2023	Trade statistics
Green tea exports, 2024, volume	About 8,798 tons, up 16.1%; about 2.5 times the volume of ten years earlier	Trade statistics
Share of powdered green tea (matcha and relatives) in export value	74% (2023); 57% of volume	Trade statistics
Government export target	81 billion yen of tea by 2030, of which 33.5 billion to the United States and 16.4 billion to the EU	MAFF export strategy, revised May 2025
Domestic green tea consumption	About 74,000 tons (2022), roughly 60% of the 2004 peak of 117,000 tons	MAFF

Read together: the domestic market has been shrinking for twenty years, the growth is almost entirely abroad, powdered tea is most of the money, and the government is planning for exports to more than double again by 2030. Demand for matcha specifically — the shaded, single-harvest, hand-finished top of the powdered category — rose faster than any of those averages, because that is what the world learned to ask for. The Kyoto houses’ blends, with their names and their histories, took the sharpest end of it.

The supply side

Matcha cannot be made quickly, for reasons that are agricultural rather than commercial.

One harvest. Drinking-grade matcha comes from tencha made from the first flush of spring, ichibancha, picked in late April and May. Later pickings are coarser and go to cooking and latte grades. The single harvest cannot be repeated that year, so a shortage of matcha is a shortage of one month’s leaf.

Five years. A newly planted tea field yields nothing usable for about five years. Fields planted in 2024 in response to the surge will begin to produce around 2029, and reach full yield later.

Shading and furnaces. Tencha requires shade frames and cloth over the rows, and tencha furnaces to dry the leaf flat; a sencha farm cannot switch overnight. Conversion is happening — Shizuoka growers are moving sencha fields to tencha — but it takes investment and time.

An aging workforce. The number of tea farmers falls every year and their average age rises. Shading and hand-picking are labor, and labor is what the industry has least of.

The price signal. Tencha averaged 3,141 yen per kilogram in 2023, about 2.6 times the price of sencha leaf, before the surge; the multiples the Kyoto houses reported for 2025 sit on top of that. High prices are pulling land and labor toward tencha, which is the mechanism by which the shortage eventually ends, but the lag is measured in years.

Reselling. Marukyu Koyamaen’s notice describing customers bringing children, taxi drivers and strangers into shops to multiply their one-tin allowance is the kind of detail that only gets written down when it has happened often. Resold tins appear on marketplaces at multiples of shop price, sometimes with short dates, and the houses’ forwarder bans are a response.

What it did to the map

The shortage has redrawn matcha’s geography faster than a decade of marketing did.

Kagoshima. Since 2020 Kagoshima Prefecture has produced more tencha than Kyoto, and its tencha output roughly tripled between 2018 and 2023 while Shizuoka’s stayed flat. In 2024 it also became Japan’s largest producer of crude tea overall for the first time on record. Its fields are large, flat and mechanized; its organic acreage is the largest in Japan; and it is where export-oriented supply is growing. American brands that source from Kagoshima have generally kept product on the shelf, at higher prices.

Shizuoka. The traditional sencha capital reported first harvest at 1.2–1.3 times and second harvest at twice the prior year’s prices in 2025, and its growers are converting sencha fields to tencha. It has the acreage; what it is building is the shading and furnace capacity.

Nishio. The Aichi district that produces roughly 30% of Japan’s matcha by some estimates held a protected geographical indication from 2017 and gave it up voluntarily in 2020 because the mark brought no advantage. Names, it turned out, were not the scarce thing.

Kyoto. Small, hilly, hand-worked and famous, Kyoto has the reputation, the competition record, the cultivars and the blenders, and it cannot expand. It is where rationing is strictest and where the resellers concentrate. The name that is scarce is Kyoto; the leaf that is available is elsewhere, and increasingly it is good.

Who is affected, and how

The Kyoto houses ration, withdraw sizes, raise prices and publish notices. Their blends are the ones missing from shelves and appearing on eBay.

Tea schools and practitioners in Japan compete with export demand for the same blends they have used for generations, which is the context for the one-tin rules.

American and European brands that buy tencha on contract from Uji or Kagoshima have generally kept supply, with price increases and occasional stock-outs of first-harvest tins. Their organic Kagoshima lines have been the steadiest.

Cafés built on matcha lattes have moved down the grade ladder or switched suppliers; the powder in a chain latte was never the top of the market and is the least affected.

Home drinkers see missing sizes, rationed tins, higher prices, resellers, and a wider gap between what is labeled matcha and what is.

What it means if you are buying

• Expect the famous houses’ large tins to be missing and their small tins to be rationed. The 20 g and 40 g formats are what the Kyoto houses kept.
• Expect prices to be out of date by the time you read them on any page, including this one.
• Expect resellers on marketplaces to be the only route to some blends, and read the best-by date before the price. Small tins carry dates of around six months from packing.
• Buy direct if you can catch it. Marukyu Koyamaen’s International Online Shop ships from Uji to customers outside Japan; matcha appears at random during Kyoto business hours, not every blend or size each time, and destination countries are rotated. Its Japanese shop is domestic only and refuses forwarders, so the proxy route through a Japanese address is closed. Authorized retailers are the other channel.
• Look south. Kagoshima first-harvest organic tins from brands that state harvest and cultivar are available and good, and they are not what the resellers are chasing.
• Read the ingredient line. The shortage has widened the market for powdered sencha and non-tea green powders sold under the name. If it does not say tea, tencha or matcha and nothing else, it is not what you want.
• Do not stockpile. An opened tin fades within weeks; unopened tins keep six months to a year in the cold and dark. Buy a month at a time.

The one thing the shortage has not touched

The whisk. Bamboo whisks, bowls and scoops are not tea and are not scarce, and the shortage has made the difference they make more valuable, not less. If good leaf is expensive and rationed, the sensible response is to make what you have better: cooler water, sifted powder, a fresh tin finished within the month, a whisk that foams. The same 2 g, well made, is a better bowl than 4 g wasted. This is a good year to learn the hand.

How the trade works, and where the numbers come from

The multipliers the Kyoto houses reported are trading prices, and understanding where they are set explains why they moved so far. Growers sell steamed and dried tencha through regional tea markets — Kyoto has its own — or on contract to the finishing houses. The market opens with the first harvest in May, and the May prices are the ones Ippodo cited: what the houses paid for the year’s leaf in the weeks it was picked. Those prices reflect that year’s harvest against that year’s orders, which is why a demand surge shows up at the source within a single season while the supply response takes five years to arrive. The finishing houses then blend, mill and pack through the year from cold-stored tencha, and their retail notices — price revisions in August, limits in February — follow the May market with a lag. Retail prices abroad follow with a further lag and unevenly, depending on each brand’s contracts and stock.

What the numbers mean for a tin

The arithmetic is simple and worth doing once. Tencha averaged 3,141 yen per kilogram in 2023 across Japan, before the surge; Kyoto first-harvest leaf, the top of the market, traded well above that average. If the 2025 Kyoto first-harvest price was 2.5 times the 2024 price, then the leaf in a 20 g tin cost the house two and a half times what it did the year before — before milling, packing, and the retail margin, none of which rose in proportion. That is why the houses raised prices and, more tellingly, why they rationed: at any price, there was not enough leaf. It is also why the effect is smaller on tins from Kagoshima, where the multiplier was lower and the fields larger, and smaller still on cooking grades made from later harvests. A drinking-grade Uji tin is the most exposed product in the category, and it is the one everyone wants.

Signals to watch

If you want to know when the shortage is easing before the makers say so, three public signals lead the notices.

• The Kyoto tea market’s May prices, reported each year in the Japanese trade press and cited by the houses in their summer notices. A year in which first-harvest prices fall against the prior year is the first sign.
• The trade statistics for green tea exports, published monthly. Growth slowing toward the government’s 2030 target curve, rather than above it, would mean demand and supply are converging.
• The houses’ own notices. When Marukyu Koyamaen restores a 100 g size or drops the one-per-person rule, the shortage is over for practical purposes; those notices will be the last to change, and they are the ones to watch.

A glossary for the notices

• Ichibancha — the first harvest of spring; the leaf drinking matcha is made from.
• Nibancha — the second harvest; coarser, used for cooking and latte grades.
• Tencha — shaded, unrolled, destemmed leaf; the raw material of matcha.
• Trading price — what finishing houses pay growers or the market for tencha, set in May.
• Purchase limit — a cap per customer, per person or per address, at a shop or online.
• Forwarder — a Japanese address that re-ships purchases abroad; now refused by Marukyu Koyamaen.
• Best-by date — six months from packing for small tins; the number to read on a resold tin.

Two details in the notices that are easy to miss

Bancha. When Ippodo extended its limits to bancha in February 2026, it was limiting the cheapest tea in its shop — the coarse, late-season leaf that Japanese households drink by the pot with meals. Bancha does not compete with matcha for the spring harvest; it comes from later pickings and from the trimmings. That the house rationed it anyway says that the pressure had spread from the single scarce harvest to the fields as a whole: growers were being paid so much for tencha that the everyday teas were being crowded out. It is the clearest sign in the record that the shortage is agricultural, not a fashion for one product.

Forwarders and resellers. Marukyu Koyamaen’s refusal to ship its Japanese shop’s orders to hotels, forwarding companies and logistics warehouses was written for one audience: buyers outside Japan who route orders through a domestic address. The house closes that workaround because it has built the other door itself — an International Online Shop that ships from Uji to overseas customers directly, at list price, one household at a time. That shop refuses cafés, resellers, proxy shoppers and group buyers, withholds 10% of the order value from refunds on purchases it judges to be resale, and publishes the names of unauthorized resellers and proxy services. Anyone offering to “buy it for you in Kyoto” is offering something the house has said it will refuse, and on a list it updates.

When it ends

Fields planted in 2024–2025 will begin to yield around 2029–2031. Until then, supply grows through conversion of sencha fields and through Kagoshima’s expansion, and prices at the source will fall only when the Kyoto first-harvest multiples come back down. A working benchmark: when Kyoto first-harvest trading prices return to within about 50% above their 2024 level, the houses’ rationing is likely to ease. A second: when Japan’s tea exports approach the government’s 81 billion yen target, the market will have matured to the point where price stops being the story and the differences between growers and blends become it again. Neither has happened as of September 2026. The shortage is a structural fact of matcha for the rest of this decade, and the numbers above will be updated here as the houses publish them.