Matcha Shortage: Why Demand Exceeds Production

Over the past few years, one word has come up more and more often around matcha: shortage. Out-of-stock notices at some brands, purchase limits, prices climbing. This isn't a marketing myth, but the fairly logical result of two forces colliding, global consumption exploding, and Japanese fields increasingly struggling to keep up.

Global consumption that has exploded

About ten years ago, matcha remained a fairly niche product outside Japan, reserved for tea enthusiasts and a handful of specialty shops. Driven by social media and the wellness craze, it has become a common ingredient in cafés, bakeries, and supermarket aisles around the world. We cover this shift in detail in our article on matcha's history, but the concrete result is demand that has multiplied several times over in just a few years, for a product whose production simply can't adapt as quickly.

Fields that can no longer find enough hands

On the other side, production faces a problem that's far more structural than a simple lack of investment: the aging of Japan's farming population and the lack of successors. According to a study by the Global Japanese Tea Association, more than half of tea producers in Japan are now 65 or older. The case of Shizuoka, one of the country's major tea-growing regions, is particularly telling: the Japanese financial daily Nikkei recently reported that the local producers' cooperative, which had around 110 members in the late 1990s, now has only 23. As in many of Japan's rural regions, producers' children increasingly move to the city for work, leaving family farms with no one to take over. Yet growing tencha for matcha remains a demanding trade, with shading nets put up and taken down by hand, harvesting still largely done manually on the best plots, and know-how that's hard to pass on outside a family setting. We cover this painstaking work in detail in our article on tencha.

A growing area that could shrink drastically by 2050

This lack of successors has a direct impact on the area planted with tea. According to Nikkei, Japan's leading tea-growing region still covered 25,400 hectares in 2025, but could fall by more than 80% by 2050 if the current trend continues, dropping to around just 5,000 hectares. Facing this risk, some local authorities and cooperatives have started to respond, with subsidies meant to encourage new plantings or the conversion of existing plots, but the effect of these measures remains, by nature, very gradual.

The long timeline of tea plants, a limit that can't be sped up

Even with goodwill and new investment, a tea plant can't be planted and harvested overnight. It generally takes several years, often at least three to five, before a young tea plant produces usable leaves, and its productive lifespan then caps out at around 35 years. Yet, again according to Nikkei, around 40% of Japan's tea plots are already more than 30 years old, meaning a large share of the stock needs to be renewed in the coming years, on top of simply having to keep up with rising demand. This agronomic reality explains why supply simply can't keep pace with a sudden demand spike, unlike an industrial product that can be manufactured in greater quantity overnight.

Major regions under pressure

The major producing regions find themselves at the front line of this pressure. According to the BBC, Kyoto alone accounts for about a quarter of Japan's tencha production, the raw material for matcha, and the traditional stone mills used to grind it produce only about 40 grams of matcha per hour, a bottleneck that's hard to work around without changing the nature of the product. In Kagoshima prefecture, by contrast, many sencha producers are converting to tencha, a transition actively supported by public subsidies. We cover these regions and their specific traits in our article on origin and cultivar. Some recent harvests have in fact come in lower than previous ones, as we mention in our article on matcha's history, which further widens the gap between ever-growing global demand and a production still constrained by nature and by the number of hands available to work it.

On the ground, the consequences are already very tangible. In Kyoto, the Camellia Tea Ceremony tea house had to limit sales to one box per customer as visitor numbers doubled, with its director Atsuko Mori telling the BBC she wants to avoid running out of stock completely. The Chazen tea ceremony chain, for its part, saw its prices rise by around 30% in 2025, with tea master Rie Takeda pointing directly to the growing scarcity of quality matcha. On top of that, still according to the BBC, there's the 15% tariff applied to Japanese imports into the United States since the trade agreement signed in 2025, which is also weighing on the global matcha market.

In summary

The matcha shortage isn't a marketing stunt, it's the meeting point between global consumption that has exploded, with the value of Japanese green tea exports nearly doubling between 2024 and 2025, and Japanese production held back by two realities that are hard to change quickly, an aging farming population, more than half of whom are already 65 or older, and the long timeline of tea plants. This tension largely explains the price increases seen in recent years, which we cover in more depth in our article on preconceptions about matcha.

Have a question about matcha and its production? Feel free to contact us, we'll be happy to answer.