The Matcha Problem
In a fascinating exploration of the cultural phenomenon surrounding matcha, the article delves into how this traditional Japanese green tea has surged into the mainstream, becoming a staple in American diets and lifestyles. Introduced as a quirky Pokémon character, Poltchageist, this “Grass/Ghost type” monster embodies the whimsical nature of how matcha has infiltrated various facets of modern culture—from desserts and drinks to beauty products. The statistics are staggering: retail sales of matcha powder in the U.S. have skyrocketed by 86% in just three years, and the global matcha market is projected to reach an estimated $8.2 billion by the end of the decade. Cafés are even reporting that matcha is outselling coffee, showcasing its meteoric rise in popularity.
However, the article highlights that this sudden demand comes with significant challenges. Matcha, which has been cultivated in Japan for centuries, is a labor-intensive product that requires specific growing conditions and meticulous harvesting practices. Climate change is threatening the land where Camellia sinensis, the tea plant, thrives, and the aging farmer population poses a risk to the future of matcha production. As demand surges, prices for authentic matcha have nearly tripled in some regions, leading to a surge of counterfeit products in the market. Experts estimate that up to 90% of matcha sold in stores may not be genuine, with unauthorized resellers and manufacturers taking advantage of the lack of regulation in the booming market.
The article also touches on the commercialization of matcha, as companies like PerfectTed have capitalized on its popularity by rebranding it for modern consumers. While these brands use the rich cultural heritage of matcha as a marketing tool, they often strip it of its traditional significance, promoting it as a trendy, accessible alternative to coffee. This commodification raises questions about authenticity and cultural appropriation, as the essence of matcha as a ceremonial beverage gets lost in the rush to meet consumer demand. As the article concludes, the rapid rise of matcha serves as a reminder of the tension between fleeting trends and the slow, deliberate nature of agricultural production, prompting reflection on how our fast-paced consumption habits can impact deeply rooted cultural practices.
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A couple of years ago, Pokémon introduced a new monster: Poltchageist, a “Grass/Ghost type” with special abilities in “hospitality” and being “heatproof.” It is wily and homicidal; it is also matcha.
Sure—why not? Matcha, a special preparation of green tea, is already everywhere else. It’s in candy and restaurant desserts and
ultra-firming eye cream
and Frappuccinos and a pretty foul-sounding
martini
. Loacker, the
100-year-old
Italian company that makes those Quadratini cookies, has
introduced
a matcha flavor. Dunkin’
sells
a matcha doughnut. Thousands or possibly millions of young people on TikTok seem to have devoted their life to decanting green sludge from one vessel to another. Retail sales of matcha powder in the United States are up by 86 percent from three years ago. Matcha is outselling coffee at some cafés,
including
my local Blank Street, which
isn’t really a coffeeshop at all anymore
—earlier this year, the company drenched its interiors in celadon, dropped the word
coffee
from its name, and began offering an ever-expanding menu of matcha drinks in baroque, hybridized flavors, such as carrot cake and “daydream.”
In 2023, the global matcha market was
estimated
to be $4.3 billion. That number is expected to nearly double by the end of the decade. Like most trends, this one is a synthesis of several macro-level factors, among them: caffeine anxiety, the wellness boom,
rising coffee prices
, the proliferation of cheap home milk frothers, and the fact that the color green looks
amazing
on video. Matcha has appeared, as if out of nowhere, to brute-force its way into the mainstream American palate.
Except—matcha does not come from nowhere. It comes from Japan, where it has, for centuries, been used ceremonially, and where supply challenges are now colliding with world-historic demand. For hundreds of years, matcha has been a specialized product, one that is, by definition, laborious to produce:
Camellia sinensis
thrives in subtropical, rainy climates. The best, sweetest matcha—the matcha that people who know matcha drink—comes from plants grown in the shade, after which their two youngest leaves are picked (by hand, only at the very beginning of the season) and then steamed, de-stemmed, deveined, dried, and ground between granite. As an agricultural product, it is much more like wine than like, say, corn. But climate change is shrinking the land that
C. sinensis
can grow on, and the farmers who have traditionally cultivated it are getting older, and they lack willing successors for the demanding work.
[
Read: The drink Americans can’t quit
]
And so, as interest spikes, things are getting weird. From 2024 to 2025, the average price in Kyoto for first-flush
tencha
, the whole leaves used to make matcha, nearly tripled. Farmers outside Japan—in China and South Korea, for example—are frantically cultivating
tencha
, hoping to catch the wave. Manufacturers are taking advantage of the market’s lack of regulation and are selling ground-up green tea as matcha. Joseph Sorensen, the chair of UC Davis’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and the acting director of the university’s Global Tea Institute, estimates that 90 percent of the powdered matcha on store shelves isn’t technically matcha at all.
“Unauthorized resellers”
are scalping marked-up matcha powder on social media as if it were Bad Bunny tickets. Counterfeiters are—allegedly!—selling colored powder and hoping no one notices. Kelly Shaw, who leads marketing for the U.K. matcha brand PerfectTed, told me that her company has seen others bulk ordering its matcha on Amazon and reselling it at competing local shops.
Like Poltchageist, PerfectTed is a product of its time. Quite literally: It became popular in 2023, after two of its co-founders, Marisa Poster and Teddie Levenfiche, went on
Dragons’ Den
, the United Kingdom’s version of
Shark Tank
, when they were both 25. There, they sold matcha using the language of utility and the logic of enterprise: Matcha, Poster told the cameras, evoked a venerable ritual, but more important, it was a “massive opportunity in the natural-energy-drink sector.” Poster had learned of matcha while trying to manage her ADHD and anxiety as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. She was using energy drinks and coffee to stay awake while studying but was constantly crashing. Matcha—which contains less caffeine than coffee does but more than other green teas do, as well as an amino acid said to aid focus—offered her a cleaner buzz.
All five Dragons fought to give Levenfiche and Poster their money. PerfectTed is now the U.K.’s
fastest-growing retail brand
across all sectors; according to Shaw, it alone imports 25 percent of Japan’s matcha supply. In addition to its flagship product, an energy drink, the company sells canned matcha lattes, Nespresso-compatible matcha pods, and powdered, sometimes flavored matcha. Its website features photographs of sporty people in green outfits and ad copy suggesting that matcha is not only better caffeine but more
interesting
caffeine:
One graphic
juxtaposes an intoxicatingly swirly jade-green matcha latte with a generic paper coffee cup, the latter stamped with BORING in red, like a voided check.
The traditional Japanese matcha ceremony involves patience, special equipment, and zero high-fructose corn syrup. Most of the new-wave matcha companies courting customers outside Japan are offering something else entirely, by admission and design. “I think if it remained in a tea ceremony and required a
cha-wan
and a whisk, it wouldn’t have become as popular as it has,” Shaw told me, gently, using the Japanese word for the special vessel in which matcha is traditionally brewed.
But even as these companies reject historical authenticity, they employ it as a selling point: PerfectTed, like
many, many others
, calls its powdered matcha “ceremonial grade,” a newly popular designation that is
unregulated and completely meaningless
. Matcha, in these companies’ tellings, presents an ancient and vaguely spiritual answer to the trials of modern life—an easy-to-consume, crash-free caffeine hit to get you through a looming deadline, a monk-approved solution to a problem that a monk would never have. Like miso, tahini, gochujang, and so many other global foods that have become trendy in this context-collapsed, free-associative, flavormaxxed culinary era, matcha is no longer really a fully formed cultural product with a heritage to be fidelitous to. Rather, it is a collection of appealing attributes, ready to be stripped for parts and endlessly remixed—a novel flavor, a functional ingredient, a component, a value proposition, a brand.
[
Read: The golden age of the fried-chicken sandwich
]
Matcha’s shift from niche commodity with sacred associations to international celebrity is not, in Sorensen’s view, wholly negative, as long as people don’t “pretend that they’re participating in Japanese culture by having a Starbucks latte.” The matcha ceremony’s practitioners take it seriously, and they’re watching it get more expensive—but, he told me, this is a “pretty specialized group of enthusiasts.” To the degree that the teenagers buying my local Blank Street out of carrot-cake matcha lattes are driving up the price of a pillar of Japanese life, we’re talking about something that’s closer to golf clubs than to Communion wafers. And besides, Sorensen reminded me, much of the “matcha” flavor finding its way to the mass market isn’t actually matcha. “It’s pretty much the difference between something that is strawberry flavored,” he said, “and actual strawberries.” Food products can experience shortages, but
flavors
are a basically infinite resource, at least in food science’s modern era.
Sorensen and
others
are less worried about the rise in demand than they are about what comes after it. Matcha plants require three to five years to mature. Even if farmers were to have the arable land and the human labor to plant all the plants that the world wants right now, the world, at some point, is likely to stop wanting so much of it. Telegenic 20-somethings in the United States can get excited about a new way to stay focused or go viral, and almost immediately, a massive agri-industrial mechanism halfway around the world will shudder to life to satisfy them—a population that barely knows such a mechanism exists and that will probably move on soon anyway. Food, especially food that comes from plants, is slow. Trends, especially trends that come from the internet, are not.
