Global matcha tea shortage driving up prices in B.C.

Akshay Kulkarni · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 20, 2025 8:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: 11 minutes ago

As planetary request for the fashionable matcha beverage beverage grows, producers successful Japan person been incapable to support up, starring to a worldwide shortage and terms increases, which are being felt by B.C. cafés and importers.

Matcha beverage refers to a peculiar benignant of greenish tea, primitively from Japan, that is shade-grown, which makes it vibrantly green. Once the young leaves are picked, they're de-stemmed and de-veined, then dried and crushed to a precise good powder.

The portion and its distinctive greenish hue person been a trendy prime connected societal media, wherever hundreds of thousands of radical person watched matcha mentation videos. The greenish beverage is present a regular fixture on café menus.

But arsenic popularity for matcha beverage has boomed, experts accidental accumulation capableness successful Japan hasn't kept up, starring to a shortage that has been driving up prices since past year.

WATCH | Matcha shortage being felt successful Vancouver: 

B.C.-based cafés and matcha importers accidental consumers volition apt consciousness the pinch, and prices could spell up further arsenic the harvest play for matcha begins successful spring.

"I'm waiting with bated breath," said Jared Nyberg, who runs beverage wholesaler JagaSilk successful Victoria. "Harvest play is astir upon us. It's the May, June, clip play wherever we commencement to spot a batch much of what we're going to person to wage for these things."

Nyberg said determination were immoderate "pretty important terms increases" past twelvemonth for the teas and that prices could adjacent treble successful the adjacent fewer months.

Elliott Graham, who owns the Vancouver café Superbolt Tea, said he's had to crook to aggregate sources of matcha beverage successful bid to support up with the request of his hundreds of regular customers.

"The situation determination is however overmuch you tin really unafraid from these farmers," helium said. "And I'd accidental the extremity user is getting deed the hardest.

"There's a scarce proviso of matcha astatine the moment," helium added. "So we're seeing a lot, benignant of, of ... radical are similar reselling matcha, and selling it astatine a higher price."

The café proprietor said that prices could beryllium marked up by arsenic overmuch arsenic 40 per cent by wholesalers and arsenic overmuch arsenic 150 per cent by resellers.

Production bottlenecks

John Harrison, the CEO of beverage importers Andrews and George Co. and the DōMatcha brand, said that implicit the past 5 years, the export volumes of matcha beverage from Japan had grown by 115 per cent.

He said that the shortage has been a improvement since the second fractional of 2024 and attributed it to accumulation bottlenecks successful Japan, with galore of the farms being operated by families and seniors.

"The contented for them is based connected an imbalance betwixt accumulation and product," helium told CBC News. "And truthful they person the inventory, they conscionable don't person the mechanics and the measurement successful presumption of the machinery." 

Harrison says helium estimates that it'll instrumentality Japanese producers a twelvemonth oregon 2 to drawback up with demand.

Graham says that the unsocial accumulation process for matcha is simply a portion of the accumulation bottleneck.

To marque high-grade matcha, the leaves of a peculiar beverage works person to beryllium harvested astatine precisely the close clip and crushed by manus aft a shading process of a fewer weeks.

But the café proprietor says that overmuch of the shortage has been driven by a request for lone the highest-quality matcha teas, which person the greenest hue and popular connected societal media videos.

"Not ever having to spell for the highest prime matcha is a much sustainable mode to, I think, bask the matcha," helium said. "So that it's not putting unit connected each these old, family-owned farms successful Japan."