Opinion Bad news for ‘cool people’: The world may be running out of matcha

The global demand for matcha, the rich, strikingly green-coloured Japanese tea lighting up everybody’s social media feeds in recent times, has officially outpaced its supply. The explosion in its popularity came after influencers discovered matcha, thanks to an uptick in tourism to and exports from Japan after the Covid pandemic. Since then, it has become a green flag on the road to aspiration — it is a common feature in elite cafes from Gurugram to Los Angeles. But owing to US tariffs on Japan, heatwaves impacting the production of tencha — the leaves matcha is made of — and dwindling numbers of farmers harvesting them, matcha’s production and export is falling at an alarming rate. For the hashtag cool kids, that is bad news.

In a world reeling from the chaos of unpredictable trade wars, the matcha story is an example of how even a niche product might be hit by the calculus of demand and supply. Brought to Japan by the Chinese at the end of the 12th century, much of matcha’s popularity owes itself to an accidental technique that the Japanese embraced to allow it to grow during the country’s harsh winters. They covered it with straw and reed, protecting it from frost and sun, and allowing its colour to steep. As demand escalates and retailers set limits on how much customers can buy, the Japanese government is now encouraging what was once a carefully curated process to be converted into a larger-scale production of tencha. But that risks sacrificing the quality of matcha.

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In the rise and fall of matcha, there is also a larger story that runs alongside the tension driven by contradictory forces in a world in transition — one that features the famous villain called climate change, already wreaking havoc on products as diverse as coffee and gin and tonic. Globalisation enabled matcha’s exposure to the world; the move towards protectionism now threatens it. Whether the story will end with a promising sip of matcha is anyone’s guess.