We Are Drinking So Much Matcha That Supplies Are Running Out
Western consumers have thirsted for the health option in recent years, a trend skyrocketed by social media—especially through Tik Tok. At the same time, Japan has experienced a mass tourism rise in the post-pandemic years—in 2024, Japan welcomed a record-breaking 36.9 million international visitors, surpassing the previous record of 31.9 million in 2019 — leading to many mass tea companies and local vendors to report shortages of supply.
Back in October 2024, two well-known matcha companies—Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen—limited and/or stopped selling certain kinds of matcha, citing short supplies.
'Dear customers, We have been receiving an unexpected high volume of orders during the past few months. Taking production scale and capacity into consideration, we regrettably announce that availability for all Matcha products, regardless size and packaging type, will be limited from now on,' Marukyu Koyamaen's website still reads.
Matcha comes from the same plant that many different teas come from— the camellia sinensis. The camella sinensis leaves can be made into green tea, oolong tea, and black tea. Though matcha originates from China, it has become closely associated and rooted in Japanese culture.
Matcha is a type of green tea, but the processing, form and taste differs significantly, and is made specifically from tencha, a shaded green leaf tea. Matcha also only makes up a small amount of Japanese tea production—just 6%—according to the Global Japanese Tea Association.
Yet, the demand has skyrocketed. And as a result, prices have also soared.
According to Forbes, the matcha market is expected to hit about $5 billion by 2028, an expected growth of more than 10% since 2023. Further, the Japanese agriculture ministry has reported that the 2024 tencha output was over 2.5 times higher than 2014. The question is whether increased demand, small farmers trying to meet this demand, and a crop that is heavily dependent on weather patterns can keep up, even as the spring matcha harvest attempts to make up for the shortages of the past year.
This year, though, the Kyoto region of Japan, which accounts for a large percentage of tencha harvest, was hit with a hot and dry harvest season, say farmers in the area.
In 2025, Zach Mangan, founder of Kettl Tea, a Brooklyn-based company specializing in high-quality teas imported directly from farms in Japan, called this year's harvest a 'high-quality but lower-yielding harvest' in a blog post in May of this year—the kind of harvest that will boost demand and lower availability, potentially raising prices even further.
Read More: The Surprising Reason Your Groceries Are More Expensive
According to the Global Japanese Tea Association, the average price for tencha in late April reached 8,235 yen per kilogram, which is 1.7 times higher than last year's average. And according to producers, that can only be expected to continue.
'Over the past year, demand for matcha has grown beyond all expectations,' Ippodo updates customers on July 18. 'Unfortunately, supply constraints are likely to continue.'
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While Shimamoto invested the same sort of time and attention into his product, the ramen burger's quality and flavor were almost beside the point for many consumers. Mike Chau, one of the city's original food Instagrammers, sees the ramen burger as a turning point; the burger's success led to an 'escalation' of people not only waiting in lines but also 'getting food for the sake of posting about it,' he says. Instagram, which had launched in 2010 and hit its first 100 million users in 2013, was beginning a period of rapid growth. (Chau distinctly remembers the ramen burger's first weekend, but with his wife days just away from giving birth, 'the line was so long that we just gave up,' he says. If you live in NYC, you probably recognize that kid: Chau runs the popular account @foodbabyny.) With its ability to draw customers primarily interested in posting online, the ramen burger quickly began to outshine its neighbors. 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Writer and pastry chef Tanya Bush recently theorized in i-D that the first step toward virality is manipulation (you give a familiar food a tantalizing new appearance) and the second hybridization (you mash it up with another food that people already know). Nail those two steps, as the ramen burger did, and you increase the likelihood of a dish that people will make an effort to seek out. It may be cynical to paint purveyors as shrewd manipulators of the attention economy and diners as disloyal clout-chasers. But it's the game. No one is really fooled anymore. Viral food trends don't seem as organic now, according to Allyson Reedy, author of The Phone Eats First Cookbook, a compilation of 'social media's best recipes' published earlier this year. Unlike 2013, when foods like the ramen burger could make the news basically unintentionally, viral food is now more clearly 'a manipulation,' Reedy says. 'It's more strategic and intentional.' 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'If you can get remembered for something, you'll have customers for a long time.' Shimamoto's cooking was always about more than virality. While the novelty of the ramen burger was the bun made of noodles, the 'heart and soul' was its shoyu glaze, he explains. 'That juice from the meat and the sauce, and then that texture from the noodles, is really what makes it.' While the burger might have gotten people in the door at Shimamoto's restaurants, he hoped to flex his broader culinary skills on bowls of ramen too — something on which he was an expert, as his blog proved. In Serious Eats, Sho Spaeth once described Ramen Shack as 'the most exciting place to eat ramen in the United States,' though the ramen burger's success 'always risked occluding [Shimamoto's] true skill as a ramen-making savant with seemingly perfect taste-memory.' In 2019, Shimamoto closed the New York City location of Ramen Shack. In 2022, he closed the Ramen Shack location in Orange County, California, as well, citing staffing changes and personal health issues. While he says that he never grew to resent the ramen burger, the business around it could be 'overwhelming at times, with everyone trying to get a piece of the pie.' Smorgasburg's approach to choosing vendors has also crystallized over the past decade-plus. Food that works at Smorgasburg has to be good, Demby says, but it also has what he calls a 'moment of theater.' 'You've got to get known for something,' he says. 'If you can get remembered for something, you'll have customers for a long time.' The ramen burger has much more competition now, but interest in it has remained relatively steady since 2017 (though vastly decreased from its 2013 to 2016 heyday). 'I didn't close my shops because I thought that the ramen burger was no longer sellable,' Shimamoto says. Whenever he posts the ramen burger on Instagram now, commenters tend to reminisce about the good old days. And whenever his kids or friends request one, he'll make the ramen burger — just on a smaller scale now. 'To this day, it's still great,' he says. Sign up for Eater's newsletter The freshest news from the food world every day Email (required) Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
