Why Is Matcha Sold Out Everywhere? The Real Story from Japan (2026)
In three lines: The matcha shortage is real and still ongoing as of August 2026, with famous Kyoto shops limiting purchases since October 2024. Supply can’t catch up because the raw leaf takes years to cultivate and a stone mill grinds only about 40 grams an hour. You can still drink well if you buy small, store smart, and look beyond the two most famous names.
I live in Japan, I drink matcha every day, and for the past two years I’ve watched this shortage unfold from the inside: the apology notices taped to shop counters, the one-tin-per-person signs, the auction headlines in the Japanese press. Friends overseas keep asking whether it’s real or just hype.
It’s real. It’s also widely misunderstood, so let me walk you through what happened, why Japan can’t simply make more, and what to do about it as a drinker.
First, What Exactly Is Running Out
Japan is not “out of matcha.” If I walk into my local supermarket tonight, there will be inexpensive culinary-grade powder on the shelf for baking and lattes. What’s scarce is the good stuff: first-harvest, shade-grown, stone-milled matcha of the kind produced by the historic Kyoto tea houses. That’s a small slice of Japan’s total tea output, and it’s the slice the whole world suddenly wants.
A “sold out” page on a famous brand’s site doesn’t mean matcha has vanished. It means demand for the top tier has outrun a supply never designed to serve millions of latte drinkers.
How We Got Here: A Timeline
Autumn 2024: Kyoto’s Old Houses Hit the Brakes
The moment this became undeniable was late October 2024. On October 25, Marukyu Koyamaen, one of Uji’s most respected producers, posted a notice limiting quantities on all of its matcha products, citing order volumes far beyond expectations. Five days later, Ippodo, a Kyoto tea house in business since 1717, suspended sales of some matcha entirely and capped the rest at one item per customer.
Both framed it as temporary, something to ride out until early 2025. I read those notices and assumed the same. Neither of us was right.
2025: The “Temporary” Limits Never Ended
Through 2025, the squeeze spread from two famous names to the wider industry. At the spring auctions in Kyoto, machine-picked tencha (the shaded leaf that becomes matcha) averaged a record 8,235 yen per kilogram. Japan’s green tea exports jumped more than 40 percent that year to over 13,000 tons, and roughly 70 percent of that was powdered tea. Meanwhile a record wave of tourists carried tins home in their suitcases faster than shops could restock.
Spring 2026: The Records Fell Again
Then this spring made 2025 look calm. At the first tencha auction of the season in Kyoto on May 13, 2026, machine-picked tencha averaged 13,972 yen per kilogram, about 1.7 times the record set a year earlier. The next day in Kagoshima, the average hit roughly 19,000 yen, close to double its previous year. Those are wholesale prices for raw leaf, before milling, packaging, or shipping, and they flow directly into what you pay for a tin.
As of August 2026, purchase limits are still a normal sight in Japanese tea shops, and the retail price rises from those spring auctions are still working their way onto shelves.
Why Japan Can’t Just Make More
This is the part most coverage skips. Matcha supply is slow by nature, in three specific ways.
Tencha Is Slow, Deliberate Farming
Matcha starts as tencha, and tencha is not ordinary tea. For three to four weeks before the spring harvest, the fields are covered with shading cloth to cut the sunlight. That stress forces the plant to produce more chlorophyll and amino acids, which is where matcha’s color and sweetness come from. Shading takes structures, labor, and skill, so a farmer growing sencha (regular green tea) can’t flip a switch and produce tencha next season.
Converting an existing field takes years of investment. Planting a new one is slower still: a tea bush needs about five years before it yields a proper harvest. The leaf being auctioned at record prices this spring was planted when nobody outside Japan was panic-buying anything. Decisions made in 2026 won’t show up in your cup until around 2030.
A Stone Mill Grinds About 40 Grams an Hour
Traditional matcha is finished on a granite stone mill, and a single mill produces roughly 30 to 40 grams per hour. That’s one or two small tins in an hour of grinding. Run the mill faster and friction heat scorches the aroma, so producers can’t just crank the speed. Nor can they order fifty new mills for next month; the mills are cut and maintained by a small number of specialist craftsmen. Industrial grinders exist and handle much of the culinary supply, but the fine, slow-milled texture of top-grade matcha doesn’t scale on demand.
The Average Tea Farmer Is Past Retirement Age
The least fixable constraint is people. Japanese agricultural surveys have long shown that most tea farmers are elderly, with the commonly cited figure being around 70 percent over the age of 65, and many have no successor. Japan’s overall tea acreage has been shrinking for years. Tencha is the one bright spot, with national production reaching 5,336 tons in 2024 according to the agriculture ministry, about 2.7 times the level of a decade earlier. But that growth comes largely from existing farmers switching over from sencha, which tightens supply elsewhere, not from a new generation entering the fields.
The Demand Side: Lattes, Wellness, and 42.7 Million Tourists
While supply crawls, demand sprints. Three forces stacked on top of each other.
The first is cafe culture. The matcha latte stopped being a novelty and became a standard menu item from Los Angeles to London to Riyadh, and cafes buy in kilograms, not 30-gram tins.
The second is the health halo. Social media has spent years presenting matcha as the calmer, antioxidant-rich answer to coffee, and whatever you think of the more breathless claims, the effect shows up in those export numbers.
The third force is the one I see with my own eyes: tourism. Japan welcomed a record 42.7 million international visitors in 2025, per the national tourism organization, up from 36.9 million the year before. A tin of great matcha costs less here than almost anywhere else, so buying at the source is entirely rational. Multiply that decision by tens of millions of visitors and you get Kyoto shops selling out by early afternoon.
What It Looks Like from Inside Japan
Here’s my honest, ground-level view as of this summer.
At the supermarket, nothing looks unusual. Culinary matcha sits in the tea aisle at normal-ish prices, maybe slightly up, never sold out. Daily life here does not feel like a shortage.
The specialty counters are another world. At department store tea counters and famous shops, the one-per-person signs (“お一人様一点限り”) have been up so long the tape is yellowing. Certain named blends I used to buy casually now appear irregularly, and when they do, they go fast. At the flagship stores in Kyoto, lines form before opening, and the majority of the line is visitors from overseas. I don’t say that with any resentment; I’d do exactly the same on holiday in Japan. But it explains why “just buy it in Japan” is no longer the loophole it was in 2023.
The biggest change is in my own habits. I used to keep two or three open tins around. Now I buy one small tin, finish it while it’s lively, then buy the next. The shortage taught me, a little embarrassingly, how matcha was always meant to be bought.
How to Actually Buy Matcha During a Shortage
Practical advice from someone shopping this market weekly.
Buy Small, Buy Often
Resist the instinct to hoard. Matcha is closer to fresh produce than to coffee beans; once a tin is opened, the aroma fades noticeably within a month or two no matter how well you store it. A stockpile of six tins is really one good tin and five mediocre ones on a delay. A 20 to 40 gram tin you finish in a few weeks beats a 100 gram bag every time.
Store It Like It’s Perishable
Keep opened tins airtight, cool, dark, and away from anything fragrant, since matcha absorbs odors readily. I keep unopened tins in the refrigerator and let them come fully to room temperature before opening, so condensation doesn’t clump the powder. Opened tins stay out in a cupboard, because a tin that goes in and out of the fridge daily collects moisture.
Match the Grade to the Drink
If you’re making lattes or baking, a good culinary matcha is the correct choice, not a compromise, and it’s far easier to find right now. Save the expensive, scarce tins for drinking straight, where the difference actually shows. If the grade labels confuse you, I’ve written a plain-language breakdown of what ceremonial grade actually means, because the term is doing a lot of unregulated work these days.
Look Beyond the Two Famous Names
Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen earned their reputations, but Japan has many excellent producers whose stock situations are far less dire. Being flexible about brands is the single most effective way to keep good matcha in your kitchen this year. I keep an updated list of where to buy authentic Japanese matcha online, including smaller houses that ship overseas.
Keep Your Guard Up
Shortages attract opportunists. Japanese producers have been raising alarms about powder grown outside Japan being sold under labels like “Uji matcha,” and about powdered sencha passed off as the real thing. In 2026, a shop offering unlimited stock of suspiciously cheap “ceremonial” matcha is a reason for caution, not celebration.
So When Does It End?
I won’t pretend to a certainty nobody has. The genuinely hopeful signs: tencha production has grown for four straight years, Kagoshima’s large, mechanized farms have overtaken Kyoto in volume and are expanding fast, and record prices are finally giving young farmers a financial reason to stay in tea. The sobering ones: fields planted now won’t produce until around 2030, the milling bottleneck hasn’t moved, and demand shows no sign of cooling.
My honest read from here is that the top end stays tight through at least 2027, while everyday matcha remains findable if you shop wisely. In the meantime, the shortage carries a quiet lesson Japanese tea people have repeated all along: this was never meant to be an infinite commodity. It’s a seasonal crop, grown slowly, ground slowly. Buy it in small amounts, drink it while it’s fresh, and it turns out there’s still enough to go around.