Ippodo, the Kyoto tea house trading since 1717, does not rattle easily. Yet when the matcha boom went vertical, it and its Uji neighbor Marukyu Koyamaen each reportedly sold nine months of stock in a single month — a figure first put about by Kettl's Zach Mangan and later echoed by TIME. By March 2026 Ippodo was discontinuing whole product lines outright. That is not a 300-year-old company managing a busy season. That is one watching its supply chain buckle.

What happened to matcha across 2024 and 2025 was a collision: centuries-old shade-grown farming on one side, viral 21st-century demand on the other. Here are the numbers, most of which never reached English-language coverage.

What actually happened to supply

Abnormal spring weather did the visible damage. Accounts differ on the exact mechanism — some growers and importers blame an April cold snap during the critical budding window, while TIME and farmers interviewed on the ground point to record heat in what was Japan's hottest year on record. Either way, Ministry of Agriculture figures, cited by Uji Matcha Tea, tell the rest:

  • Hand-picked Uji tencha: 10,216 kg (2024) → 6,140 kg (2025), down 40 percent.
  • Machine-picked first-harvest tencha: 529,960 kg → 434,521 kg, down 18 percent.

Kagoshima, now Japan's largest producer, grew its output and softened the national blow. But Kagoshima's leaf cannot substitute for Uji's premium tencha, so the collapse hit hardest exactly where the most prized matcha comes from. Some Fukuoka producers reported yields down 30 percent while their prices doubled (Tezumi).

Demand, meanwhile, did the opposite of retreat. Japan's FY2025 green tea exports hit 13,125 metric tons, up 42 percent year on year, with export value of ¥84.7 billion, double the prior year (One With Tea).

The prices, in full

This is where the story stops being abstract. From the Ministry data cited by Uji Matcha Tea, the 2025 auction season:

  • Uji hand-picked tencha: ¥20,024/kg → ¥43,330/kg, up 116 percent.
  • First-harvest machine-picked tencha: ¥5,402/kg → ¥14,541/kg, up 169 percent.
  • At the Chatomeichi final trading day at JA Zen-Noh's Uji distribution center on August 1, 2025, the season closed at a record ¥9.629 billion — nearly double 2024's ¥4.6 billion — with the hand-picked average peaking around ¥47,096/kg.

That spike had been visible from the season's first bell. When the Kyoto auctions opened that spring, the average tencha price already sat at ¥8,235/kg, 1.7 times the prior year and well past the ¥4,862 record set during the 2016 matcha run-up (Global Japanese Tea Association).

Tezumi adds the human translation. When tencha first reached Kyoto's wholesale market on May 9, 2025, machine-picked leaf jumped 170 percent year on year and hand-picked roughly 220 percent. In their words, "machine-harvested tencha this year costs the same as handpicked tencha did last year." That shattered the old record set during the Häagen-Dazs matcha craze.

Ippodo's own March 2026 figures put producer prices at 2.6 times the previous year, with first-harvest tea around 2.5 times, effective March 1, 2026. At retail, One With Tea tracks ceremonial tins moving from $30 to $40 per 30 g in 2023 to $50 to $80 now, with wholesale tencha running 30 to 60 percent above pre-2025 levels.

Why supply can't just bounce back

This is the part that turns a price spike into a structural shift. You cannot conjure more tencha next season, for four stacked reasons:

  • The farmers are gone. Japan's tea-farming operations fell from roughly 53,000 in 2000 to about 12,000 by 2020 — a loss of more than 40,000 operations in two decades (MAFF Agricultural and Forestry Census). Only a few hundred grow tencha well (One With Tea).
  • New plants are slow. A tea bush needs 4 to 5 years to mature. Anything planted in 2024 or 2025 won't reach full production until 2029 or 2030 (One With Tea).
  • The mills are a bottleneck. Stone mills grind at roughly 40 grams an hour. As producers rushed to buy them in 2024, both the mills and the stonecutters who resharpen them backed up severely (Tezumi).
  • The buffer is spent. Major blenders drained their frozen tencha stockpiles during the 2024 surge (Tezumi).

Kyoto's prefectural government is paying farmers to convert sencha fields to tencha, but the same 4-to-5-year lag applies to every new planting.

What lit the demand fuse

Global matcha searches grew another 27 percent year on year, and social-media mentions rose 107 percent (Tastewise). A weak yen made Japan cheap to visit, tourists met matcha at traditional blending houses, and the cycle fed itself (Tezumi). By 2026 the squeeze had broken into the mainstream press, with TIME running a feature on it, which only widened the buyer pool. It even reached cafés, whose gross margins compressed from 70 to 75 percent down to 50 to 55 percent as wholesale costs climbed (One With Tea).

Who's rationing, and what it means for you

The oldest houses tightened first. Ippodo and Marukyu Koyamaen both reportedly sold nine months of stock in a single month during the 2024 surge (Kettl's characterization, later echoed by TIME). By late 2024 and early 2025, Ippodo had imposed strict limits, often one 20 g or 40 g tin per in-person buyer, and pulled products from Amazon and third-party sellers. In March 2026 it formally discontinued six lines — Gokujo Hojicha, Gokujo Genmaicha, Kuki Hojicha, Wakayanagi, a one-cup hojicha teabag and Hojiko — protecting its bancha supply by redirecting leaf toward tencha. As Kettl put it, "most major suppliers are carefully protecting their remaining stock."

What 2026 and beyond look like

The shortage is expected to deepen month by month through August 2026, when the spring tencha harvest sets the next inventory pool (One With Tea). After that, supply should ease somewhat as Kagoshima's expanded capacity fills the commercial-grade gap; full stock-outs aren't expected past the second quarter of 2026.

But the price floor has moved. Raw-material and energy costs have folded permanently into the cost structure, and elevated pricing is anticipated through at least 2027. The 2023 prices are not coming back.

If you're buying through all this, the buying guide covers how to spend well when everything is scarce, and the regions explainer covers why Uji took the hardest hit.

Key facts

  • Uji hand-picked tencha harvest fell 40% in 2025 (10,216 → 6,140 kg); machine-picked fell 18% (MAFF data via Uji Matcha Tea).
  • Uji hand-picked tencha auction price rose 116% (¥20,024 → ¥43,330/kg, MAFF via Uji Matcha Tea); the Aug 1, 2025 Chatomeichi final trading day at JA Zen-Noh Kyoto cleared ¥9.629 billion, nearly double 2024's ¥4.6 billion record.
  • Ippodo's March 2026 producer prices ran 2.6x the prior year; retail ceremonial tins now $50–80/30 g, up from $30–40 in 2023 (Ippodo, One With Tea).
  • Supply can't recover fast: tea-farming operations fell from ~53,000 (2000) to ~12,000 (2020) per MAFF census, 4–5 year plant maturity, stone-mill backlog, depleted stockpiles.
  • Elevated pricing expected through at least 2027; prices will not return to 2023 norms (One With Tea).