Japan’s matcha exports doubled to 72.1 billion yen in 2025. What it means for US cafes.

Japan’s green tea exports (matcha is the engine) hit a record 72.1 billion yen in 2025, doubling 2024’s 36.4 billion yen, per Yomiuri Shimbun citing Ministry of Finance trade statistics. Export volume crossed 10,000 tons for the first time in roughly 70 years. The US alone bought 29.3 billion yen — 40% of the total — and domestic green tea beverages are now being marked up to absorb the squeeze.

For US specialty cafes, this is the macro signal: the supply you’ve been sourcing casually is now globally contested, and the price you locked last year is not the price you’ll pay this year.

Quick Answer

Japan’s green tea exports doubled to 72.1 billion yen in 2025, with the US taking 40% of the volume. Matcha drove most of that growth. Cafes should expect tighter allocation, longer lead times, and higher landed costs — and should lock relationships with sourcing partners who can name region, cultivar, and harvest year on every shipment.

Key Takeaways

• Green tea export value doubled year-over-year to 72.1 billion yen, with volume above 10,000 tons for the first time in ~70 years
• The US is the largest single buyer at 29.3 billion yen (40% of total), confirming American demand is the structural driver
• Domestic Japanese beverage brands are raising prices, a downstream signal that wholesale raw-material costs are climbing through 2026

What actually changed in 2025

Two numbers do most of the work. Exports doubled (36.4B yen → 72.1B yen) and volume crossed a threshold not seen since the mid-1950s. That combination, both price and tonnage up, means this isn’t yen weakness alone. There’s genuine new demand, and Japanese producers are shipping every kilogram they can finish.

The US share matters more than the headline number. 40% of a doubled market means American buyers are now the price-setters for matcha-grade tencha and high-spec sencha. When Starbucks reformulates a global matcha latte, when the next ready-to-drink brand hits Whole Foods, those orders pull product out of the same finite pool your wholesaler draws from.

The domestic price hike noted in the Yomiuri piece is the tell. Japanese beverage makers don’t raise prices on their home market for fun. They raise because the leaf going into their cans is costing them measurably more, and they can’t absorb it indefinitely.

Why this hits specialty cafes harder than chains

Big chains have multi-year contracts and volume leverage. A 20-cafe specialty roaster doesn’t. When the global pool tightens, three things happen at the wholesale tier:

1. Lead times stretch. What was a four-week reorder becomes six to eight.
2. Allocation appears. Suppliers start triaging — long relationships and predictable volume go first, spot buyers go last.
3. Spec ambiguity gets weaponized. “Organic Japanese ceremonial grade” can be sourced from anywhere when the market is loose. In a tight market, that vagueness lets wholesalers swap origin, cultivar, or harvest year without telling you.

The third one is the quiet killer. A cafe that’s built its menu language around a specific flavor profile loses the profile and doesn’t know why until a regular notices.

What to actually watch for in the next two quarters

Three concrete signals worth tracking through summer 2026:

• Uji and Shizuoka first-flush auction results (tencha pricing sets the matcha price floor for the rest of the year)
• Your wholesaler’s willingness to name the cultivar on each shipment — if they’re hedging, supply is tightening on their end too
• Lead-time creep, even by a week. It’s the earliest indicator that allocation is starting

If a partner won’t name region + cultivar + harvest year, you’re not buying matcha. You’re buying whatever they have that week.

How Hisa sources against this

We source across Shizuoka, Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Aichi, and Kyoto, multi-prefecture by design, so a bad harvest in one region doesn’t break a customer’s menu. Every SKU ships with region, cultivar, harvest year, and tasting notes specified. Yabukita from Shizuoka, 2026 first flush, stone-milled — that’s the level of specificity we treat as the floor, not the ceiling.

In a 72-billion-yen export year, the cafes that thrive are the ones whose supplier can tell them exactly what’s in the can, every can.