Matcha Searches Tripled in Two Years. Japan Cannot Grow It Fast Enough.

Last week I wrote about padel, where demand has gone up twentyfold and Britain has responded by building courts as fast as it can. Matcha is the same story with one important difference: you cannot solve it by building anything.

UK searches for matcha averaged 40,500 a month in the year to June 2021. Four years later they averaged 135,000. What I find more interesting than the size of that jump is its shape. Matcha did not build steadily. It sat flat, and slightly declined, for three years, and then roughly tripled in two.

Flat, flat, flat, then vertical. That is the hardest possible pattern for anyone supplying a product, because nobody plants for a boom they cannot see coming.

It is not a tea trend

My first assumption was that matcha was riding a broader wellness wave and that the whole green tea category would be moving with it. That turned out to be wrong, and the way it is wrong is the most useful thing in this piece.

Green tea has gone backwards. It was on 33,100 searches a month in 2021 and it is on 22,200 now, a third lower. Over the same period matcha went from roughly level with it to six times its size.

So matcha is not the fast-growing end of the tea category. It is taking share from something else entirely, and the next chart shows what.

Nobody is making it at home

"Matcha powder" not quite doubled. That is a perfectly respectable grocery trend and it is roughly what I expected to find across the board.

"Matcha near me" went from 140 searches a month to 22,200. Even allowing for the tiny starting base, which you should, that is a different kind of number. People are not buying tins and whisking at home. They are walking into a café and ordering one, which puts matcha in competition with the flat white rather than with the teabag aisle.

That reframes who should care about this. If you are a coffee shop, an independent café, a food hall or a franchise operator, matcha is now a footfall term in your area with 22,200 people a month behind it. If you are a supermarket, it is a much slower-moving story.

The bit that cannot be fixed quickly

Here is where matcha stops resembling padel. When British padel demand exploded, operators built courts. It took capital and planning permission, but the supply side could respond within a year or two.

Matcha comes from tencha, a shade-grown leaf that is stone-ground into powder. Japan produces almost all of it. Tencha is harvested once a year, a newly planted tea field takes around five years to reach full production, and the farming workforce is ageing. Japan has responded about as well as it could: tencha output has gone from roughly 1,960 tonnes in 2014 to 6,278 tonnes in 2025, more than tripling. It is still not enough.

Japan exported 13,125 tonnes of green tea in the year to March 2026, up 42%. The value of those exports rose 2.2-fold to ¥84.7bn. Volume up 42%, value up 120%: the difference between those two numbers is price, and it works out at roughly 55% more per kilo in a single year.

That is what a genuine supply constraint looks like in a dataset. Not empty shelves, just a steadily rising price that every business in the chain has to absorb or pass on. Ceremonial-grade matcha has been the sharp end of it, with reports of tins that were £15 or so now selling for several times that.

What that means commercially

The keyword picture is unusual. "Matcha powder" does 33,100 searches a month at a difficulty score of 17. "Matcha near me" does 22,200 at 16. Terms with that much volume are normally fought over, and these are not, because demand arrived faster than anyone got round to building pages for it.

I would treat that as a closing window rather than a standing opportunity. Difficulty scores in the teens on five-figure search volumes do not survive contact with a competent competitor for long.

Three things I would actually do with this:

If you sell matcha drinks, win your local search now. "Matcha near me" is a footfall term with no meaningful competition and it is growing every month. A Google Business Profile that actually lists matcha, and a page that says where yours comes from, is a couple of hours of work against a term most of your competitors have not noticed.

If you sell matcha as a product, lead with provenance. When a raw material triples in price, the market fills up with cheaper substitutes, and buyers get suspicious. "Ceremonial grade matcha" already does 5,400 searches a month at £1.21 a click, and that is people trying to work out what they are actually buying. Grade, origin and harvest are commercial information now, not packaging detail.

If you supply the trade, the terms are almost free. "Matcha wholesale" is only 210 searches a month, but it is £1.93 a click at a difficulty score of 9, and the people searching it are cafés placing recurring orders. That is about as cheap as commercial intent gets.

The wider point

Padel and matcha look like the same story and are not quite. Both had demand arrive faster than supply. But padel's constraint is capital and planning, which Britain can solve in a couple of years if it wants to. Matcha's constraint is agricultural, in another country, on a five-year lag, and no amount of demand shortens that.

Worth knowing which kind you are in. If supply can catch up, your advantage is temporary and you should be racing. If it cannot, then price rises are structural, and the businesses that win are the ones that get honest about provenance early rather than quietly cutting quality and hoping nobody notices.

We will keep pulling these apart sector by sector. If you want to know what the search data says about yours, come and ask us.

Sources

• UK search volume, cost per click and keyword difficulty: Semrush UK database, pulled 17 August 2026. Figures are 12-month averages, so this summer is not included.
• Japanese green tea export volume and value, financial year 2025: Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, via reported figures. FY2024 comparatives and prices per kilo are derived from the reported changes.
• Tencha production and the structure of the shortage: MAFF production statistics and industry reporting, 2025 to 2026.