Is Ito En Causing the Green Tea Shortage? The Real Story

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Introduction

There's a rumor going around, and if you buy tea for a living, you've probably already heard it.

It goes like this: the green tea shortage isn't real. Ito En (伊藤園) signed Shohei Ohtani(大谷翔平), demand exploded, and now the biggest tea company in Japan is buying up every leaf in the country to lock in supply.

That's why your matcha costs twice as much as it did two years ago. That's why your supplier keeps apologizing.

I've heard versions of this from café owners, from shop buyers, even from other people in the trade who should know better.

If you run a café or a tea shop and your customers are asking why a matcha latte costs more now, I have a stronger answer than "the market went up."

So I went and pulled the actual numbers. Ito En's financial reports. Japan's Ministry of Agriculture data on farms and exports. Auction results from Shizuoka (静岡) and Kagoshima (鹿児島).

The short version: the rumor is backward. Almost perfectly backward.

The long version is worth your time because hiding inside the real story is something useful — the shortage and the Ohtani boom aren't the same event, and understanding the difference tells you how to buy tea for the next five years.

Why Does the Rumor Feel So True?

Before I take this rumor apart, I want to be fair to it.

It didn't come from nowhere. The timeline is genuinely suspicious if you don't look closely.

If you've been to Japan since 2023 or even earlier, you know Ohtani isn't just famous there.

He's ambient. He's on the billboards in Shibuya, the ad panels inside train cars, the TV breaks between any shows, the magazine covers at the convenience store register.

Even for cosmetic brands, he was the face of toners and moisturizers, mainly for women.

He does commercial ads in every possible field in Japan. Still today, you will see him on every corner in Tokyo.

On April 30, 2024, Ito En announced a global ambassador contract with Ohtani for O~i Ocha（お〜いお茶）, its flagship unsweetened green tea. This wasn't a normal endorsement. The launch ad ran as a full-page ad in some 60 newspapers in Japan and the US.

And here's a detail I like: the ad didn't show Ohtani at all. Just a single bottle placed alone on a stadium bench, logo turned away from the camera.

Ito En said they wanted to quietly watch over him from the stands rather than sell anything. From what I've read, it was their biggest contract ever.

Then, in the autumn of 2024, the Global Japanese Tea Association described the market situation as the first matcha shortage in its history.

Six months apart. You can see why people drew a line between the two. And the circumstantial evidence keeps piling up from there.

Walk into a Costco in the US, and the Kirkland Signature Matcha Blend Green Tea (抹茶入り緑茶), 100 tea bags of sencha blended with matcha, "100% Japanese Tea Leaves" stamped on the box, has the ITO EN logo printed right on the front.

The house brand of America's warehouse club, co-signed by Japan's tea giant.

Meanwhile, back in Japan, Ito En really does run a program that contracts directly with tea farms and buys 100% of their crop. If you squint, that looks like a supply grab.

Prices did the rest of the storytelling.

Japan's green tea export value roughly doubled in a single year. First-flush prices in 2025 opened about 30% higher in Shizuoka and about 40% higher in Kagoshima.

By autumn, something happened that nobody in the trade had ever seen: autumn bancha, historically the cheapest leaf of the year, the stuff that goes into bottles, traded above shincha at the Shizuoka market.

Big star. Big company. Big price spike. The rumor writes itself.

But here's the thing about Ito En that the rumor never checks. What kind of company are they actually?

About 85% of their business is still in Japan (as of the year ended April 2026), bottled tea sold in supermarkets and vending machines in a country where tea drinking hasn't grown in a decade.

The overseas business, making all the headlines, Ohtani ads included, is real and growing fast. And it's still a fraction of the whole.

Once you see those proportions, the "buying up all the tea" story starts to wobble.

Let's look at the numbers properly.

What Actually Happened to Prices

Let me show you real numbers on the "price spike" before we look for a culprit, because the scale of this is bigger than most people outside the trade realize.

Ten years ago, Japan's green tea exports were a niche business. Since then, the export value has grown roughly sevenfold, with most of that growth occurring in the last three years.

In calendar 2025, export volume jumped 43% in a single year while the value nearly doubled — from ¥36.4 billion to ¥72.1 billion. Japanese newspapers called it the strongest export performance in over seventy years.

Volume up 43%, value up 98%. That gap between the two numbers is the price increase, and it landed everywhere at once.

At the 2025 first-flush auctions, prices opened roughly 30% above the prior year in Shizuoka and roughly 40% above in Kagoshima. 

Tencha (碾茶), the shaded leaf that becomes matcha, was the epicenter. Trading at about 2.7 times the price of regular sencha even before the panic buying started.

Afterward came the moment that made old-timers in the trade rub their eyes.

In autumn 2025, autumn bancha traded above shincha at the Shizuoka market.

If you're not from the leaf side of the business, let me translate: the cheapest, lowest-grade harvest of the year — the leaf destined for plastic bottles — briefly cost more than the celebrated first tea of spring.

From what I've read, nothing like it appears anywhere in the market's records.

It's the kind of inversion you only see when a supply chain is genuinely out of leaf, not when one company is sitting on a warehouse full of it.

One more number completes the picture.

While all this was happening, Japan imported 82% more green tea from China and elsewhere in a single year—because domestic bottlers were being outbid for their own country's cheap leaf.

So the shortage is real. The question is who caused it.

Did Ito En Buy Up All the Tea?

Here's a simple test.

If Ito En had spent the last few years cornering Japan's tea supply ahead of a global boom, their financial results should look spectacular right now.

Buy low, watch the market explode, sell high. That's how hoarding pays.

So I opened their investor reports. Ten years of them.

The picture that emerges is the opposite of a company riding a corner.

It splits cleanly in two: domestic sales flat for a decade while rising costs grind down the margin — and overseas growing fast, year after year, on the health trend.

A quick note on dates before the numbers: Ito En's fiscal year runs May through April, so when I say "the year ended April 2026," that means May 2025 through April 2026.

Start with Japan, which is still around 85% of their business. Ito En's domestic revenue has barely moved in ten years — up 1.9% in the year ended April 2026, and that counts as a good year — in a bottled-tea market they already lead with 36% of national sales (calendar 2025).

There's simply nowhere left to grow at home.

Japanese people are not drinking more green tea dramatically; they're drinking it from bottles instead of teapots, and that switch happened years ago.

Meanwhile, the cost side caught fire.

In the year ended April 2025, the parent company's operating profit fell about 21%, with tea leaf costs cited as the biggest single drag.

The year ended April 2026 was worse: operating profit fell another 16.6%, and this time Ito En put a number on the pain — rising raw material and packaging costs took roughly ¥9.7 billion off group operating profit in that single year.

The bottom line was uglier still.

The parent company's net profit for the year ended April 2026 came in around ¥1.5 billion — down 87% after a one-time write-down of roughly ¥16 billion tied to restructuring its vending machine business.

Read that again.

In the middle of the greatest green tea boom in modern history, Japan's biggest tea company earned almost nothing. And they're budgeting for more of the same.

Their plan for the year ending April 2027 assumes another ¥11.6 billion hit from green tea raw material and packaging costs, with group operating profit planned to fall about 8%.

Their own investor slide says it plainly: profitability improves, but the surge in green tea raw materials hits hard.

ITO EN FY2026/4 Financial Results (ITO EN FY2026/4 Financial Results Presentation Materials)

That is not what market-cornering looks like. That's what being squeezed by the same leaf inflation as everyone else looks like — except at a scale of hundreds of millions of bottles.

Now the other half of the sentence. Overseas, the story flips completely.

In the year ended April 2026, Ito En's overseas sales grew 27% to about ¥74 billion, and overseas operating profit grew 41% — the US business alone grew its operating profit by 70%.

O~i Ocha's overseas drink volume grew 12% that year; overseas tea bag volume grew 17%. The brand now sells in 52 countries and regions, with a target of 60 by the year ending April 2029.

Just hold those two pictures side by side, and the rumor falls apart on scale alone.

Everything Ito En sells outside Japan added up to about ¥74 billion in the year ended April 2026. The group as a whole did about ¥498 billion. The booming overseas business everyone points to is still only about 15% of the company. The other 85% is a flat home market in which every yen of leaf inflation comes straight out of their margin.

The Ohtani deal isn't about locking up Japan's tea supply.

It's a long-term investment based on the idea that the overseas 15% of Ito En's business could eventually become a much bigger second pillar, while the domestic 85% will probably remain relatively stable.

It doesn't make much business sense for a company like that to squeeze Japan's tea supply just to support an export market that makes up about a seventh of its business, especially if higher tea prices end up hurting the rest.

The rumor also points to Ito En's farming program — and here I owe you the full picture, because one of the farmers we work with brought it up, and they're right that there's more to it than contracts.

Ito En's tea-sourcing program has two arms. The first is contract cultivation: the company guarantees to buy 100% of a contracted farmer's harvest.

The second is what they call the new production-area business (新産地事業), running since 2001 — Ito En takes over abandoned and idle farmland and consolidates it into large, mechanized, company-run tea estates.

This operates across four Kyushu prefectures: Miyazaki, Oita, Nagasaki, and yes, Kagoshima.

The developed area reached about 2,500 hectares (6,200 acres) in 2023, with a stated target of 2,800 hectares (about 6,900 acres) by 2030. And in 2025, Ito En announced a ¥30 billion, five-year acquisition budget that names agriculture as a priority area.

So if someone in Kyushu tells you Ito En is buying farms — they're not wrong.

But look at what those farms are. They're built on land that had already fallen out of production. Reclaiming abandoned fields adds acreage to a national tea supply that has been shrinking for decades.

That's the opposite of hoarding scarce leaf. And the estates exist mainly to feed the bottling machine: high-volume, machine-cut leaf for O~i Ocha, not the first-flush tencha at the shortage's epicenter.

I'll be honest about one thing, though.

Ito En is moving into matcha too. In the year ended April 2026, their matcha product sales grew 41%, they doubled the matcha production lines at their Shizuoka plant, and they're signing more contract farmers to secure tencha. So some drift toward the premium end is real.

But notice the mechanism: their answer to scarce tencha is to grow and contract more of it. A company trying to corner a market doesn't spend twenty years planting new fields for everyone to see. The wider context matters too.

Japan has lost over half of its tea-farming households in the past 15 years, and a record number of producers exited the business in 2025.

For many farmers, having a guaranteed buyer is what keeps them in business. Without those contracts and those reclaimed fields, there would likely be even less tea produced in the first place.

If the giant is bleeding too, then something else drove prices through the roof.

Three things, actually. But first, we need to talk about the man on the billboard — because what Ohtani actually sells turns out to be the key that unlocks the whole puzzle.

The Ohtani Effect — What He's Actually Selling

Time to deal with the man on the billboard.

First, the part the rumor gets right.

Ohtani's connection to green tea is completely real. 

This isn't a celebrity holding a product he's never touched. He's been drinking O~i Ocha since his pro days with the Nippon-Ham Fighters（日本ハムファイターズ）, and when he moved to MLB in 2018, he famously kept the habit going by hauling Ito En tea across the Pacific — stocking up from Japan because you couldn't reliably find it in an American clubhouse.

By the time Ito En made him a global ambassador in 2024, he'd already been a fan and a daily drinker for more than a decade.

They didn't recruit a spokesman; they signed a customer.

And the habit fits the man. From what I've read over the years, his self-management borders on monastic: meals planned around protein targets and split into six or seven small feedings a day, a schedule built backward from ten-plus hours of sleep, road trips packed with his own pillow and, yes, cases of green tea. He can drink alcohol — by his own account, it tastes fine — he just mostly doesn't, because it costs him sleep.

In a sport that spent a century running on beer, the best player alive runs on unsweetened tea.

Hold that thought, because it matters at the end of this article.

Now, the part the rumor gets wrong, and it's the key to the whole puzzle: what Ohtani sells and what's in shortage are two different teas.

The bottle in his hand is O~i Ocha — a brewed tea drink. The leaf that goes into bottles is the workhorse harvest: second flush, third flush, autumn bancha, the affordable later pickings that make up the volume of Japan's crop.

Remember that Kirkland box from earlier? Same story. Sencha blended with matcha, everyday tea bags by the hundred.

That's the Ito En machine: enormous volume, modest grades.

The shortage lives in a different place entirely.

Its epicenter is tencha — first-flush, shade-grown, hand-managed leaf from a small fraction of Japan's fields, milled into the matcha that cafés from Los Angeles to London are whisking into lattes.

Tencha is about 7% of Japan's tea production. The panic, the auction records, the rationing signs in Kyoto shops — that's a tencha story.

Even if Ohtani doubled the world's tea-holics for bottled green tea overnight, it wouldn't directly affect the ceremonial-grade supply.

The fields, farms, factories, and even the buyers are different in the end.

One fair pushback before we move on is that there is matcha in Ito En's green tea bottle.

O~i Ocha blends some matcha in, and the Kirkland box says 抹茶入り (with matcha) right on the front of the box. But the proportions and the leaf are different worlds. A bottle carries a pinch per serving; by contrast, a café latte uses a spoonful of matcha. And the shortage is happening in first-flush ceremonial tencha.

Even though the two markets touch, they don't compete for it. A different slice of the crop from what large-scale blending draws on.

For perspective: even a formal tea ceremony bowl of usucha (薄茶) uses about 1.5–2 g (60–70 ml / 2–2.4 fl oz of water) — a 16 oz (473 ml) café matcha latte uses 4–6 g, two to three bowls' worth. The latte, not the tea ceremony, is the most matcha-hungry serving ever popularized.

They stopped being fully separate in 2025, though.

Tencha money ran so hot that sencha farmers converted fields and factories to chase it, which shrank the supply of everything else.

That's how autumn bancha ended up out-pricing shincha, and how every grade of tencha got repriced at once.

The pinch in every bottle suddenly cost gold-rush money too.

Which is exactly why Ito En's raw-material costs are squeezing their margins: they're paying the new prices, not setting them.

The bottled-tea side of the market is a victim of the gold rush, not its cause.

Which means the rumor has it exactly inverted.

Ohtani isn't the reason your matcha costs more. But he might be the reason the demand under your entire tea menu keeps growing — and that part of the story, the part with the farmers in it, is where we go next.

The Real Cause #1: The Farmers

Everything you're paying extra for right now traces back to a number nobody puts on a billboard.

Japan had about 45,000 tea-farming households in 2008. By 2023, it had fewer than 20,000. That's more than half the country's tea farmers gone in fifteen years — not to scandal or disaster, just to time.

Three out of four of the farmers still working are past 60. The industry's own surveys show about four in ten tea fields planted more than 30 years ago, old enough that the bushes themselves yield less leaf of lower quality every season.

The land tells the same story.

Tea acreage shrank by a quarter over the same period. Processing factories fell by about 40%. And in 2025 — the very year the world discovered it couldn't get enough matcha — a record number of Japanese tea producers closed or suspended operations.

Sit with that overlap for a second.

Demand hit an all-time high in the exact year supply capacity hit a modern low.

You don't need a corporate villain to explain a price explosion after that. The explosion was scheduled decades ago, when a generation of farmers' children chose city jobs, and it simply waited for a spike in demand to reveal itself.

The industry isn't simply disappearing.

The farms that remain are larger and far more efficient than they used to be.

Average farm size has roughly doubled across Japan's main tea-growing regions, and some corporate producers now cultivate fields ten times the size of a traditional family operation.

Riding harvesters are common, drones monitor fields, and even 5G-connected robotic machinery is beginning to appear. With only a fraction of the workforce it once had, Japan still produces about three-quarters of its former tea output. Those gains have slowed the decline, but they haven't been enough to stop it.

But "not enough" is the whole story of this shortage.

New tea fields take four to five years to produce a proper harvest. You cannot surge tea the way you surge a factory product.

When demand jumped 43% in a year, the only possible responses were higher prices today and more planting for 2030. Both are happening. And nowhere are both happening faster than in the prefecture that just rewrote the map of Japanese tea — which is the following part of the story, and it happens to be a story our team knows from the inside.

The Real Cause #2: Japan and the World Want Opposite Teas

The farmer's story explains why supply shrank, though it also reveals a strange truth beneath the surface.

What is interesting about this case is that the world wants what Japan didn't demand in quantities for decades.

Matcha was not a frequent drink in everyday life in Japan at first, though the rest of the world wants to have it every day in larger quantities, like in smoothies and matcha lattes (see the usage comparison in the picture above). And this is happening on the same shrinking fields.

Start at home.

Japanese households buy about 40% less leaf tea than they did fifteen years ago. Not because Japan stopped drinking green tea — the bottles took over.

Household spending on tea drinks has climbed the whole time, and bottled green tea consumption per person is up by roughly a fifth. The teapot lost to the plastic bottle — grabbed cold from a supermarket or convenience store shelf, not brewed at home.

My own guess — and this is opinion, not something I can back with survey data — is that the summers are helping the bottles win.

Japan's heat has turned brutal, and pouring hot water in a kyusu (急須, a Japanese teapot) is a hard sell in August. The old wisdom says to drink hot tea even in hot weather to cool the body. I suspect fewer people are following it every year.

And the age split is stark. Households headed by someone over 70 spend more than ten times as much on leaf tea as households headed by someone under 30.

From what I've seen in the consumption surveys, the acquired habit of brewing leaves in a kyusu is aging out with the generation that learned it. Young Japan drinks its green tea cold, from a plastic cup, on the way somewhere.

Now notice what that did to farming.

Bottles want cheap leaf — late-flush harvests, big machine-cut volume, price above all. For twenty years, Japan's own demand pushed its tea industry downmarket.

First-flush tea, the pride of the craft, fell from over 40% of production to under 40% because fewer and fewer buyers at home would pay for it. Then the world showed up wanting exactly the opposite.

Look at what actually leaves Japan today.

Powdered tea — matcha above all is nearly 60% of export volume and about three-quarters of export value, at unit prices more than double leaf tea's.

The US, the biggest buyer at roughly a third of export volume, takes almost 80% of its Japanese tea in powder form.

And the number that still stops me: organic tea accounts for about 65% of what ships to the US and roughly 75% of what ships to the EU and the UK. If you're wondering, Europe's strict pesticide rules and the West's wellness culture did that together.

Overseas demand wants everything — premium, shaded, first-harvest, organic, powdered — exactly what domestic demand spent two decades teaching farmers not to grow.

So picture a tea farmer in 2023: on one side, a long-standing home market that's flat and wants the least expensive option possible. On the other hand, the export market is looking for the most demanding crops a tea field can produce, and it pays multiples for them. Which field do you replant for?

That's not a trick question, and thousands of farmers answered it the same way at once.

The stampede toward tencha and organic conversion is completely rational — it's the first time in a generation the market has paid Japanese farmers to move up. But a stampede through a supply chain this small breaks things. Sencha fields become tencha fields. Bottle-grade leaf gets scarce. Prices invert. Importers backfill with Chinese leaf.

The shortage, in other words, isn't just "demand went up." It's Japan's entire tea industry executing a U-turn — from cheap-and-domestic to premium-and-global — inside a machine built with no spare capacity and no young hands.

And one prefecture made that U-turn faster and harder than anywhere else. So fast that in 2024 it did something no region had done in 65 years of record-keeping.

The Real Cause #3: The Tencha Gold Rush

For generations, Shizuoka was Japan's leading tea prefecture.That changed with the 2024 crop.

Figures released by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) in February 2025 showed Kagoshima producing more crude tea than Shizuoka — the first time Shizuoka had lost the top spot since prefecture-level records began in 1959.

Kagoshima held onto that position in 2025 and also overtook Shizuoka in first-flush tea production.

Sixty-five years of Shizuoka at the top, over in two seasons.

If you want to understand the shortage — and where the tea you'll be buying for the next decade comes from — you need to understand how that happened.

It's a story our team knows from both sides, since we work with farms in both prefectures. Different farms, same team, front-row seats.

Here's the heart of it: Kagoshima grows more tea on less land. About 8,000 hectares against Shizuoka's 11,600 — and roughly 30,000 tons against 24,000.

The gap comes down to geography meeting history.

Shizuoka's tea culture is centuries old, planted on the steep hillsides that made its tea famous and its harvests brutal; many of its finest fields are simply too steep for riding machinery, so aging farmers still work them largely by hand.

Kagoshima's tea industry is young — mostly postwar plantings on flat volcanic land — and it has mechanized almost completely: about 98% of its harvest is handled by riding machines, yields per field are about 40% above the national main-region average, and labor per field is roughly half.

For decades, that made Kagoshima the volume player — reliable, efficient, unglamorous, feeding the bottling plants. Then the export boom repriced everything, and every structural trait that made Kagoshima "the cheap one" suddenly made it the future.

Flat fields take shading rigs easily, so converting to tencha is simple. A diverse cultivar mix — Kagoshima planted its fields with early and late varieties while Shizuoka stayed overwhelmingly loyal to yabukita (やぶきた) — stretches the harvest from Japan's earliest shincha in late March deep into autumn, keeping expensive tencha factories running for months instead of weeks.

And Kagoshima holds about half of Japan's organic tea acreage, which slots exactly into what American and European buyers demand.

Kagoshima leads the country in the increased demand for tencha.

In 2024, according to the local tea industry, five new tencha processing factories were opened. The growers continued converting sencha fields across the mid- and late-harvest districts to tencha for matcha.

Kagoshima is expanding.

The investment didn't stop there. In 2025, a tea producer in Kagoshima City announced an expansion of its tencha processing facilities after a major beverage customer asked for more product.

Soon after, the JA group unveiled plans for the prefecture's largest matcha grinding plant, expected to open in 2028. Its chairman said the project was needed because tencha production was growing faster than processing capacity.

The tencha output has roughly tripled nationally over the past decade. It reached a record while nearly every other tea type has shrunk.

That's the U-turn from the last section made physical: the fields, factories, and billion-yen investments are all pivoting toward the one crop the world can't get enough of.

So every gold rush story has a downside. All of this conversion is future supply.

A field switched to shading this spring won't ease your matcha invoice this year. The brand-new tea fields need four to five years before a real harvest.

Meanwhile, every field that converts tightens the sencha side today.

This is exactly the leak we trace in the Ohtani section. The gold rush is the long-term answer to the shortage and its short-term amplifier, both at once.

Shizuoka still champions green tea.

The deep steamed sencha, the first harvest shincha, cannot be replicated anywhere else. It's not about a winner or a loser; it is about the emergence of an industrialized tea farm to meet global demand.

Knowing which prefecture's strengths match which slot on your menu will matter more than ever for a buyer.

What This Means for Your Menu and Your Margins

Everything above is background. This section is the part you can use on Monday morning.

Treat the new prices as a floor, not a spike.

The most important thing I can tell you as you read this is that once tencha prices go up, they historically don't go back down.

This isn't a bad harvest that a good harvest will fix — it's a repricing of a shrinking supply against a larger world of buyers. Even the optimistic voices in the industry talk about prices stabilizing at the new level rather than returning to the old one.

If your menu math only works at 2023 ingredient costs, fix the menu, not your hopes.

By the way, the Japanese trade is now buying early and is committed.

The ministry surveyed tea dealers heading into the 2025 season, and the numbers indicate a market that is no longer casual.

It reports that around 90% of dealers had inventories lower than in 2024, and nearly 80% planned to increase their purchases of second- and later-harvest leaf for the 2025 crop — the everyday grades everyone assumed would always be there.

Last-minute ordering of matcha stock before it runs out is no longer your routine.

Overseas buyers now reserve harvests months in advance. The buyers who get first pick of good lots are the ones their suppliers know by name and have standing commitments with.

Loyalty has become a sourcing strategy, not a sentiment.

Guard your grade honesty — it's about to be a competitive weapon.

Here's an uncomfortable trend: as ceremonial-grade tencha gets scarce, more powder in the Western market is drifting upward in labeling.

Honesty scales. Selling culinary as ceremonial, or blending as single origin, is a reputation risk now.

More and more customers are becoming aware of and educated about green tea.

The move is simple: just be honest.

Know exactly what grade you're buying. Use ceremonial where it shows (straight usucha, koicha), use honest culinary where it belongs (lattes, baking), and say so.

A café that's straightforward about grades will outlast the one next door within a year.

Remember the Kirkland box — even Ito En sells the world an honest blend with the contents printed on the front.

Let the rest of the leaf carry more of your menu.

The shortage has an epicenter, and most of the Japanese tea sits outside it.

Sencha, genmaicha, and especially hojicha — roasted from later-flush leaf, naturally lower in caffeine, gorgeous in a latte — are less exposed to the tencha squeeze and give you premium Japanese offerings without matcha's supply anxiety.

The cafés handling this best aren't rationing matcha; they're expanding the Japanese tea section around it and letting customers discover there's a whole country's worth of flavor beyond the green latte.

And here's the tailwind hiding under the price pain.

One last look at the man on the billboard.

For more than a decade, Shohei Ohtani has shown a global audience that the drink of choice isn't an energy drink or a beer after the game — it's unsweetened green tea.

He's also arrived at the right moment.

In Japan, unsweetened beverages have grown from a niche category in 1980 to more than half of the soft drink market today.

The same shift is taking hold in Europe and North America, where younger consumers are steadily drinking less sugar and less alcohol.

That's good news for tea shops.

Matcha is more expensive than it used to be, but so are coffee, cocoa, and plenty of other agricultural products.

The difference is that demand for matcha is still growing.

More people are discovering it, more people are asking for it, and one of the world's biggest sports stars has spent years making it look like a normal part of everyday life.

Rising demand doesn't erase higher costs, but it makes those costs much easier to absorb.

The rumor asked whether one company and one athlete broke the tea market.

The better question for a buyer is the one this whole story has been answering: the market has permanently changed shape — is your buying keeping up with it?

Conclusion

So — did Ito En and Ohtani cause the green tea shortage?

They caused a demand wave. They did not cause the shortage, and the numbers make the distinction plain.

The company accused of buying up all the tea is a domestic bottler squeezed by the same leaf inflation as everyone else, with about 85% of its business in a flat home market.

The athlete accused of spreading the problem sells everyday brewed tea, not the first-flush tencha at the shortage's core — and his real effect was to make unsweetened green tea aspirational for a generation raised on sugar and beer.

The shortage was quietly built over decades: half of Japan's tea farmers are retiring, a home market that pushed farming downmarket even as the world wanted the opposite.

And a tencha gold rush that leads to repricing every leaf in the country, even as its new fields wait four or five years to mature.

If anything, the rumor gets the moral exactly backward.

The story of this shortage isn't a giant hoarding of tea. It's a shrinking group of farmers being paid properly, for the first time in a generation, to grow the best tea they know how — and the whole world lining up for it at once.

This is not a crisis, but a market change.

Recognizing this change will benefit buyers — by building relationships with people close to the farms, committing early, knowing your grades, and diversifying your menu.

That last part is what we do.

Our team works directly with growers in both prefectures in this story — Shizuoka and Kagoshima, different farms, same team — and we help cafés, tea shops, and restaurants source honestly graded Japanese tea at wholesale.

If you're planning your tea program for the year ahead, get in touch with Gwen via our wholesale page and let her know what you're pouring. She'll tell you what the harvest looks like from where we sit.

Quick Reference

The claim	The reality
"Ito En is buying up all the tea"	About 85% of Ito En's business (year ended April 2026) is flat domestic Japan; group profits took a ¥9.7 billion raw-material hit that year, with ¥11.6 billion more planned for the year ending April 2027
"Ohtani's deal caused the shortage"	He sells everyday brewed tea; the shortage's epicenter is first-flush tencha — different leaf, different market
"The shortage came out of nowhere"	Tea farm households down ~57% in 15 years; 3 in 4 remaining farmers are over 60
"Prices will go back to normal"	The trade treats new price levels as a floor; new fields take 4–5 years to produce
"It's a matcha-only problem"	The squeeze leaked into all grades — autumn bancha out-priced shincha in 2025, a first in the trade's history
"Demand is a fad"	Exports grew ~7x in a decade; unsweetened is now over half of Japan's beverage market, and the same shift is underway in the West