“This is why we can’t have nice things.” That often memed phrase is a good one to explain where we are right now with matcha. In case you didn’t know, we are in the middle of a matcha boom. This matcha mania has, of course, resulted in a matcha shortage. After all, tea is an agricultural product. When demand spikes, you can’t just push a button and make more of it. 

Here to explain what our insatiable thirst means for producers, importers, and matcha obsessed consumers is Zach Mangan, founder of Kettl Tea, a Los Feliz cafe that the Infatuation featured on its list of the best matcha lattes in Los Angeles. Zach has been working in Japanese green tea for nearly two decades and he has a front row seat to the matcha craze.

Evan Kleiman: Before we get into the current matcha debacle, I would love for you to describe what matcha is and how it’s prepared after harvest.

Zach Mangan: Matcha is a type of green tea. It’s primarily produced in Japan. What makes matcha unique is the process of how it’s grown before it’s manufactured. It’s actually shaded from the sun before it’s harvested, then it goes through a very specific processing where it’s steamed and dried. 

I think what most people understand about matcha is that it’s a powdered tea. After the tea is processed, it’s milled into a fine powder, which makes it a little different than other types of green teas, where you might steep the leaves in a teapot. Matcha, you actually whisk it. You use a whisk to turn the tea into a drinkable beverage, which is really a suspension of water in the tea leaves.

Is it considered its own category, not coffee, and yet, not quite tea in the traditional sense? 

Well, technically it is tea. But I’ve said for many years that I feel like people who identify as matcha drinkers consider themselves more of a matcha drinker than a tea drinker. I do think it has this perception of being a third category but in technicality, it actually is tea as it comes from the same plant that other teas come from. 

At Kettl in Los Feliz, owner Zach Mangan says he offers more than 20 different kinds of matcha. Photo by Zach Mangan.

Traditionally, matcha was used for the formal tea ceremony. When did the bulk of the tea, or a lot of the tea, start to be used in other ways?

You’re right. The growth of matcha within how it was consumed domestically in Japan, for many, many, many years, for centuries, was tied to the traditional tea ceremony. But if you look at the trends, around the ’80s to ’90s, you see matcha becoming more mainstream in the sense that people would take it out of its context in the tea room and drink it at home, or perhaps at a gathering or a museum or certain types of events outside of tea.

I think you still see, even today, if you go to Japan, there are different pathways, and one of them still is the tea room or something around traditional tea ceremony. But you have seen a lot of growth for cafes and people consuming matcha in more informal ways as well.

Can you pinpoint a moment or maybe a person who introduced it to the West in a non ceremonial beverage? Is the matcha latte all to blame?

That’s a really good question. What they call the kickoff in Japan of the matcha boom, I guess you would say, actually had more to do with a food product than a drink product. One of the real pivotal moments was when Häagen-Dazs decided to add the matcha flavor to their catalog. They went to Japan and they toured many of the big producers. There was this huge boom in the amount of matcha that was being purchased in Japan but also this signaled it being on the map in the West. That was 1996, the Häagen-Dazs introduction of the matcha ice cream. Then we saw Starbucks releasing matcha drinks in the 2000s so that was the global recognition of okay, this is on the map, so to speak. 

In my personal experience of working in Japanese tea for over a decade, when I started, it was a small group of people that were very committed to it but it didn’t have an audience, really. It’s been drip by drip by drip over the last several years, and then, really in the last two years, it’s just exploded in a way that… Bill Wilderman is the only word I can use for how people have come to understand how popular it’s become. 

Is the crazy boom of the last two years directly linked to social media?

Absolutely. Tiktok, in particular, in the last year. If we look at last summer, there was a huge, huge viral moment on Tiktok where matcha just became a real focus of people’s feeds. That has led to an interesting situation, specifically in Southeast Asia. 

If you look at Vietnam and Thailand, a lot of folks were traveling to Japan, buying up matcha and then reselling it in their home countries. That kicked off what I think would be the shortage. So if we talk about what the start of the shortage was, we’re looking at probably last July and August, and that has continued on. But yes, social media has absolutely fueled the rise of matcha.

Let’s talk about how this global matcha obsession is affecting farmers. How does matcha typically get to the US?

Typically, what happens is a farmer, or groups of farmers, are responsible for growing the raw material, the tea leaves. That’s processed into something called tencha. Tencha is what people are buying and selling in the marketplace. They’re not selling the powder. The powder comes later. That’s the end result of all of the preparation and production. The farmer will grow this tencha and process it, and then typically take it to a market. They’ll take it to the tea market. Actually, right now, as we speak, the market is going on throughout Japan. 

Then, people who are responsible for processing the tea will go and bid on these leaves. They’ll go in, they’ll select what they need for the year, they’ll place a bid, they’ll take it back to their factory, they’ll blend it, and ultimately turn it into the matcha powder that we know. It can then be distributed a few different ways. 

Some of those people have companies that have websites that you can go on, and you can order the tea from Japan. In my case, we work directly with both the farmer at the farmer level and the producer level to secure those teas. We do all our own repackaging and shipping from Japan, and we distribute those ourselves. So it really goes through the farmer, the processor, and then some type of retailer. It’s similar to other agricultural products in that sense.

To turn matcha into a drinkable beverage, you combine matcha powder with water and whisk it. Photo by Zach Mangan.

Given that you have this direct contact with farmers, I would imagine you hear quite a lot from them about what’s going on. In one of the articles that you wrote, you quote a farmer about how he plans to respond to the huge increase in demand.

I think when you think of many of the people who are producing the tea or growing the tea, they’re viewing this as a lifelong pursuit, and there is a real respect for the process and the craft. I think that’s something common to, if people are familiar with Japanese culture, that commitment level is, I think, what we all really love about Japan. 

A lot of people are saying, “Look, this may be here for a while. It may come, it may go. Our focus is really on producing the best quality that we can.” And I respect that. There are opportunities now to say, “Hey, let’s expand. Let’s get bigger.” There’s more customers. How can we take advantage of that? But a lot of the people we work with as a quality-focused company are saying, “We will continue to focus on quality.”

That being said, there are people that are saying, “Hey, this is a unique moment in the history of Japanese tea production. We are going to have to make changes.” That often happens at the level above the farmer, which is the producer. They deal more with the financial issues of are they going to have enough product? What’s the price going to be to their final customer? I think they’re navigating, in real time, a lot of the issues.

I just have to repeat, this is unprecedented. I received an email this morning from someone at the auction saying they’ve never seen this before, the prices and the demand. It’s in a place where they have no context to go on it. It’s sort of what everyone was wishing for — that tea would become popular. I just don’t know that they thought it was going to happen in this way. It’s a very unique moment.

Is this obsession with perfection of craft at odds with this particular tea’s use as a mass market beverage? 

I think that’s a really great point. You have these avenues in which people consume matcha, and truthfully, a lot of what makes it into the Western market, if you really consider the Amazons and Walmarts and the distribution channels that are selling powdered green tea, a lot of what comes in wouldn’t even be considered matcha in the sense of how it’s produced. It’s really a powdered green tea. 

What’s interesting is there’s no governing set of laws that say, “Hey, this is matcha. This is not matcha.” People can market other styles of green tea that, as I mentioned earlier, don’t go through the typical process to create tencha. They’re just sencha or other types of green tea that are grown in full sunlight and then pulverized into a powder and packaged and sold under the name matcha. 

When we’re talking about the farmers that I was speaking about earlier, they’re concerned about tencha, which is this really special type of tea that is turned into higher quality matcha. And that is at odds.

 Even if you think about Japanese tea, it’s much more specific in the sense, if you’re talking about wine, it’s like we’re talking about, for example, burgundy or champagne. It’s a specific group of areas, small areas, focused on quality. I think it’s important for customers to understand that you just can’t hit a button and say, “All right, next year we’re going to double the output.” There’s so much culture and care and terroir that comes together to create what we think of as high-quality matcha. 

That’s kind of what’s happening now: What will matcha become? Can we maintain the understanding that it’s a quality beverage that’s limited in its scale? Or there will be companies that say, “Hey, let’s look outside of Japan to produce powdered tea because there’s more and more customers every day.” So we’re at this interesting tipping point to see what the identity of matcha will be over the course of the next few years.

As matcha grows, it is shaded from the sun before it’s harvested. Photo by Zach Mangan.

Just to drive this point home, can you give us some numbers so that we can understand how much matcha is being sold right now?

I can speak from my personal experience. With our business, close to 80% of our sales are matcha. We market other teas. We talk about other teas. We try and champion other styles of tea, as well. But the customers really want that. We saw that growth really start to explode over the last two years. But specifically, in relation to what we think about as the “matcha shortage,” it was about last August, where a lot of the tea manufacturers in Japan, especially the ones that have customer-facing stores (stores in Japan that they could go to in cities or in department store basements), they saw such significant sales that one company did nine months of sales in one month. 

To give you some context, now is the harvest season. So we’re in April, May. The tea is processed and it can be stored and then basically ground to order. But they have a set amount that they know by, say, the beginning of June, so they know what they have in stock. Typically, every year they forecast, thinking, okay, this, this amount that we either grew or bought at auction will hold us over until the following harvest. All bets were off last year because people were coming in and buying such large volume that those stocks diminished. 

What happened was between August and now, more or less, the stocks were so low that they just didn’t have product to sell. I think another thing that’s important to remember is it’s not just the material itself, the matcha, it’s all of the surrounding industry. It’s the tins that they come in. For a period of time, there weren’t enough tins to keep up, or the bags that they needed to be put into or packaging. Packaging the powder is often done almost exclusively by hand. They were running into these pain points of we have all these orders, and it’s taking us so long to package each one, and in some cases, we don’t have the materials to pack them into. That became almost as much of a problem as the lack of the tea leaves themselves.

How are you preparing for the year ahead? Do you offer allocations to your customers in advance? Do you limit people’s purchases? Or is it all first come, first served?

Generally speaking, we try and give the opportunity for anybody that’s willing to come and buy the matcha to get it. We haven’t capped amounts yet. I know some people are saying you can buy one or two or three tins. We haven’t gotten there yet. We’ve been lucky. We have a very unique supply chain and we work with, at this point, I think we have over 20 different varieties of matcha. So while it’s true that the majority of tea right now is sold out, we are able to keep certain things in stock. Or when one thing comes in, another goes out of stock. 

We’re trying to manage it but it’s a serious challenge. It’s something that, as a business owner, I don’t feel great about people coming to the store, especially in LA, driving all the way to the shop and being like, “Oh, you don’t have the thing that I was coming for.” But again, that comes down to communicating to the customer to say, “Hey, look, here’s an opportunity to try something else. If you like that, I think you might like this.” And then also explaining to them that we’re in the midst of a place we’ve never been before with the shortage.

What beverage do you wish people would come in order at Kettl that is not a match latte?

It’s funny, if you go on our Instagram and look at the post from yesterday that I posted, you’ll see, while I love matcha and it’s something that I do drink daily, sencha is a tea that I would love for more people to experience. One of the reasons why is if you think about matcha, it is produced in maybe six prefectures in Japan. If you look at sencha, it’s made in every prefecture that produces tea in Japan, close to 20. You really do get a depth and breadth of terroir that’s quite expansive. It’s a tea that I’m literally drinking right now. I think for me, it’s something that I’m passionate about and I would love to share that more with customers. So I hope the era of sencha is upon us. We’ll see.