08/26/2026
DE JA VU: THE WORLD MACCHA SHORTAGE CONTINUES IN 2026
As some of you have noticed, we have had to embrace shrinkflation and transitioned from 40g to 30g bags. First of all, we want to express a heartfelt apology that we were not able to give our customers more warning. We sold through our 2025 inventory with absolutely no cushion as we release our 2026 maccha essentially as soon as we received it. We have had to increase prices much faster than planned as a result due to the second successive year of unprecedented demand outsripping supply and rocketing prices up to a place that we honestly never saw coming when we look back to 2024.
JagaSilk has survived many a crisis, including the 2008 Financial Crisis and the pandemic, but we have never seen anything effect the maccha industry like the past two years. Prices went up 30% in Kyoto last year and 20% in Fukuoka on average and we hoped against hope that prices would stabilize this year. But it was not to be. The average price at the JA co-op in Kyoto is easily 70% higher than last year. We are told that the reason is three-fold: the war in Iran (shot up fertilizer, equipment and packaging costs for the farmers), unusually dry growing conditions suppressing yield, and the ongoing crisis of demand far outstripping supply.
Climate change has been wreaking havoc on harvest stability, making year on year predictions harder and harder for farmers on the ground to predict. Severe heat waves have essentially interrupted the cold night temperatures and warm daylight required to develop the primary metabolites that deliver the coveted sugars, proteins and starches that make Japanese maccha so incredible, reducing yields easily by 30% or more.
On top of that is the supply shortage that we went into great detail last year, essentially exacerbated by social media. We thought that perhaps this year there would be a gentle slow down but that was not to be. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Total drinks have gone up for everyone and the world is catching on with countries serving maccha that were not even aware that it existed for the most part even three years ago. US tariffs have also had an effect, steering importers away from cheap Chinese maccha and toward cheap Japanese maccha, having a domino effect up the quality chain. The milling process taking an average of one hour for every 40g is a definite bottleneck that is a true challenge to scale up if you are a producer married to this process (for what it’s worth, JagaSilk has proven for ourselves that the water chilled Japanese “space age” mills we use are more than up to the task, producing a “better” product in one fifteenth the time, but we are and outlier). The land required to scale up is a definite issue as well, and many farmers have transitioned fields intended for sencha and hojicha production to tencha fields (tencha being the substrate tea leaves that are micro-milled to make maccha) which has in turn drastically increased sencha and hojicha and non maccha tea prices.
We have always prided ourselves on paying more to the farmers than if they just simply sell to the co-op, so we find ourselves in a very challenging position. What we have been able to achieve, like last year and the 20 years before it, is supply stability. To do this, we have to make purchasing decisions in April to carry us through to the following year's August. This means we have to use data to project need, but this is all thrown askew when cost is this volatile. We are blending to lower cost, reducing freight expenses, cutting everything we can cut, but here we are.
We even looked at South Korean, Chinese and Japanese second harvest or lower quality stuff, but it's just not good. None of them can manage good flavour, colour, aromatics all in one.
That being said, we are happy with what we normally bring in, have managed to maintain our supply line stability, but have had to absorb and share some pretty monumental cost increases. We did not expect to have to do this so suddenly. We strongly hope that next year the pressure from increased domestic and international production will lower or at least stabilize costs. We will do our best to maintain good quality maccha and have utmost appreciation and gratitude to you all who have decided to stick with us.
