New York Coffee Shops Experience Matcha Shortage

HOST, MADELINE REILLY: This Spring, New Yorkers may expect a matcha shortage at their favorite coffee shops. Supply chain issues and growing demand for Japanese tea have impacted matcha distribution all over the globe. Reporter Dana Binfet took a trip uptown to find out more.

NARRATOR, DANA BINFET: It’s a rainy morning on the Upper West Side and New Yorkers are lined up at Blank Street Coffee on Broadway. 

KAYLEEN CABILLA: I ordered a strawberry shortcake matcha large from Blank Street here. It's really good.

BINFET: Kayleen Cabilla is here for her matcha, she picks one up everyday on her way to high school nearby. But lately, she’s started to notice that shops are low on stock.

CABILLA: Kinda worried about it because I really like it, ya know? It keeps me going everyday so it’s better than coffee to me.

BINFET: It’s not unusual these days for coffee shops to turn away customers seeking matcha beverages. Karen Dunlap is co-founder of a matcha importing business, Matcha Source. She says that this sort of shortage is due largely to the rapid rise in popularity of the drink here in New York.

KAREN DUNLAP: The matcha shortage, at least in North America, is kind of a new phenomenon, because for so long, Japanese matcha was so prized and so special that it really was kept in country. They only looked to export outside Japan when the traditional waves of tea started to decline in the younger generation.

BINFET: Today, matcha has become an integral part of the beverage industry in New York City, even the coffee carts outside the natural history museum have matcha on the menu. The majority of matcha is still harvested in Japan, where over 4,000 tons of matcha was produced in 2023 — almost three times the amount produced ten years earlier. Dunlap says when she started selling matcha in 2007 to cafes in New York, nobody knew what it was.

DUNLAP: So I had to do lots of demonstrations. There was a lot of hesitation. But it was really like Starbucks bringing it in and making it into mainstream culture with like frap, you know, with their matcha lattes, that it started to be in a wider culture.

BINFET: Social media featuring the tea was key to its growth. But unlike Instagram posts, production of matcha can’t be quickly scaled up. For one thing, the plants take up to five years to mature so even if the farmers expanded today it wouldn’t immediately solve the crisis.

DUNLAP: And then, they'll harvest these super green leaves. It goes through a whole process of halting the oxidation process after harvest, and then they age it, and then they grind it into powder. So there's many steps that go into the process of making this jewel of a tea. 

BINFET: Mark Im is a co-partner at Chalait, the matcha bar and cafe on the corner of 82nd St and Amsterdam. The shop has been serving matcha lattes, matcha arnold palmers and matcha cappuccinos for seven years. Shortages like this, he says, will come and go.

MARK IM: There’ve always been seasons where they didn’t have enough matcha because of weather and everything else but we’ve always been able to work things out. Not too stressed about it, feel like it’s gonna be okay.

BINFET: Have you heard about the matcha shortage? Are you worried about it?

IM: Yes we’ve heard about it. I’m not really worried about it because for us we import our own matcha, so we directly work with farms so we don't have a middle man so we haven’t noticed too much difference.

BINFET: Cecilie Gubster is an undergraduate student at Columbia, and a big matcha fan. Yesterday she ordered her usual drink at Joe’s Coffee but the barista told her the matcha had sold out. 

GUBSTER: I was a little sad, I got a Chai, it was still good, but you know…haha….

BINFET: Today, though, Gubster returned to Joe’s and walked away with her favorite–an iced matcha latte. Dana Binfet, Columbia Radio News.