The bitter truth about our sugary matcha habit

In 2018, I was “prom-posed” to with a matcha lemonade. It’s true. During my high school years, my favorite afternoon drink was a venti version of the drink with two scoops of dried strawberries from Starbucks.

I don’t know exactly how matcha came across my desk, but I knew I loved the earthy, tea taste mixed with the sugary sweetness of the lemonade. I especially loved eating all the strawberries out of the cup after they had soaked up the sweet matcha drink. My family and friends didn’t get the hype. They would say things like, “What is that? It looks moldy.”

Well, look who’s laughing now.

Unless you’ve spent the summer off-grid with monks in Japan, you know matcha has taken over. Search interest hit peak popularity on Google Trends. If matcha in any and all forms isn’t flooding your FYP and explore pages, I’m jealous. I can’t escape it. I’m trapped in an endless cycle of whisks, cafes, cheesecakes, cookies, cloud foams and flavored lattes.

Matcha is painting the town green, but the iced matcha latte is the true social star — usually with oat or almond milk and some pastel pop of color, like strawberry or blueberry syrup.

I’ve outgrown my DIY strawberry matcha latte phase, but it was my gateway. Now, matcha’s everywhere, from tiny cafés to specialty spots popping up all over. Why? How? Is matcha the next big food trend? And is a strawberry matcha just strawberry milk for adults — a sugary, dressed-up version of something originally meant to be healthy?

Matcha may be trending, but what we’re drinking in the U.S. barely resembles the sacred tradition from which it originated.

What even is matcha?

True matcha — capital-M Matcha — is a highly concentrated, antioxidant-rich green tea made through a labor-intensive process of shading, harvesting, and grinding. It’s so specialized that real matcha can’t be mass-produced without losing its quality. And yet, the attempt is being made — everywhere.

“It’s the only tea beverage really where you consume the whole leaf,” says Peter Goggi, president of the Tea Association of the U.S.A., “You’re getting 100% of the benefits, it’s not like whatever gets extracted into the cup from a tea bag.”

Goggi spent decades working as a research chemist at Lipton before becoming president of the Tea Association. He says matcha first really started showing up in American markets in the ’80s, a time that is widely considered to be the first American “health wave.” From there, it was picked up by creative marketers as a wellness buzzword and morphed into powders, lattes, energy drinks and more.

Market Data Forecast expects the North American matcha market to be worth $3.34 billion by 2033. The flavored matcha sub-segment — strawberry, vanilla, even peanut butter — is growing nearly 13% annually, largely because it appeals to younger consumers. But that same report also highlights an uncomfortable truth: A growing number of imported matcha powders have been found to contain fillers, artificial colors, and low-grade green tea dust. Goggi’s Tea Association has had to send out guidelines for what qualifies as “matcha.”

So what’s really in your cup?

Goggi doesn’t sugarcoat it: “Green tea in general does not really fit the Western palate. It’s bitter, grass-like. All drivers of taste that people don’t really enjoy. The driver of liking for any beverage in America is sweetness.”

Matcha drinks here often come packed with syrups and sweeteners. A 16-ounce iced matcha latte from Starbucks has 25 grams of sugar. Dunkin’s version has 21 grams. “It doesn’t taste anything like matcha,” Goggi says. “It’s green, it’s frothy, but that’s about it.”

Starbucks says its matcha powder is “unsweetened,” but the default three pumps of syrup in each 16-ounce drink tell a different story. I tried to trace where major chains source their matcha from. After hours of searching, I gave up. If they’re hiding the distributor that hard, it’s probably not Uji.

Internet commodification is causing a shortage

Matcha might be going mainstream, but capital “M” matcha is not.

Japan is experiencing a matcha shortage. Climate shifts, aging farmers, fewer tea farms and surging global demand are all part of the squeeze. Producers in China and Vietnam are now making their own versions, but it’s not the same as the prized matcha from Uji and other Japanese regions.

If real matcha is upwards of $50 an ounce, what’s in the cup you’re buying for $6 at a drive-thru? And you don’t need me to tell you that the way Americans are largely consuming matcha is a far cry from the traditional Japanese tea ceremony.

Trend vs. history and culture

In Japan, matcha farming is a delicate art passed down through generations. It’s a reminder of centuries of tradition, monastic practices and skilled farmers shading tea fields by hand. But now, we’ve turned it into a pastel backdrop.

There’s a dissonance between that depth and what’s trending online. We’ve stopped treating matcha like a tea and started treating it like a syrup — something to be manipulated. “Matcha isn’t a ‘canvas’ type of ingredient. It has a very distinct flavor,” says Micheline Maynard, a business journalist and author of the Substack Culinary Woman. “I think the fact that we’re manipulating it so much says a lot about the culture right now.”

Maynard says Gwyneth Paltrow, actress and owner of the infamous luxury lifestyle brand Goop, helped popularize the modern matcha latte in the U.S. about 10 years ago. But now, it’s in cookies, croissants, KitKats and cakes.

“People don’t have a clue that what they’re consuming is like the Cadillac of green tea,” says Maynard. “We’re seeing the strawberry matcha lattes everywhere, and that’s taking it even further from tea.”

Matcha as a canvas

Boba Guys, a bubble tea chain in San Francisco, is widely credited with inventing the strawberry matcha latte around 2012/2013 after sampling strawberry and matcha-flavored KitKats from Japan. Despite its origins, the drink has spread internationally.

“I’m fascinated that people took something that’s fairly humble in Japan and turned it into an everyday drink, and now into this dressed-up, viral beverage,” says Maynard.

She points out that matcha has become expected at American coffee shops, alongside lattes and cold brew. “It’s become a canvas for these drink developers,” she says. “They’ll post photos on Instagram of like 12 variations of the matcha latte.”

But she also worries. “I think about these seventh- or eighth-generation matcha farmers carefully shading these tea leaves, and then someone turns it into a blueberry matcha latte. I’m not sure that’s what all these families ever conceived of happening with their matcha,” she says.

Reinvention or respect?

Matcha is very personal to the traditional Japanese farmers. Like wine, it has a sort of terroir. The real matcha farmers don’t mess around, and they definitely don’t cut corners. But with an impending shortage, the international matcha market is at a high point of tension.

“I’m concerned that as this whole thing snowballs, the banana cream matcha latte that somebody gets is just getting farther and farther away from the matcha that you would have in a tea ceremony,” says Maynard. “Matcha has not peaked. There’s plenty of space for matcha to expand in popularity. The only question will be: Is there going to be enough matcha?”

Robert Hellyer, author of “Green with Milk and Sugar,” says this isn’t the first time Americans have commodified Japanese tea. “America was the biggest consumer of Japanese green tea in the late 19th century,” he says. “People would pay more for it because they wanted to look sophisticated.”

That “cool factor” is still at play. But Hellyer isn’t convinced that these new matcha drinkers are conflating status with the quality of what they’re drinking. “For a lot of people, a beverage is just to quench the thirst or get an energy boost with caffeine. So yeah, maybe the tea behind it isn’t really that important for them.”

Some cafés — like 12 Matcha in New York — are trying to change that. They highlight origin stories and farmer relationships, and build brand loyalty through education and storytelling.

Still, Hellyer says the matcha trend has progressed to the point where the two (“Matcha” and “matcha”) almost can’t even be considered the same drink.

“There isn’t and we don’t really need to look for those connections [between new flavored lattes and traditional tea ceremony]. Tea ceremony is about the practice of being with people and preparing tea. It’s less about the consumption of tea,” he says.

He thinks this splintering is inevitable. “You might see something like ‘Uji-style’ matcha, the same way you see ‘Kobe-style’ beef,” he says.

Tea with terroir

That kind of commodification is what chef and wellness author Candice Kumai has spent her career trying to prevent. “If we were going to introduce matcha to the world, we had to do it the right way,” she says.

Kumai has been an ambassador for Ito En, a legacy Japanese tea company, for 15 years. “It’s important to learn from the most credible sources,” she says. “Someone who works directly with the farmers in Japan.”

In 2024, Ito En signed Shohei Ohtani as a global ambassador, which led to a larger partnership between Ito En and Major League Baseball in both Japan and the United States.

But for Kumai, visibility isn’t enough. She likens matcha to wine: a product of place, care and community. “People are claiming, ‘This is my matcha,’ when in other industries you would say, ‘I’m a salesperson. I work in collaboration with the tea farmers in Japan.’”

Kumai’s first experience with matcha was in kindergarten through sweets, the way many Japanese children are introduced. She studied tea’s history and tradition for years, learning about 16th-century master Sen no Rikyu, credited with making matcha more accessible to the public.

Today, Kumai runs Matcha Masterclass, a traveling workshop series, and regularly posts “Matcha Mondays” on Instagram. In a recent video, she says, “Japan is not a theme park,” calling out the trend of cherry-picking aesthetic elements while discarding cultural context.

“I don’t want to be the matcha police,” she says. “I want to be the matcha educator.”

But Kumai is also cautious. “We must not forget that with the things we enjoy, there was struggle, suffering, war — turmoil between these two countries.”

Trends come and go, she says, but culture is meant to last. “There’s a deep responsibility that comes with sharing these trends. I think there’s a sweet spot where we can pay homage to Japan while still enjoying parts of the culture… It’s important for people to learn about the individuals who helped make matcha what it is today. Go to the tea schools in Japan, learn from the monks.”

So how do we keep the trend from snowballing into something unrecognizable? If we can’t book a flight to Kyoto, how do we protect the farmers, the tea, the truth of the tradition?

“I do see matcha as a new wine or cheese,” Kumai says. “I see it like a product from a DOC — where it matters deeply where you’re sourcing it from.”

Sure, let’s sip our strawberry matcha lattes — they are delicious. But maybe, while we’re sipping, we can remember the farmers who picked the leaves. And the monks who first whisked them into something more.