Matcha is in the middle of a genuine supply squeeze. Japan's tencha crop, the shade-grown leaf that becomes matcha, has not kept pace with a few years of runaway global demand, and the tightest supply is at the top, in the ceremonial-quality leaf that specialist producers actually stone-mill. The question we can answer that nobody else is answering: what is that doing to prices, brand by brand, week by week?
Signal 01Increases are winning, and they're big
Across pure matcha powder in this window, once we strip out currency-display noise, real price changes broke 0 increases to 0 decreases, a 1.6-to-1 tilt upward. The typical increase was around +30%, which is not a nudge. Most of the decreases, meanwhile, were promotions ending rather than genuine price cuts, which makes the upward pressure even starker than the raw ratio suggests.
When a shelf reprices this fast and this asymmetrically, you're not watching normal merchandising. You're watching a supply shock arrive at retail.
Signal 02Sold out, then more expensive
Here is the pattern shoppers are starting to feel. Of the products that went out of stock and later returned during our window, the ones that also changed price came back higher far more often than lower, a median markup around +17% on restock. A stockout is increasingly a repricing event in disguise: the cheap inventory sells through, and what comes back is dearer.
Signal 03The move is catalog-wide, not per-product
The pattern repeating across brands: not nudging one SKU, but lifting the whole line at once. That tells you the pressure is upstream, in the cost of leaf, not in any single product's merchandising.
No verified repricing events in this window.
Every row is a real change captured between two crawls, with the source page on file. Currency-display artifacts, where a store briefly renders tax-inclusive prices and then reverts, are excluded; those account for the majority of raw "changes" and are not repricing.
On stock levelsWhy we're not shouting a sellout number
You'll see viral claims that "80% of the good matcha is sold out." We can't responsibly publish a single market-wide sellout percentage this week, because our own availability feed was disrupted by a data migration mid-window that reset stock states in bulk. Rather than launder a dirty number into a scary headline, we're holding it. What we can stand behind: individual heritage producers like Aoi Seicha and Horii Shichimeienare currently showing 40%+ of their matcha out of stock, well above the market norm, and several are removing sold-out products entirely rather than restocking them. We'll publish a clean, methodologically sound availability index once the feed is verified.
Method and limitations
What this tracks. Price and availability changes on matcha products across hundreds of brands, captured by repeated crawls. Each change is a diff between two observations of the same product page. Window: Jun 29 - Jul 13, 2026.
What we remove. Currency-display artifacts (price changes that coincide with a currency change, or that move by an identical percentage and then revert) are excluded. They made up roughly two-thirds of raw price events and are not real repricing. Accessories and non-matcha listings are excluded from powder figures.
Known gap. A bulk data migration on Jul 8 corrupted availability states for many products that day, so point-in-time sellout percentages for this window are unreliable and are not headlined. Repricing figures are unaffected. This is a live tracker; numbers update as coverage and cleaning improve.