The matcha craze needs more champagne

IF YOU THINK it’s hard work selling coal to Newcastle or ice to an Inuit, how about selling matcha to Japan?

- DAVID FICKLING Bloomberg

That’swhat Chinais hoping toachieve,as the biggest tea producer spots an opportunity in the worldwide craze for putting Japan’s richly-flavoured green tea powder into everything from lattes and cookies to cheesecake and KitKats.

Japanese public broadcaster NHK last month visited a factory in China’s Guizhou province that’s producing 2,000 metrictonnes of matchaayear, almost half of Japan’s annual output. China is already by some measures the bigger grower: Some 3,966 tonneswere processed in 2020,accounting formore than half of the tea soldinamarket valued at $4.53 billion. With China dominating electric vehicles, smartphones, furniture,and solar panels, it might feel inevitable that matcha will go the same way. Still, Japan could do more to defend itself against the onslaught. Adopting the more aggressive techniques used in Europe would bea good place to start.

Interms of mass-market production, the game has surely already been lost.China has 30 times as much farmland as Japan and produces about 50 times more green tea. Matcha production can be labour-intensive: It has to be grown in the shade, and in Japan is often harvested with handheld machine cutters and processed in smallscale facilities that are struggling to keep up with the explosion in demand.