This summer, the London coffee run has been as much about matcha as it has about coffee. Between June and July last year, cafés across Britain sold matcha drinks a little over 1.6 million times, and around three-quarters of that went through London alone.
Matcha has roots in powdered tea practices brought from China to Japan around the beginning of the Kamakura period, roughly 800 years ago and became closely associated with the Japanese tea ceremony, chanoyu. For centuries, it was known for its slow, ritualistic process, meaning it was never industrialised in the way that black tea and coffee was, despite green tea being sold in the UK for over a century. Until recently, it was only available in health shops, and was seen as a niche and specialist drink that was consumed by people already interested in green tea, antioxidants, meditation and clean energy.
Now, however, it has broken through into the mainstream. Japan produced 5,336 tonnes of tencha – the leaf used to make matcha – in 2024, nearly 2.7 times the level of a decade earlier. And with heat-stressed harvests in 2025 tightening supply further, Kyoto’s first tencha auction in 2026 opened at prices around 1.7 times higher than the previous year. These figures highlight one thing – matcha is in demand.
“Functional drinks have moved from the health-food aisle to the mainstream, with Ocado Retail reporting a 54% year-on-year increase in health drinks sales.”
The growth is not only confined to dedicated matcha bars. Black Sheep Coffee co-founder, Gabriel Shohet told The Sunday Times that matcha products now account for almost a fifth of all sales at the business, which has more than 100 coffee shops across Britain and Ireland. Clearly consumers are buying into more than novelty, as matcha is more expensive to serve, more complicated to source and, in many cases, more expensive to buy than a standard coffee, but demand has not fallen away.
Part of that is because consumers have never been more interested in their health and wellbeing. Functional drinks have moved from the health-food aisle to the mainstream, with Ocado Retail reporting a 54% year-on-year increase in health drinks sales in 2025, across products including kombucha, prebiotic sodas, kefir and matcha. This has been largely led by Gen Z, where 61% now buy functional drinks several times a month, and have largely swapped out their morning tea or coffee for one of these alternatives.
Businesses have been taking note of this shift with Jenki, which started life as a market stall and pop-up concept in 2020, planning to double its London estate to 11 sites by the end of 2026 while also exploring regional cities from 2027. It has said that this isn’t just driven by new customers but by increasing frequency from existing customers as it becomes part of their lifestyle. In this vein, Jenki also has its own range of matcha-making equipment, starter kits and ritual sets, to allow customers to have a shop-standard matcha experience in their homes.
Blank Street has also harnessed this interest to grow its sales by over 500%, intentionally, jumping on the now famous ‘matcha green’ in its branding. By leaning into this, the coffee chain has reportedly become the fastest growing in the country since it arrived from New York in 2022, and has seen matcha drinks not only become half of its total sales, but also working as a key driver in their social media success.
PerfectTed is following this consumer behaviour but in a different format. Launched in 2021, the matcha energy drink brand is now sold in 3,500 locations – including Tesco, Waitrose and Joe & the Juice – across more than 30 countries. It has taken matcha away from its ritualistic beginnings, and given it a new life as portable, functional energy by being picked up from a supermarket shelf. In the same way that coffee grew to become embedded in everyday life both at home and from cafes, matcha is doing the same.
“The coffee chain has reportedly become the fastest growing in the country since it arrived from New York in 2022, and has seen matcha drinks not only become half of total sales, but also working as a key driver to their social media success.”
It is this idea of energy tied in with wellness that has made matcha so popular now. McKinsey found that 79% of UK consumers now consider wellness a top or important priority, while UK consumer spend has increased by nearly a third since 2019. This helps explain why consumers are finding different sources for caffeine. Coffee is often framed as fuel – something to get through the commute, deadline or afternoon slump. However, matcha offers a different version of the same. Although it is still about energy, it has a culture of focus, calm, and slow-releasing energy which fits more comfortably in modern wellness culture.
None of this would have happened at the same speed without social media, and the way a drink looks has become part of what consumers are buying. According to research by Mintel, 49% of people in the UK say they have bought a drink after seeing it in a social media post, explaining why colour has become such a powerful commercial consideration. A matcha latte photographs well, which is why so much of its early growth came through Instagram and TikTok and the same logic has also been seen with the growth of ube.
The bright purple yam, long used in Filipino desserts, has started appearing in lattes, soft serves and pastries across British cafés, and its appeal has as much to do with its colour as its flavour. Like matcha, its colouring is natural, containing four grams of fibre and the same antioxidants found in blueberries. Its growth is just more evidence that consumers are looking for drinks that look good enough to post online without compromising on their health.
The question now is whether matcha can keep the balance that has made it so popular to this point as it grows. Its appeal depends partly on being old, precise and rooted in ritual, while its growth has come from being made fast, accessible and easy to repeat. That may be why it has travelled so quickly. Matcha has not replaced coffee, and nor does it need to; it has found a place slightly to the side of it, familiar enough to become part of the day but different enough to make the choice feel considered. For a product that has existed for centuries, that feels like a very modern kind of opportunity.
