Canada Has No Matcha Code: A CAD 67 Million Green Tea Market It Cannot Measure

There is no matcha code

Every serious question about the Canadian matcha market runs into the same wall in the same place. Canada does not measure matcha. It measures green tea, in two lines: HS 090210, green tea in packages not exceeding three kilograms, and HS 090220, green tea in packages above that. Matcha — stone-ground tencha, the most expensive form the leaf takes — is inside those lines, indistinguishable from the sencha, bancha, gunpowder and tea-bag fill that share them.

That is not a filing quirk. It means the fastest-growing category in Canadian specialty beverages has no baseline, no growth rate and no import share that anyone can verify. Every number circulating for Canadian matcha is an inference from a green-tea total, a café operator’s own sales data, or a global figure divided by a guess at Canada’s share.

What the register does show is a market large enough to be worth measuring properly, and a supply chain that explains why its pricing is now set somewhere else.

What Canada actually imported

The Canadian Importers Database, published by Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, records CAD 52,540,690 of retail-packed green tea — HS 090210 — imported in 2024, and CAD 14,717,321 of green tea in bulk packs above three kilograms. That is CAD 67,258,011 combined, of which 78.1% arrived in retail packaging, a ratio that tells you Canada is a consumer market rather than a repacking hub.

The concentration is the more interesting figure. In retail-packed green tea, the three largest importers account for CAD 13,426,746 — 25.55% of the total — the top ten take 47.17%, the top twenty-five 62.26%, and eighty-four importers are needed to reach 80.46%. In bulk, three importers hold 34.04% of a much smaller number and twenty-five reach 64.06%. This is not a market dominated by one grocery gatekeeper. It is a long tail of tea houses, Asian grocery distributors, Japanese trading companies and foodservice suppliers, with a moderate head.

The names in that tail are the shape of the category. Japanese trading houses and their Canadian arms — Hokusan Trade Canada, Ozawa Canada, Yamato Trading, JFC International Canada — sit alongside specialty tea businesses such as Genuine Tea, Emperor’s Tea Canada, Soar Organics, Cha Easy Canada and Minami. Grocery is present through T&T Supermarket, Loblaw and Wal-Mart Canada; foodservice through Starbucks Coffee Canada, Sysco Canada and Gordon Food Service; and the beverage-format end through Qualitea Bubble Tea Canada and Kung Fu Tea’s Toronto entity. The register does not tell you which of them buy matcha, but the presence of both ceremonial-grade specialists and bubble-tea distributors is the clearest structural signal in the data.

The harvest that set the price

The supply side moved first and moved hard. Kyoto Prefecture accounts for roughly a quarter of Japan’s tencha — the shaded, stemmed leaf that is dried and then stone-ground into matcha — and the summer before the 2025 harvest was the hottest on record in Japan. The result was a weak April–May crop. Reuters reported in July 2025 that tencha prices at the Kyoto auction had risen 170% year on year, that one sixth-generation Uji farmer harvested 1.5 tons against a typical two, and that farmers need roughly five years before a newly planted tea field comes into production.

That last number is the one that matters commercially. A five-year lag between a price signal and a supply response is not a cycle; it is a structural gap. Demand can be reallocated inside it, but it cannot be satisfied. Japan’s green tea exports had already risen 25% in value in 2024, before the short crop, and Pheonix Research sizes the global matcha market at USD 3.4 billion in 2025 rising to USD 6.9 billion by 2033 at a 9.2% compound annual growth rate — a 2.03-fold expansion — with Asia-Pacific the largest region and North America the fastest growing. Soaring demand meeting a harvest that fell is exactly how a 170% auction move happens.

Why Canada’s matcha is largely American-routed

Look again at the importer register and a pattern emerges that does not appear in any market report: a significant share of the businesses importing green tea into Canada are American. AIYA America, based in Torrance, California; Ito En North America of Irving, Texas; Jade Leaf Organics of San Francisco; Stash Tea of Tigard, Oregon; Twinings North America of Rutherford, New Jersey; Bigelow Tea of Fairfield, Connecticut; Traditional Medicinals of Sebastopol, California; Uncle Lee’s Tea of South El Monte, California. All appear as major importers into Canada, alongside Canadian-domiciled distributors.

The consequence is straightforward and rarely stated. Canada’s access to Japanese tencha is decided at the North American level. When a Japanese producer or trading house has less to allocate, the conversation happens in San Francisco, New Jersey and Texas before it happens in Vancouver, and Canada receives the residual of a North American allocation rather than a national one. A café in British Columbia and a café in Oregon are competing for the same consignment, and the Canadian buyer is further from the origin relationship.

This is why the shortage showed up in Vancouver first, and publicly. The CBC reported in April 2025 on British Columbia cafés absorbing price increases and rationing supply, months before the July auction data made the mechanism legible. Canada is a small, high-income, café-dense market at the end of a distribution chain it does not control.

What a café is actually buying, and what it can substitute

The category’s internal segmentation is the practical lever. Ceremonial grade is first-harvest, shade-grown, de-stemmed and stone-ground; it is bought for drinking as tea and for the colour and mouthfeel of a latte. Culinary and ingredient grade is later-harvest, often from older leaves, more astringent, darker, and bought for blending, baking, ice cream and ready-to-drink formats. The grades are not interchangeable in a blind tasting and they are not interchangeable in a cost sheet either.

When tencha is short-cost, the substitution that actually happens is downward within the grade ladder, and it happens first in the blended and iced formats where the leaf is carrying sugar, milk and ice. That protects the margin on a menu but quietly changes the product. It is also why the shortage has been felt hardest by the independent café sector, which buys at the top of the grade ladder in small volumes and has no forward contract, while the large chains and the grocery importers — visible in the register — buy on annual terms at the volume that gets allocated first.

Sizing the gap honestly

Canada’s CAD 67.3 million of green tea imports in 2024 — on the order of USD 50 million at 2024–25 exchange rates — sits against a global matcha market that Pheonix Research sizes at USD 3.4 billion. Even allowing for the fact that the Canadian figure covers every green tea, not only matcha, the comparison is the argument: Canada’s share of worldwide matcha consumption is far below its share of North American specialty coffee and tea culture. That gap is either an opportunity or a measurement artefact, and at present nobody can say which, because the statistics do not separate the product.

Anyone quoting a Canadian matcha market size should be asked which line of the tariff schedule they used. If the answer is none, the number is an estimate built on a category total, and it should be described that way.

What to watch

• The 2026 tencha crop. The five-year establishment lag means this year’s harvest is the first real test of whether the 2025 shortage was weather or structure.
• North American allocation decisions. Because Canada is served largely through US-domiciled importers, allocation and pricing shifts in that layer reach Canadian cafés before any Japanese export statistic reflects them.
• Grade drift. Watch for ceremonial-grade menu claims being quietly sustained by blending, which shows up in colour and mouthfeel long before it shows up in price.
• Substitution out of Japan. Chinese and Korean matcha production is expanding. The question is whether a Canadian buyer under allocation pressure treats origin as a quality claim or a price variable.
• Whether a matcha code ever exists. Until a statistical line separates matcha from other green tea, the Canadian market will keep being described by people selling into it.