What a Japanese tea auction looks like, and why your price moved

Where the price is set

Japanese tea is sold through a handful of wholesale tea markets, one per major region. The trade press counts five that matter: Shizuoka, Kagoshima, Kyoto, Fukuoka and Mie. Growers and processing factories bring aracha, the rough tea, or tencha, the shaded leaf that becomes matcha. Tea merchants and millers buy it, refine it, blend it and, for matcha, grind it. We buy finished matcha at those mills, so the price on our product pages is two steps downstream of the market floor, and it moves when the floor moves.

Not every kilo goes through a market; large factories also sell on direct contracts. But the market price is the reference everyone quotes, including for tea that never went there.

A morning on the Shizuoka floor

The Shizuoka Tea Market, founded as a company in 1956 and usually described as Japan's first, is not an auction. It runs on negotiated trades, with the market's own staff standing between seller and buyer. In the peak season, mid-April to the end of June, the floor opens at 6:30. Each lot is laid out on a tray: buyers judge the leaf by eye, hand and nose, and where it matters brew it under one fixed condition, 3 to 4 g in 200 ml of hot water. The seller has written an asking price on a slip; buyer and seller settle the number with the market's intermediary, by convention on a small abacus so that neither figure is shouted across the room. When they agree, the three of them clap hands three times. Everything listed that morning is, as a rule, sold by the end of it.

The market vets who may buy: as of June 2023 it listed 163 approved buyers, each in the blue cap that marks them, each having put up a deposit so growers are paid even if a buyer defaults. About 40 percent of what crosses the floor comes from outside the prefecture, which is why its prices are watched nationally.

The tencha tenders: Kyoto and Kagoshima

Tencha is traded differently. In Kyoto the season opens with a tender sale at JA Zen-Noh Kyoto's Uji tea distribution centre in Joyo: lots are listed, buyers inspect, bids go in and the winning prices are published. Kagoshima runs its own tencha market in Kagoshima City each May, where, as the Global Japanese Tea Association's May 2026 report describes it, merchants evaluate colour, aroma and flavour before bidding.

What May 2026 did

The 2026 first sales were the highest in a decade. At the Kyoto tender on 13 May, reported by the Shokuhin Shimbun, 375 lots totalling about 25,000 kg were offered to 50 companies, and the average winning price was 14,127 yen per kg, the highest in ten years, with a top bid of 40,021 yen. The previous year's opening tender had averaged 8,235 yen on a much smaller offering of about 1,700 kg. The Kagoshima tencha market on 14 May, according to the Mainichi Shimbun as cited by the Global Japanese Tea Association, averaged about 19,000 yen per kg, roughly 1.8 times the year before, with 27 factories offering 5.8 tons, half again as many factories as in 2025.

Reported opening tencha prices, 2026 first harvest. Opening sales are a small share of the season's volume and tend to run above the season average.

Two cautions. The opening tender is a showcase, and its average runs above what the season settles at. And a 1.7 or 1.8 multiple is on last year's price, which had already roughly doubled in Kyoto the year before, as we wrote in our shortage piece in September. Manufacturers told the Nikkei in May that their raw material costs this year are more than double last year's, and the same report said retailers were weighing smaller packs or price rises of around 20 percent.

Why your price moved

Four things pushed the same way at once. Export demand: Japanese green tea exports have been reported at record levels for several years running, and matcha is the visible part of that growth. Supply switching: growers have been converting sencha fields to shaded tencha, but a converted field takes a season or more to give shaded leaf, so supply lags demand. Weather: the 2025 summer heat cut yields, with Kyoto reported down by about a quarter. And more buyers in the room: the Kagoshima market had half again as many factories offering tencha.

Underneath all of it is a shrinking base. Japan loses tea farms every year, and we wrote about where they are closing. The matcha boom is riding on fewer, larger, flatter farms, mostly in the south, which is one reason Kagoshima keeps gaining share.

What it means per cup

A tencha price in yen per kilo of leaf is not a matcha price in dollars per kilo of powder: the leaf loses stems and veins in sorting, and grinding, packing and documents sit on top. What a café can do is work from the price it is actually quoted. At 4 g per latte, a kilo is 250 drinks.

Tea cost per drink from our list prices, before freight, duty and milk.

Our first-harvest Yame is the lot most exposed to the Kyoto and Fukuoka tenders, and it is priced at $295 / kg, FOB Osaka, with a 10 kg minimum because it comes from the halal and kosher certified line. Even at that price the tea in a latte is a little over a dollar, which is why a well-run café changes its grade mix when the market moves, not its menu price; our latte pricing guide has the full cost sheet.

How to read a supplier's price change

1. Ask which harvest and which lot. Moving from a 2025 lot to a 2026 lot is a different conversation from a new price on the same lot. Our list changes when a lot changes, not week by week, and the harvest year is on every product page.
2. Ask when the tea was bought. A mill that bought its tencha in May is pricing from May. A supplier re-quoting in September on May tea is pricing from the news.
3. Compare second harvest. The opening tenders price the first harvest. A second-harvest café grade such as Megumi moved less in absolute terms, and our harvest comparison explains what you give up in the cup.
4. Fix what you can. If your volume is steady, a standing order reserves a lot and fixes its price per kilo for the harvest year, so the next May is the mill's problem and not yours.
5. Taste before you believe. A market average says nothing about the lot in front of you. Twenty grams of sample does.

The floor at 6:30 is a long way from a café at 3 pm, but the hands clapping over a tray of tencha are the start of every price you pay. Knowing when that happens, and for which harvest, is most of what keeps a menu steady through a year like this one.

Questions buyers ask

Prices and lots named in this article are as published on Nov 2026; the catalog always carries the current list price per kilo.