Why We Flew to Japan to Meet Our Matcha Farmers
I didn't start MotherMatcha because I wanted to sell matcha. I started it because I got tired of not knowing where my matcha came from.
For years I drank matcha the way most people do — a tin from a shop, a whisk from another shop, no real idea whose hands had grown it or how long ago it was picked. Then I started reading about how the industry actually works, and it unsettled me enough that I booked a flight.
What I found once I started asking questions
The number that stopped me was this one: over 80% of the matcha sold globally isn't grown in Japan at all, and much of what is labelled "ceremonial grade" is neither ceremonial nor, sometimes, even matcha in the way the word was meant. That's true here in South Africa too — there are brands on our own shelves calling themselves "ceremonial grade" without saying where the matcha is actually grown. If a brand won't tell you the origin, that's the moment to be suspicious, not reassured. On top of that, most matcha on shelves is third harvest — the later, coarser picks of the season, which is part of why so much of it tastes bitter and chalky instead of sweet and rounded.
The other thing I learned is that there are usually five or more middlemen between the farmer who grows the matcha and the person who eventually drinks it. Every one of those hands adds a markup, a delay, a loss of information. By the time a tin reaches a shelf, nobody selling it has met the person who grew it, and often nobody can tell you which farm, which harvest, or which cultivar is actually inside.
I didn't want to sell that. So I went to Japan to find out what the alternative looked like.
We rented a tiny car, met up with a friend in Tokyo, and drove to Shizuoka, then on to Wazuka. We spent around six hours with each farmer, not rushing anything, just sitting with them in the fields and asking questions.
One of the most eye-opening stops was meeting the president and CEO of the Shizuoka Organic Matcha Association (SOMA), where we had a long conversation about the industry — how they collect matcha from individual farmers and turn it into the powder that eventually reaches a tin. To actually see that process, I had to put on what felt like a hazmat suit and pass through a sterilisation machine before I was allowed into the factory floor, where the matcha is ground slowly, patiently, on stone mills, in a space as sterile and pristine as any pharmaceutical lab I've seen.
Meeting the people who grow it
We visited a few farms across the Shizuoka region, and again in Wazuka, Kyoto. At one, the farmer picked us up in his little Jimny and drove us up into the hills of his farm. We got out and walked into the fields with him while he showed us the soil, explained how elevation changes the character of the matcha grown at different heights on the same hillside, and had me touch the top and bottom leaves of the same plant so I could feel the difference in age for myself — the young top leaves soft and tender, the older bottom leaves noticeably tougher.
What I can say is why it mattered to go in person. A phone call or an email exchange can tell you a price and a harvest date. Standing in the field tells you something else — how the matcha is actually grown, whether the farmer is proud of it, whether what they're describing matches what arrives in the tin months later. It's the difference between buying a product and buying a relationship.
Why first harvest, and why it's worth the wait
The matcha we buy is first harvest — the earliest picking of the season, when the leaves are youngest, shaded longest, and highest in the amino acids that give good matcha its natural sweetness rather than bitterness. It's also the most limited picking of the year, which is exactly why so much of the matcha on the market skips past it in favour of the third harvest — more volume, lower cost, less waiting.
We buy direct, without the five-plus middlemen that usually sit between a farm in Japan and a tin on a counter in South Africa. That means the farmer sees more of what we pay, and it means I can actually tell you where your matcha came from instead of gesturing vaguely at "Japan."
Exceptional things take time. A shaded field takes weeks to prepare before harvest. A relationship with a farmer takes longer than one visit to build properly. None of that fits neatly into a supply chain built for speed, and I've made peace with that trade-off — slower, smaller, but honest about what's in the tin.
What this means for you
When you scoop matcha from a MotherMatcha tin, it isn't an abstraction. It's matcha that was grown by people I've stood in a field with, picked at the point in the season when it's meant to be picked, and brought to you without a chain of anonymous hands in between. That's the whole reason the company exists.
I'll keep sharing more from that trip — the fields, the people, the parts of the process most tins never tell you about. If you want the fuller story of how MotherMatcha started, it's on our Our Story page, and there's more from the farm on Instagram.
x, Steph