Matcha vs green tea powder

A friend asked me recently: “The matcha latte I had at a café yesterday tasted completely different from the one I made at home. Why?” She had bought a tin labeled matcha from a large online retailer, and whisked it up at home expecting the same bright, grassy, slightly sweet drink she remembered.

It’s a fair question. And the honest answer is a little complicated.

In Japan, the word matcha (抹茶) has a specific meaning within the tea industry. Green tea powder (粉末茶, funmatsucha) is something different, and it’s not a secret — the two have long been recognised as distinct products. Outside of Japan, though, that distinction has quietly blurred. Most green powders sold today are marketed as “matcha,” regardless of how they were grown, processed, or ground.

This article isn’t an attempt to call anyone out. Green tea powder is a perfectly good product in its own right, and it has a place in Japanese tea culture. The point is simpler: there’s a difference, and once you know what it is, you can decide for yourself what you’re drinking — and what you want to drink.

What does “matcha” actually mean?

According to the Japan Tea Central Public Interest Incorporated Association, the organisation that sets the industry definitions of Japanese teas, matcha is:

Leaves cultivated under shade, dried without rolling (this stage is called tencha), and then ground into powder using a stone mill.

That’s the full definition. Three conditions, each of them specific, each of them essential. If any one of them is missing, the result isn’t matcha — it’s something else.

Each of those three steps takes time and care. Shading isn’t automatic — farmers choose varieties suited to it, monitor the weather, and decide when to start and stop. Tencha processing requires equipment and skill that most green tea factories simply don’t have. And stone milling is slow by nature. A single granite mill, turning at its ideal pace of around 30 revolutions per minute, takes about an hour to produce 40 grams of finished matcha. This is why real matcha has always been expensive, and why it has always been rare.

“Matcha” is not a legally protected term

Here’s the part that surprises most people. Despite everything above — the centuries of tradition, the carefully defined production method, the word appearing on packaging around the world — the term matcha is not protected under food law in most countries.

The Austrian wine and food publication Falstaff, citing European consumer authorities, put it plainly in a 2025 article:

The term “matcha” is not protected under food law — meaning there is no definition of the properties and manufacturing characteristics that matcha must fulfill, nor how it differs from conventional green tea.

The same is true in North America, the UK, and most other markets. There is no regulator checking whether a product labeled “matcha” actually meets the Japanese industry definition. A company can take any green powder — made from any kind of tea, grown in any kind of light, ground in any kind of machine — and sell it as matcha, and no food safety authority will stop them.

This is starting to change. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) published ISO/TR 21380:2022, a technical report that provides an internationally agreed definition of matcha based on plant source, cultivation, and production methods. A broader classification standard, ISO 20715:2023, also addresses matcha as a distinct tea type. And in Japan, NARO (the National Agricultural and Food Research Organization) is actively pushing for international certification. NARO’s Institute of Fruit Tree and Tea Science has stated that adopting matcha as an international standard would “reduce the circulation of substandard products and reduce harm to Japanese products in the marketplace.”

These are steps in the right direction. But for now, the label on the tin is still mostly up to the seller.

Green tea powder is something different — and that’s okay

When a tea that isn’t tencha is ground into powder, the result is funmatsucha (粉末茶), usually translated as green tea powder. It’s a real product with a real place in Japanese tea culture. The powder you might have encountered at a conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, mixed with hot water from the tap beside the seat — that’s green tea powder. It’s served at kaiten-zushi because it’s inexpensive, quick, and pairs well with rich food.

The differences from matcha start at the very beginning, in the field, and continue all the way through processing.

Because the tea bushes are grown in full sunlight, the leaves develop more catechins — the compounds responsible for astringency and bitterness — and less L-theanine, the amino acid that gives matcha its characteristic sweet, savoury umami. The colour tends toward yellow-green or olive rather than the vivid jade of matcha. The texture, depending on the grinder, may be slightly coarser. And the flavour is noticeably more bitter, sharper, often flatter.

None of this makes green tea powder a bad product. It’s inexpensive, it’s nutritious, it works beautifully in certain recipes, and for daily use it can be excellent value. Problems arise only when green tea powder is sold as matcha, because buyers expect one experience and receive another.

What’s happening in the global market

The demand for matcha around the world has grown extraordinarily quickly. Matcha lattes, matcha cheesecakes, matcha ice cream, matcha martinis — the category has expanded well beyond what traditional Japanese production can support. According to Falstaff, tencha — the shaded, carefully cultivated leaf from which matcha is made — accounts for only about 6 percent of Japan’s annual tea harvest. The other 94 percent is sencha, bancha, hojicha, and the rest.

When demand outpaces supply by this much, something has to give. In 2025, matcha went through a period of visible shortage. Reports from Los Angeles, London, and other cities noted that premium matcha had been selling out at specialty shops. Coffee chains and cafés, unable to keep up, began switching to blends or alternatives. Falstaff observed:

In Los Angeles, matcha powder is partly sold out. Faced with shortages and rising costs, many producers and coffee chains have turned to ready-made blends composed of conventional green tea powder or lower-quality teas.

This is the context in which many of today’s “matcha” products exist. Some are made from later harvests — second, third, or autumn-winter pickings — which are less expensive than the ichibancha (first harvest) leaves traditionally used for matcha. Some are made from tea that wasn’t shaded at all. Some fall into a category that Japanese tea people quietly refer to as moga (もが) — a slang term for low-grade green tea powder passed off as matcha. Dr. Andrew Weil, writing about the category in his food safety column, describes moga as typically including low-quality powdered green tea from sources outside Japan, often labeled as Japanese matcha and widely sold in large retailers across North America, alongside powdered teas that were never made from tencha at all.

At the far end of the spectrum, some products labeled “matcha” contain no tea at all — or contain fillers like mulberry leaf powder or moringa powder, which share the bright green colour but not much else.

All of this exists simultaneously on the same shelves, sometimes at similar prices, sometimes under nearly identical packaging. And because nothing legally stops a seller from using the word matcha, there’s no external signal telling buyers where on this spectrum their product actually sits.

Why it’s hard to tell just by looking

This is the part worth thinking carefully about. If you’ve shopped for matcha, you’ve probably done what most people do: look at the colour, read the label, check whether the packaging looks authentic. These are reasonable instincts. The problem is that each of these signals can be produced independently of the product inside.

Colour can be engineered

Vivid green is associated with high-quality matcha, and for good reason — properly shaded tencha, carefully ground, really is jade-green. But colour in a photograph is not the same as colour in reality, and colour on a package is not the same as colour in the tin. Product photos can be edited. Packaging colours are chosen by the designer. And even within the tin, some producers add colourants or blend in greener powders to enhance appearance.

Packaging is a design decision

A beautifully designed tin, with Japanese calligraphy, traditional patterns, and references to heritage, tells you what the designer wanted to convey. It doesn’t tell you what’s inside. Any product can be given expensive packaging; the packaging is often the cheapest part of a premium-looking tea.

The words “ceremonial” and “culinary” are not Japanese standards

Most matcha sold in the West is labeled either “ceremonial grade” or “culinary grade.” These are genuinely useful terms for buyers — they communicate intended use at a glance. But it’s worth knowing that neither grade exists in Japan, and neither is regulated anywhere. As Naoki Matcha, a company that sells both grades, states directly:

In Japan, matcha is not categorized into “ceremonial” or “culinary” grade. In fact, there is no standardized matcha grading system with regulatory effect. […] No government or international organisation regulates the use of the “ceremonial grade” classification.

In practice, this means “ceremonial grade” and “culinary grade” mean whatever the seller decides they mean. Two products with identical labels can have very different qualities.

Lattes and sweets cover a lot

If you’ve only ever tasted matcha in a latte, sweetened with sugar and softened with steamed milk, the underlying tea could be almost anything. Milk and sugar are generous collaborators — they round off harsh edges, mute bitterness, and lend richness that the matcha itself may not have. The same is true for baked goods, ice cream, and blended drinks. Many people have never tasted matcha on its own, whisked with just water, and so they have no reference point for what real matcha is supposed to be.

What you can look for, if you’re curious

None of this means buyers are helpless. There are reasonable signals, most of them on the packaging, that tell you something real about the product inside. None of them is a guarantee. Together they form a picture.

This isn’t about finding fault

Green tea powder is a genuinely good product. Mogo, when sold honestly as what it is, is a genuinely good product. Second-harvest matcha, third-harvest matcha, blended matcha — all of these have legitimate places in Japanese tea culture and beyond. The problem isn’t that these products exist. The problem is that when all of them are called “matcha” without distinction, buyers can’t tell what they’re getting, producers of real matcha get squeezed on price by products they can’t meaningfully compete with, and the word itself starts to lose its meaning.

The goal of this article isn’t to suggest any particular brand is dishonest. It’s simpler than that: if you know the difference, you can choose. If you want green tea powder for its bright, bitter energy in baked goods, you can buy green tea powder and pay green tea powder prices. If you want matcha — real, shaded, tencha-based, stone-milled matcha — you can look for the signs, ask the questions, and find it.

At Kawagiri Tea, our approach is to be transparent about what we carry. Our matcha is shade-grown tencha, stone-milled, from single cultivars and single farms in Shizuoka. We share the cultivar, the farm, the harvest details, and our reasoning for every selection. We do this not because it makes us special — plenty of producers are doing similarly careful work — but because we believe the best way to support real matcha is to let buyers see clearly what they’re buying.

If you’re curious about the subject of green tea powders more broadly — including the cultural place of mogo and the economics around it — we’ve written a separate piece that goes into more detail.

Thank you for reading. Whatever you choose to drink, we hope you enjoy it.