🍵 The jade-green drink that has colonized Cairo’s coffee shops tells a story much larger than a simple beverage trend. Matcha’s meteoric rise from ceremonial Japanese tea to global phenomenon — retail sales in the US alone jumped 86% in three years — represents a new and potentially destabilizing pattern in how we consume food in the age of viral content.

Browsing any upscale coffeeshop in Cairo today, you’ll find matcha lattes competing with (if not outnumbering) more conventional drinks. Caesar’s Matcha food court in Sahel stands as a monument to the drink’s unlikely conquest of Egyptian taste buds. During Ramadan 2024, matcha-flavored mehalabeya, date, and sobia drinks and desserts appeared on menus across Cairo. A drink that most Egyptians had never heard of five years ago has become ubiquitous, served everywhere from longstanding Zamalek cafés to coastal resorts.

But Egypt is just one node in a global network straining under unprecedented demand, and matcha is just the latest victim of how social media affects trend cycles that can create whiplash on supply chains and agricultural systems that still operate on multi-year timelines. Every coffee shop in Cairo mixing matcha into their menu is a symptom of the global trend, with the market ballooning to USD 4.3 bn last year, projected to nearly double by 2030.

The acceleration problem: Traditional food trends used to percolate slowly — a chef would discover an ingredient, haute cuisine would adopt it, food magazines would write about it, and gradually, over years, sometimes decades, it would filter into mainstream consciousness. The glacial pace gave agricultural systems time to respond, for supply chains to adapt, and for regulations to catch up.

But social media has obliterated this timeline. A single viral TikTok video can create a food trend that is instantly adopted by mns overnight. Within a week, a small family-run Algerian food company might find their hazelnut spread facing global demand. At the height of its popularity, El Mordjene — originally priced at DZD 780, or EGP 283 — was selling for EGP 900+. “I’ve been selling this product for two years, and before the summer [of 2024]. I was selling an average of about fifty,” said one French shop owner. “Since the buzz on TikTok, I’ve sold 5k in three months, with two stock shortages.” Cebon, the manufacturer, isn’t thrilled with the pressure, noting that they preferred to remain “discreet.”

The problem? Matcha plants take three to five years to mature. The precise conditions required — subtropical climate, careful shade cultivation, hand-picking only the two youngest leaves at the beginning of the season, then steaming, de-stemming, deveining, drying, and grinding between granite stones — cannot be rushed or easily scaled. Climate change is already shrinking the viable growing regions, and Japanese farmers, who have cultivated these plants for centuries, are aging out with no successors willing to take on the demanding work. From 2024 to 2025, the average price in Kyoto for first-flush tencha, the whole leaves used to make matcha, nearly tripled.

The new reality is this: A massive agri-industrial mechanism halfway around the world shudders to life to satisfy a population that barely knows it exists and, more often than not, moves onto a new trend within a year or two.

Matcha is far from the first food to experience this violent acceleration. In fact, it’s following a well-worn pattern that has left chaos in its wake across multiple continents. Quinoa serves as the cautionary tale — from 2010 to 2014, this Andean grain exploded first in Western markets as a protein-rich superfood. Prices in Peru and Bolivia — where quinoa is a dietary staple — tripled. Suddenly, the families who cultivated and consumed quinoa could no longer afford it. Food security became a genuine crisis in quinoa-growing regions, while Western countries sprinkled it into their Buddha bowls, unaware and uncaring of the disruption their appetites caused.

But while quinoa took years to reach peak trend status, matcha, propelled by TikTok virality and Instagram aesthetics, achieved global ubiquity in what feels like months. Farmers are desperate to meet and capitalize on exploding demand, planting in less-than-ideal regions that yield lower-quality products. China and South Korea are frantically cultivating tencha to catch the wave, but the resulting product lacks the quality of traditional Japanese matcha. The market is flooded with inferior goods while the genuine article becomes scarcer and more expensive. Joseph Sorensen, chair of UC Davis’ Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, estimates that 90% of the matcha powder on store shelves isn’t technically matcha at all, just ground up green tea.

But the real issue isn’t whether the matcha latte at your favorite Cairo café contains authentic ceremonial-grade matcha, it’s that social media has created a do-or-die system where global supply chains must respond instantly to a consumer base trained to expect immediate gratification.

The pattern repeats: There is viral demand for a product, a race to the bottom in quality as suppliers cut corners to meet insatiable demand, and then, inevitably, the trend dies. The TikTok aesthetic moves on. The must-have product becomes yesterday’s news. But the trees remain. The matcha plants that took five years to mature will still be standing when the world has moved on, and farmers who converted their land, who took on debt, who abandoned traditional crops will be left with fields of unwanted tea plants and a collapsed market.

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