Deja brew: How matcha – and avocados, and blueberries – made the leap onto menus, and then everywhere

There are matcha croissants, cupcakes, coladas, facewashes, lip balms, candles, chewing gum, toothpaste.

It emerged as a healthy alternative to coffee, about 10 years ago. You either like its foamy earthiness, or abhor it.

Before we get to the menu adoption cycle that has seen it infiltrate everything, a quick recap.

The bright green powder, made from Japan’s shade-grown tencha tea leaves, was traditionally meant to be mixed with water in a bowl, by the consumer, using a bamboo whisk. In a traditional tea ceremony dating back more than 500 years, the individual whisked, rotated the bowl and sipped mindfully, grateful for the delicacy.

Only about 6% of Japan’s tea leaves, after all, are suitable for matcha production.

Retail prices for pure matcha powder in Japan start at 2,000 yen (about ₹1,200) for a 30-gm tin.

In 2025, Japan’s agriculture ministry reported that the country produced 4,176 tonnes of matcha in 2023, a nearly threefold increase from 1,471 tonnes in 2010, in attempts to keep up with global demand. But there are now murmurs of a shortage.

So it is tiny traces of low-grade matcha or matcha dust that are often used in the shampoos and cosmetics, instant noodles and beer looking to join the trend. Typically, this version of the delicacy lacks the umami profile of the good stuff.

If this sounds a lot like the story of saffron, that’s because we’ve been here before.

We’ve lived through this cycle, sometimes over and over, with saffron and turmeric, activated charcoal, truffles, blueberries and avocados.

In each case, the ingredient has leapt from quiet kitchens to trendy cafes and then into, well, everything. How does this leap occur?

TOO MATCHA OF A GOOD THING

The term for it is “menu adoption cycle”, coined 20 years ago by the American food and beverage market research company Datassential.

The cycle was identified as a four-phase “playbook” used by industries such as food manufacturing, retailing and marketing, to create or further a food trend (and, in many cases, now extends that food trend into an everything trend).

It starts with a simple but effective aim: get the product in question onto restaurant menus.

Studies have shown, over and over, that consumers adopt new food preferences based on what they encounter on restaurant menus. See “turmeric” or “matcha” often enough and one feels compelled to try it; try it and chances are one will find it palatable; it’s a short hop of messaging and social-media manoeuvring from there to steadily ordering it.

Menus have proven more effective than a presence in grocery stores or on recipe platforms, says Claire Conaghan, associate director and trendologist at Datassential. Trends are cyclical, she admits, so the next question is how long one can keep one’s product at the top of the charts. But that’s a problem for marketing to worry about.

EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE…

How does one get a new item to show up widely across menus?

In many cases, food trend forecasters and market researchers get to work first, looking to see what gap in the market a new trend might tap (do people under 25 seem likely to pay more for a talking-point beverage? Cue turmeric lattes; boba; matcha).

Often, they identify the ingredient based on what chefs and niche cafés are already experimenting with.

A key factor these days is what will photograph well and align with ideas of health and wellness, so it can feed into social media narratives, Conaghan says. “For instance, bright and naturally sourced colours have become especially popular, pushing ingredients such as matcha, ube or purple yam, and pandan leaves, into the spotlight.”

A two-pronged approach follows: restaurants, cafes and food trucks click into the narrative and start feeding it, by putting the item on their menus, in increasingly prominent ways. Then come the listicles, Reels and hashtags, pushing it onto more menus across a widening geography.

The third stage is proliferation. This is when large chains and consumer-goods brands move in. (Think, Starbucks and its turmeric latte; McDonald’s and its matcha ones.)

The final stage lately, is ubiquity.

This is when the ingredient escapes food altogether, becoming a sales hook across product categories. Saffron has made this leap, so have turmeric and activated charcoal. This is the point at which matcha now stands.

FARM TO FAD

What’s interesting is that the “popular ingredient in everything” approach isn’t, in a sense, new. Ancient cultures have used healthy foods for skincare, for instance, for thousands of years.

“As our mothers and grandmothers say, if it’s good enough to eat, it’s good enough to go on your skin,” says food critic and food and travel writer Roshni Bajaj Sanghvi. A traditional face mask may combine a number of currently trending items: turmeric, saffron, milk, curd and chickpea flour.

Could chickpea flour, then, be the world’s next matcha? Can anything that’s fundamentally good for you become trendy? The short answer is no.

Exclusivity is a crucial part of the storytelling, says advertising veteran and independent brand coach Ambi Parameswaran.

In order to become a fad, an ingredient should be hard to source, at least somewhat hard to grow and / or harvest (think, truffles), have an unusual flavour profile, and be expensive in pure form (and therefore aspirational).

The world’s many, many truffle-free truffle oils tell the story of what happens next. But once an ingredient has checked off the requisite boxes and become desirable, even trace amounts, clearly advertised as trace amounts, can help a product sell, Parameswaran says.

“A consumer may read that a packet of cashew cookies is less than 2% cashew, but will still be tempted to choose it over a packet of regular cookies, if the price points are similar, because they feel it offers something ‘more’,” he adds. “The same applies to ‘matcha’ skincare.”

By the time an ingredient has travelled all the way to the proliferation stage, there may be a sense of community built around it too, says Bajaj Sanghvi. “There’s a positive association today, for instance, with matcha, avocado, blueberry. A latte, cupcake or facewash advertised as containing one of these can make you feel like part of something bigger.”

Until the world moves on the next bright thing.

Which is why the real trick today, analysts say, isn’t even getting an aspirational ingredient to the proliferation or ubiquity stage. It’s getting it back there, over and over, after it flatlines.

Matcha, for instance, is already something of a punchline.

Can it stay on the charts, over the long term, the way salmon has, or even the simple apple?