At a minimalist Los Angeles matcha bar, powdered Japanese tea is prepared with precision, despite a global shortage driven by the bright green drink’s social media stardom.Of the 25 types of matcha on the menu at Kettl Tea, which opened on Hollywood Boulevard this year, all but four were out of stock, the shop’s founder Zach Mangan told AFP.”One of the things we struggle with is telling customers that, unfortunately, we don’t have” what they want, he said.With its deep grassy aroma, intense color and pick-me-up effects, the popularity of matcha “has grown just exponentially over the last decade, but much more so in the last two to three years,” the 40-year-old explained.It is now “a cultural touchpoint in the Western world” — found everywhere from ice-cream flavor boards to Starbucks. This has caused matcha’s market to nearly double over a year, Mangan said.”No matter what we try, there’s just not more to buy.”Thousands of miles (kilometers) away in Sayama, northwest of Tokyo, Masahiro Okutomi — the 15th generation to run his family’s tea business — is overwhelmed by demand.”I had to put on our website that we are not accepting any more matcha orders,” he said.Producing the powder is an intensive process: the leaves, called “tencha,” are shaded for several weeks before harvest, to concentrate the taste and nutrients.They are then carefully deveined by hand, dried and finely ground in a machine.- ‘Long-term endeavor’ -“It takes years of training” to make matcha properly, Okutomi said. “It’s a long-term endeavor requiring equipment, labor and investment.””I’m glad the world is taking an interest in our matcha… but in the short term, it’s almost a threat — we just can’t keep up,” he said.The matcha boom has been fuelled by online influencers like Andie Ella, who has more than 600,000 subscribers on YouTube and started her own brand of matcha products.At the pastel-pink pop-up shop she opened in Tokyo’s hip Harajuku district, dozens of fans were excitedly waiting to take a photo with the 23-year-old Frenchwoman or buy her cans of strawberry or white chocolate flavored matcha.”Matcha is visually very appealing,” Ella told AFP.To date, her matcha brand, produced in Japan’s rural Mie region, has sold 133,000 cans. Launched in November 2023, it now has eight employees.”Demand has not stopped growing,” she said.In 2024, matcha accounted for over half of the 8,798 tonnes of green tea exported from Japan, according to agriculture ministry data — twice as much as a decade ago.Tokyo tea shop Jugetsudo, in the touristy former fish market area of Tsukiji, is trying to control its stock levels given the escalating demand.”We don’t strictly impose purchase limits, but we sometimes refuse to sell large quantities to customers suspected of reselling,” said store manager Shigehito Nishikida.”In the past two or three years, the craze has intensified: customers now want to make matcha themselves, like they see on social media,” he added.- Tariff threat -Anita Jordan, a 49-year-old Australian tourist in Japan, said her “kids are obsessed with matcha.””They sent me on a mission to find the best one,” she laughed.The global matcha market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars, but it could be hit by US President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Japanese products — currently 10 percent, with a hike to 24 percent in the cards.Shortages and tariffs mean “we do have to raise prices. We don’t take it lightly,” said Mangan at Kettl Tea, though it hasn’t dampened demand so far.”Customers are saying: ‘I want matcha, before it runs out’.”At Kettl Tea, matcha can be mixed with milk in a latte or enjoyed straight, hand-whisked with hot water in a ceramic bowl to better appreciate its subtle taste.It’s not a cheap treat: the latter option costs at least $10 per glass, while 20 grams (0.7 ounces) of powder to make the drink at home is priced between $25 and $150.Japan’s government is encouraging tea producers to farm on a larger scale to reduce costs.But that risks sacrificing quality, and “in small rural areas, it’s almost impossible,” grower Okutomi said.The number of tea plantations in Japan has fallen to a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, as farmers age and find it difficult to secure successors, he added.”Training a new generation takes time… It can’t be improvised,” Okutomi said.

A US judge on Wednesday handed Meta a victory over authors who accused the tech giant of violating copyright law by training Llama artificial intelligence on their creations without permission.District Court Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco ruled that Meta’s use of the works to train its AI model was “transformative” enough to constitute “fair use” under copyright law, in the second such courtroom triumph for AI firms this week.However, it came with a caveat that the authors could have pitched a winning argument that by training powerful generative AI with copyrighted works, tech firms are creating a tool that could let a sea of users compete with them in the literary marketplace.”No matter how transformative (generative AI) training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books,” Chhabria said in his ruling.Tremendous amounts of data are needed to train large language models powering generative AI. Musicians, book authors, visual artists and news publications have sued various AI companies that used their data without permission or payment.AI companies generally defend their practices by claiming fair use, arguing that training AI on large datasets fundamentally transforms the original content and is necessary for innovation.”We appreciate today’s decision from the court,” a Meta spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.”Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology.”In the case before Chhabria, a group of authors sued Meta for downloading pirated copies of their works and using them to train the open-source Llama generative AI, according to court documents.Books involved in the suit include Sarah Silverman’s comic memoir “The Bedwetter” and Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” the documents showed.”This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” the judge stated.”It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”- Market harming? -A different federal judge in San Franciso on Monday sided with AI firm Anthropic regarding training its models on copyrighted books without authors’ permission.District Court Judge William Alsup ruled that the company’s training of its Claude AI models with books bought or pirated was allowed under the “fair use” doctrine in the US Copyright Act.”Use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use,” Alsup wrote in his decision.”The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” Alsup added in his decision, comparing AI training to how humans learn by reading books.The ruling stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of illegally copying their books to train chatbot Claude, the company’s ChatGPT rival.Alsup rejected Anthropic’s bid for blanket protection, ruling that the company’s practice of downloading millions of pirated books to build a permanent digital library was not justified by fair use protections.