What a cup of matcha
really costs.

There is a question people ask at the end, once they have decided to try matcha: what is this going to cost me a month? It is hard to answer standing in front of a shelf, because the pack sizes do not line up. A 30 g tin at €29 and a 100 g tin at €20.99 cannot be compared at a glance, and intuition misleads: the small one looks cheaper and costs nearly five times as much per gram.

The useful unit is the cup. This article works it out for every brand we have tasted, with the same dose for all of them.

The reference dose

We use 2 g per cup, the standard amount for usucha. At that dose with water at 75 °C you make a cup of 60 to 80 ml with water, or 30 ml of water plus 150 to 200 ml of milk for a latte. Some people use 1.5 g and some 2.5 g; what matters for comparison is that the dose is the same on every row.

From which a simple sum follows: a 100 g tin makes 50 cups, a 30 g one makes 15, a 20 g one makes 10.

The table

Brand	Pack	Price	€/kg	Cups	€/cup	Score
Hacendado (Mercadona)	100 g	€3.50	€35.00	50	€0.07	39/100
Matcha Zen Ceremonial	100 g	€20.99	€209.90/kg	50	€0.42	85/100
Cosmic Matcha Celestial	30 g	€24.50	€816.67	15	€1.63	81/100
Matcha & Co Premium	30 g	€29.00	€966.67	15	€1.93	77/100
Tesuko Hakata Saemidori	30 g	€31.00	€1,033.33	15	€2.07	81/100
Japanese Tea Hub	20 g	€28.00	€1,400.00	10	€2.80	92/100

Matcha Zen price verified on teamatchazen.com on 9 September 2026. The rest are the reference prices recorded when each review was written; check them at the shop before buying. The scores come from the published formula.

What the table shows

Three things, and none of them is obvious from the shelf.

Pack size matters more than brand. The three 30 g tins run between €1.63 and €2.07 a cup; the 20 g one goes to €2.80; the two 100 g ones come in under €0.50. The price-per-kilo gap between small and large formats is more than threefold, and it does not correspond to an equivalent gap in quality: packaging, labelling and shipping weigh far more on 20 grams than on 100.

Dearer is not proportionally better. The Japanese Tea Hub is the highest scored in the ranking (92/100) and costs €2.80 a cup. Matcha Zen scores 85/100, seven points less, and costs €0.42: nearly seven times less. Between those two points the curve of diminishing returns is very steep.

Moving up a grade costs pennies. Going from supermarket matcha to a certified ceremonial is 35 cents a cup. Set against almost any other household buying decision, that is a small difference for a large change of product. We go into it in the comparison against a ceremonial.

What it comes to per month and per year

At one cup a day, five days a week, that comes to 260 cups a year. At that rate:

Matcha	Per month	Per year	Tins a year
Hacendado	€1.52	€18.20	5,2
Matcha Zen	€9.10	€109.15	5,2
Cosmic Matcha	€35.32	€423.80	17,3
Japanese Tea Hub	€60.67	€728.00	26,0

Put like that, it is clear why many people end up with two tins at home: a good one for the weekend and a sensible one for the rest. And why the 100 g format changes the equation so much for a daily drinker.

Why matcha costs what it costs

Looking at the euros-per-kilo column, it is fair to ask where that price comes from. It is not simply margin: the tencha process is expensive for three specific reasons.

The first is shading. Twenty to thirty days before harvest, the field is covered to slow photosynthesis. That means putting up and taking down structures every spring, and it also means the plant makes less leaf: volume is traded for amino acids and colour. A shaded field yields considerably less per hectare than one in the sun.

The second is the milling. Tencha is ground on a granite stone mill, and that mill turns slowly: thirty to forty grams of powder an hour. This is not a technical whim: the heat of a fast grind degrades the aroma and darkens the colour. Forty grams an hour means one mill takes more than two hours to fill a 100 g tin.

The third is picking. At the top of the range it is done by hand, shoot by shoot, and that is the bottleneck that has driven Japanese prices up: hand-picked tencha in Uji fell 40% in 2025 precisely because it needs hands that are no longer there.

With those three factors, a cost floor of €120 to €150 a kilo for a first-harvest ceremonial is reasonable. Below that, something has been skipped: the shading, the stone milling, or the early harvest. That is why we are wary of «ceremonial» matchas at €60 a kilo, not any prejudice about brands.

Compared with what you already drink

Cost per cup gains perspective beside other everyday drinks. A coffee capsule is around 30 to 40 cents each. A coffee at a bar counter runs €1.20 to €1.60. A supermarket teabag comes to less than 10 cents.

On that scale, a ceremonial at €0.42 a cup is in the same territory as a coffee capsule, and the 30 g matchas are in the territory of a speciality coffee served in a café. Neither is expensive in absolute terms; what differs is that the outlay arrives all at once, in a twenty or thirty euro tin, and that feels different from paying cent by cent.

A warning about opened matcha

There is a cost that appears in no table: the matcha that spoils. Once the tin is open, the powder oxidises. It loses colour, loses aroma and gains bitterness, and it does so in weeks, not months. A 100 g tin gives you 50 cups, which at one a day is ten weeks: reasonable. At two cups a month, that same tin will last two years and half of it will go in the bin.

The practical rule: buy the size you will finish in two or three months, keep it closed, cold and out of the light, and do not buy the big tin just because it is cheaper per gram if you will not get through it.

Work out yours

If you have a tin at home that is not in the table, the sum is this:

cost per cup = price of the tin ÷ grams in the tin × grams per cup

Or, more conveniently: put it into the cost per cup calculator, which also gives you the price per kilo, how many cups are left in the tin, and the annual spend depending on how often you drink it. It comes preloaded with Matcha Zen and the 2 g dose, and all three values can be changed.