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The story
It has emerged that Meiji’s popular ice cream “Essel Super Cup Matcha 200ml” quietly ended production earlier this year. On social media, a wave of regret followed, with comments like “No way” and “That’s sad.” Since the article never spelled out a specific reason for the discontinuation, the 5ch thread filled up with posts tying it to rising overseas demand for matcha, climbing tea-leaf prices, and the rise of Chinese-made matcha. The discussion spread into suggestions for replacement flavors and comparisons with rival companies’ ice creams, eventually touching on deeper structural issues in the tea industry.
Delivered 10/8 (Thu) 15:45
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It has come to light that Meiji (headquartered in Chuo Ward, Tokyo) ended production this year of its popular ice cream “Meiji Essel Super Cup Matcha 200ml” (hereafter, Super Cup Matcha). On social media, a flood of distressed reactions followed, including “No way!”, “I knew something was off when I stopped seeing it at the supermarket…”, “I love it so much, this is shocking,” and “Of all the matcha ice creams, Super Cup was my favorite, so this is sad.”
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Matcha's been heavily "remodeled" at this point, so it's basically a different thing from Chinese tea — but the custom of tea-drinking, and the cultivar that's the ancestor of today's Japanese tea, were actually brought over from Song-dynasty China.
Well, maybe it's best not to tell foreigners about too many of Japan's good things.
China's already growing matcha. The pricier Japanese stuff might stop selling.
They added too many variations, and now cutting the lineup in half is the only way the production division can stay afloat.
A while back, unpaid overtime was the norm for factory workers, and slamming partner companies with impossible orders was business as usual.
Now there's a serious labor shortage, overtime pay has to actually be paid (unpaid overtime's banned), and partner companies are bold enough to raise their participation fees.
They're getting squeezed by planning quotas and budgets set half a century ago.
On top of that, inflation just keeps climbing.
At this point you just have to accept that cheap, small-batch production across tons of different items was the abnormal thing all along.
It's like a flawless, 100-point textbook answer with no room to poke holes in.
Just zero warmth to it.
Bring it back already.
Not that I'll eat it, though.
Tuna, eel, scallops, etc.
Seriously, what a foolish nation.
It'll all go overseas.
Every hillside on the Pacific side turns into a tea field, and boom — monoculture economy incoming.
China spotted Japan's matcha boom and is now selling it worldwide at a fraction of the Japanese price.
That's got nothing to do with the domestic Japanese market though.
That'd just make it the go-to flavor for Saitama residents. (a running joke that Saitama is nothing but empty fields and weeds)
That's not true.
Even wealthy people eat this.
It's just genuinely tasty.
Super Cup's got way too much volume and nowhere near enough richness.
Quit acting like such a connoisseur!
Cheap stuff is fine for confectionery use, but apparently the good, pricey stuff meant for drinking is getting bought up wholesale — the hardcore tea-ceremony crowd was lamenting it.
Uji matcha has always had low production volume — the old common knowledge was that Nishio matcha got slapped with the "Uji" label for confectionery use without much basis.
These days it's mostly Chinese-made matcha, and if you're unlucky, even the factory itself is in China.
Did they even have a tea flavor?
Is there a chocolate one too?
Yeah, there's a chocolate one.
Bought a sasa-dango (bamboo-leaf rice dumpling) ice cream — well, soft serve — at a roadside rest stop in Ojiya, Niigata…
It genuinely tasted like real sasa-dango.
The farmers are aging out with no successors.
Even Kagoshima's purple sweet potato only saw a wave of new products once seed potatoes got exported to China or Taiwan for mass production.
Japanese-grown produce could end up completely wiped out if things go badly.
For the not-particularly-high-grade matcha used in ice cream, that could probably substitute, no?
If you powder sencha instead, the bitterness gets way stronger though.
Bokujo Shibori and MOW are all I need.
Got curious so I checked the official sites — looks like neither of those has a matcha flavor anymore either.
Japanese trading companies are already buying up a ton of it, so Chinese-made matcha circulating domestically is bound to increase.
That's backwards. Back in the Meiji era, tea was expensive and ordinary people barely drank it — most of it went to America. Production ramped up because it sold well there, and only after the tea boom faded in America did ordinary Japanese people start drinking it.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In recent years, rising overseas demand has driven up prices for Japanese tea, including matcha, and it’s said that even confectionery-grade matcha has become harder to secure. In the thread, posts showing real familiarity with industry circumstances stood out — things like the expansion of matcha production in China, and the backstory of how Nishio-produced matcha, intended for confectionery use, ended up being sold under the “Uji matcha” name as a matter of convenience. That said, the quoted portion of the article never explicitly states an official reason for the discontinuation, so the price increases and raw-material shortages remain speculation on the 5ch side. It’s also worth flagging, as a reader, that the thread sometimes blurred the line between the high-grade matcha used in tea ceremonies and the lower-grade matcha used in confectionery — the two have always differed in quality and price, and lumping them together under one “matcha shortage” narrative glosses over that distinction.
※This article excerpts and summarizes the 5ch (News Express+) thread “[Ice Cream] “Super Cup Matcha” Discontinued, Fans Say “Sad,” “Shocked”… It’s Popular, So Why? We Asked Meiji and Found the “Real Reason”.”
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