Concept visual: Wild Bite Club.
Matcha has moved from one green latte to a full flavour platform—from strawberry and blueberry to cinnamon bun and chai. London’s cafés are learning that the next beverage system can sit beside espresso, not beneath it.
On Blank Street’s current menu, a cinnamon-bun latte sits beside a cinnamon-bun matcha. Harvest chai gets the same double treatment. Strawberry shortcake, blueberry, white chocolate and a drink called Blondie extend the green side even further. The revealing detail is not that matcha is present. London has been drinking it for years. It is that matcha now behaves like espresso: a base on which a café can build seasons, flavours and reasons to return.
That is a quiet but consequential change. The first phase of matcha in British cafés was substitution: order the green latte instead of the brown one. The new phase is multiplication. One matcha has become a family of drinks, each recognisable enough for a newcomer and adjustable enough for a chain. What looks like a colour trend is becoming a second menu system.
The mirror menu
Coffee shops are unusually good machines for turning a base ingredient into choice. Espresso can become an Americano, flat white, mocha, seasonal latte or cold drink without forcing the operator to reinvent the counter. Matcha increasingly offers the same architecture. Powder, water and milk form the core; fruit purées, syrups, foam, spice and temperature create the branches.
Blank Street makes the logic visible because some flavours appear in both coffee and matcha form. The customer does not have to learn a wholly unfamiliar drink. They choose a familiar flavour, then select the base. That lowers the risk of trial while preserving the pleasure of novelty. It also lets product developers move an idea across two beverage families instead of betting on one.
Specialists are building the other side of the market. JENKI now lists matcha bars across Soho, Battersea Power Station, Canary Wharf, Borough Market, Spitalfields, Selfridges and Covent Garden. The locations matter. Matcha is no longer confined to a Japanese grocery, a wellness counter or a single east-London destination; it is being placed in commuter districts, markets, shopping centres and tourist streets. The format travels because the ritual can be shortened into a service routine without disappearing entirely: measure, whisk, pour, customise.
Our reading is that London is not witnessing a clean transfer of loyalty from coffee to tea. It is seeing cafés learn how to sell another platform with coffee-like frequency. Matcha can be hot or iced, plain or flavoured, premium or playful. That breadth is commercially more important than the viral life of any one pink-and-green cup.
A city-sized product test
Square’s transaction data gives the clearest scale check. Across participating UK businesses in June and July 2025, the payments company counted 1,606,627 matcha beverages sold by 2,106 sellers. London alone accounted for 1,224,816 drinks across 982 sellers. In Square’s same-store comparison, matcha transaction volume in 2025 was 114.5 per cent above the previous year, while the number of participating sellers rose 52.4 per cent.
Those figures are not a census of Britain. They cover sellers using Square and depend on how merchants label products, a limitation the company states in its methodology. But they are large enough to show something stronger than a handful of photogenic openings. Growth came from both more outlets and more orders at existing ones.
The repeat behaviour is equally useful. Square identified 865,926 customers in its June–July dataset, and 37.6 per cent bought matcha more than once. An average of 1.86 drinks per customer is not proof of a permanent habit, but it complicates the claim that matcha is merely a one-shot social-media purchase. A beverage can be visually fashionable and operationally durable at the same time.
By September 2025, the Financial Times was describing the UK as Europe’s fastest-growing matcha market and citing an estimated £46 million in annual sales. In 2026, the category pushed further into the everyday: Greggs credited iced matcha lattes among the products that helped sales during a hot first half, alongside far more conventional bakery fare. When a specialist drink works at a chain with thousands of shops, it has crossed an important boundary. It no longer needs the customer to enter a dedicated matcha world.
How green tea became a flavour engine
The colour does part of the work. Matcha remains visible after milk is added, and a layer of strawberry makes the contrast even more dramatic. Yet colour alone does not explain why the menu keeps expanding. Matcha has bitterness, vegetal depth and enough tannic structure to stand up to sweetness. It can check a sugary syrup rather than simply carry it. That makes it useful in the same way coffee is useful: the base gives a flavoured drink tension.
There is also a productive ambiguity in what customers think they are buying. For one person, the attraction is Japanese tea culture and a carefully whisked bowl. For another, it is sustained caffeine, a milk drink without coffee, or an iced treat in a striking colour. Operators can address all those motives with one ingredient. The danger is making health claims that run ahead of evidence; the opportunity is serving several occasions without pretending they are identical.
Britain’s route to this point was gradual. Specialist retailers and Japanese grocers served matcha before it became a high-street category. Pellicle’s history of the UK boom notes that Japan Centre’s early matcha demand was largely among Japanese customers, while sweets such as matcha Kit Kats helped make the flavour legible to a wider public around the following decade. Cafés then translated that familiarity into lattes. Social platforms accelerated the visual language, but the drink needed existing retail, dessert and tea pathways before a bright green cup could look both exotic and easy to order.
The present menu wave is therefore less a sudden discovery than a piece of product engineering. Strawberry provides recognisable sweetness. Vanilla softens bitterness. Chai and cinnamon tie matcha to autumn. Foam adds texture and a premium cue. Each variation answers the beginner’s uncertainty—will I like the taste?—without removing matcha’s identifying colour.
The expensive green layer
A menu platform works only if its base remains available. Here the matcha boom runs into agriculture. Matcha is made from tencha leaves that are shaded before harvest, processed and ground into fine powder. Expanding output is slower than adding another syrup bottle to a café station. Skilled cultivation, processing capacity and grinding all create limits; poor harvest conditions can tighten them further.
Japanese producers have already signalled strain. Marukyu Koyamaen restricted some matcha products and package sizes in 2025 as demand outran supply. Reporting by Time documented purchase limits and shortages at major tea companies, alongside higher tencha prices. The problem is not that Japan has run out of green tea. It is that the qualities, regions and production methods demanded by a suddenly global café market cannot be scaled at internet speed.
This tension reaches London in two ways. First, ingredient costs rise, forcing operators to increase prices, reduce matcha dosage, accept lower grades or compress margins. Second, the word itself becomes elastic. British food labelling does not give “matcha” a tightly protected legal definition, and Pellicle found industry concern about products that mix or substitute other green-tea material. A booming category creates room for excellent tea and for green powder that relies on milk, sugar and colour to conceal weakness.
Flavour extensions can help manage that weakness, but they can also deepen it. A strawberry matcha does not need to taste like a bowl of high-grade usucha; it is a different product with a different balance. The honest question is whether the café chose a suitable culinary grade for that application—or whether embellishment is being used to make an indifferent ingredient impossible to judge.
When flexibility becomes dilution
Traditionalists have good reason to resist the idea that matcha is simply “green espresso.” Its history, cultivation and preparation belong to Japanese tea culture, not to the operating logic of a Western coffee chain. Treating it only as a caffeine-delivery base can flatten regional distinctions and turn a valued product into a colour code for wellness. The more extravagant the topping, the easier it is to lose the tea.
But purity is an incomplete answer to a mass-market phenomenon. Foods travel through adaptation. London’s flavoured matcha does not erase whisked matcha served without milk, and the city’s specialists can use curiosity created by sweeter drinks to introduce origin, cultivar and preparation. The market is broad enough for a £5 iced confection and a carefully sourced straight matcha, provided businesses make the distinction intelligible.
The stronger criticism concerns transparency. Menus should say enough about origin, grade and preparation to justify premium prices, especially when supply is tight. Operators should avoid borrowing ceremonial language for products designed chiefly around syrup. Customers do not need a lecture at the till, but they should be able to tell whether they are paying for tea quality, recipe complexity, branding—or some combination of the three.