We're Ryo and Yasmin. In 2015 we weren't looking to start a tea company. We had two small children, and we wanted to build a business around something genuinely good for people. So we started researching what "good for you" actually meant, ingredient by ingredient, industry by industry.
Matcha came up. The more we learned, the more it made sense: a healthy and whole leaf tea, not an extract, farmed the same deliberate way for centuries. That is how Matcha Wellness was born.
In 2024-2025, the matcha scene changed. Demand for matcha surged worldwide, and auction prices for tencha, the shaded leaf that becomes matcha, rose 170% in a single season. We'd spent a decade nourishing one supplier relationship, trusting it the way you trust something that's worked for ten years. Then that single supplier didn't have enough matcha for us. Lead times stretched to twelve weeks, our matcha went out of stock constantly, and it was devastating the Amazon store we'd built. Something had to change.
In June that year, we flew to Japan and spent two weeks travelling the country, meeting farmers and producers alongside a veteran family-friend wholesaler. We added Shizuoka and Kagoshima as direct-source regions alongside Kyoto: no brokers standing between us and the farm, no middlemen adding a markup.
In February 2026, we made the call to stop managing that supply chain from a distance. We relocated to Shizuoka, Japan's largest tea prefecture, so that we could sit inside the relationships that keep our matcha supply secure. From there, we decided to offer that same supply chain to other businesses, so they don't have to relocate to get it.
Eleven years later, that's still what drives this. We still believe the businesses worth building are the ones that serve people something genuinely good, not just something that sells. If you're building a menu around matcha, that same standard is now yours to lean on: we still taste everything before it ships, because that's what "nothing hidden" looks like when it's your name on the cup, not just ours.
Tens of thousands of customers and 7,600-plus Amazon reviews later, we believe in that founding idea more than we did in 2015, not less. It just reaches further now, to your menu, your regulars, and everyone you serve.
