Most matcha crosses three or four sets of hands between the field and a café bar: grower, trading house, importer, distributor. Each set of hands adds margin, and each one blurs the answer to the only question a buyer actually has — who made this, and will the next kilogram taste like the last one? MATSU exists to shorten that chain to one step. We buy at grower level in Japan and sell directly to the kitchens that serve it, so the lot you taste is the lot you order, from the same people, season after season.

We are a small company, and the site reflects that on purpose. What follows is everything a buyer usually asks before a first order.

What we do

MATSU is a wholesale supplier of Japanese matcha for hospitality. The range is a single, deliberate architecture: eight grades from three regions — Uji in Kyoto, Kagoshima in the south, and Izumo on the Japan Sea coast — running from an everyday latte workhorse at $390 per kilogram to a single-cultivar reserve at $1,050, all FOB Japan. Every grade exists because a real drink or dessert needs it; there is no grade on the list we could not tell you exactly what to do with.

We do one thing. There is no tea-adjacent product line, no accessories page, no retail arm. The narrowness is the point: eight grades, watched closely, is a range a two-partner company can actually stand behind.

How we source

Each season we are in Uji — tasting fresh leaf with the growers and grading the milled powder by colour and aroma, lot by lot. That sentence appears on our front page, and it is meant literally: grade decisions are made in Japan, in season, with the people who grew the leaf, not from samples couriered to an office. No trading house stands between your menu and the field.

The two MATSU founders with growers at golden hour by the processing shed
With our growers at the processing shed — the same faces behind the same grades, season after season.

The relationships are the product. Because each grade is tied to a specific producer rather than to whatever the spot market offers that month, the powder behaves the same across deliveries — same colour in the pitcher, same behaviour in the whisk, same finish in the cup. When a harvest varies, as harvests do, we taste through the season's lots with the grower and select for continuity rather than take what is cheapest. That is the practical meaning of producer-direct: not a romantic phrase, but the mechanism that keeps a $6 menu item from quietly changing under your customers.

What we don't claim

Plenty of matcha marketing leans on paperwork — laboratory seals, third-party marks, badges arranged along a footer. We have chosen not to compete on that ground, and we say so plainly rather than imply things we cannot stand behind. You will not find claims on this site that we cannot personally verify by standing in the field and tasting the lot.

What we offer instead is the strongest evidence we know of: the cup itself. We name the regions. We publish the prices. We tell you which producer relationship stands behind each grade, and we put 30 g of the actual lot in your hands before you commit a kilogram. If a grade does not earn its place against your own water, your own milk, and your own equipment, no document would have saved it — and if it does, none was needed. We let the cup speak, and we ask to be judged on nothing else.

The same honesty runs the other way. If your procurement process requires things we cannot provide, we would rather tell you at the first email than after a sample has raised hopes. The full version of this policy is on our quality page, which describes exactly what we check and how.

The company

MATSU is the matcha brand of Tri-Wells Co., LTD, a Japanese company. It was founded by two partners — one handling sourcing and producer relationships in Japan, the other running the commercial side — and it remains that size by design. When you write to us, one of the two people who selects the lots reads it; there is no sales floor to be routed through.

Being small shapes the terms you see. We would rather supply thirty kitchens well than three hundred badly, which is why single orders cap at roughly 30 kg, why lead times are quoted honestly at 2–3 weeks, and why we answer catalogue requests within 24 hours with grade advice rather than a price sheet and silence.

If you are deciding whether to trust a supplier you found on the internet, the fastest way to settle it is the way our own buyers do: order the Tasting Kit, put three grades against your menu, and let the cup make the argument.