🌱 As matcha shortages and skyrocketing prices ripple through cafés worldwide, an unassuming roadside herb in Japan is being floated as the next big thing. Locals call it yomogi. The rest of the world calls it mugwort. One Osaka supplier just shipped a record 754 tons. Mugwort-steam wellness salons jumped 1.8x in three years. A former trading-company employee quit his job to brand it. Could this nostalgic Japanese weed really become the "next matcha"?

A café where everything is mugwort

In the city of Nagahama, Shiga Prefecture, a recently opened café serves nothing but yomogi-themed items: vibrant green mugwort lattes, bean-flour-dusted mugwort dumplings, mugwort confections of every shape. According to FNN Prime Online, owner Hideyuki Enami told reporters he started the café because he wanted to spread the appeal of yomogi further.

Similar mugwort-focused cafés are popping up beyond Tokyo and Osaka, reaching smaller regional cities. The driver behind this trend is the global matcha boom — and the supply crunch and price surge that came with it.

Record 754 tons shipped, cultivation expanded 1.5x

The matcha supply squeeze has become a tailwind for what the trade is calling "next matcha."

Ueno Tadashi, an Osaka-based mugwort wholesaler, shipped a record-high 754 tons of yomogi in 2025, with 2026 expected to grow further. Senior advisor Kotomi Ueno explained the dynamic to FNN Prime Online: matcha is becoming expensive and scarce, so the industry is gravitating toward yomogi as the next "green" option. The company has already expanded its cultivation area by 1.5x.

Industry insiders see three main strengths in mugwort. First, it pairs easily with a wide range of foods — Japanese, Western, or Chinese. Second, you need less of it than matcha to get an intense green color. Third, it is naturally caffeine-free, making it suitable for evening drinks, pregnant women, and children.

That last point matters globally. Caffeine-free wellness drinks align well with the Western "sober curious" movement and the broader shift toward functional, mindful beverages — categories where matcha alternatives like hojicha and rooibos are already gaining ground.

What yomogi is — a primer for international readers

For readers unfamiliar with the plant: yomogi (Artemisia princeps) is a perennial herb in the daisy family, growing wild across all of Japan in fields, riverbanks, and roadsides. The young spring shoots are picked, boiled, and pounded into rice cakes — producing the green-flecked sweets known as kusa-mochi, yomogi-mochi, and yomogi-dango. The flavor is grassy and aromatic with a gentle bitterness, derived from essential oils like cineole.

The mugwort family is global. In Europe it is Artemisia vulgaris (sometimes called common mugwort or "St. John's Plant"). In Korea it is ssuk (쑥). In China it is ai cao (艾草), used in traditional medicine and moxibustion. Medieval European herbalists called Artemisia "the mother of herbs." It appears in Vietnamese cooking, German seasoning traditions, and the same genus gives French cuisine its tarragon and the spirits world its absinthe (from wormwood, Artemisia absinthium).

In other words, mugwort is not a uniquely Japanese plant. What Japan developed most distinctively was the culinary system of pounding it into sweet rice cakes — a tradition stretching back over a thousand years.

Nutrition: a different green from matcha

According to Japan's Standard Tables of Food Composition, 100g of boiled yomogi contains roughly 7.8g of dietary fiber and about 6,000 micrograms of beta-carotene — comparable to carrots and surpassing many leafy greens. It is also rich in iron, folate, vitamin K, and chlorophyll, all linked in traditional Japanese folk medicine to blood-building and digestive benefits.

Yomogi and matcha do not have the same nutritional profile. Matcha leans on catechins, L-theanine, and a moderate caffeine kick — its appeal is alertness plus antioxidants. Yomogi leans on fiber, beta-carotene, and the absence of caffeine. Rather than a "premium versus budget" comparison, the two are best understood as different green ingredients with different functional axes.

Mugwort steam salons jumped 1.8x in three years

Yomogi's growth is not limited to food. A traditional warming therapy called yomogi-mushi — sitting over a steaming pot of dried mugwort — has spread rapidly in Japan, primarily among women seeking relief from poor circulation. According to FNN's reporting, the number of mugwort-steam salons across Japan grew by roughly 1.8x over the past three years.

It is worth being honest about the cultural origin here: yomogi-mushi is not a Japanese invention. The practice is widely understood to have originated in Korea (as ssuk-jjim 쑥찜) and China, where versions of it have existed for centuries. Japan is a relatively recent participant in this wellness category.

The same is true of mugwort lattes. In Seoul, ssuk lattes have been a fixture at trendy cafés like Center Coffee for years, and Korean mugwort powder is already being marketed in the United States as the "next traditional superfood." Japanese yomogi entering the global café conversation is, in many ways, catching up rather than leading.

What is happening, more accurately, is an East Asian green renaissance — Korea, Japan, and China all rediscovering mugwort more or less simultaneously, each tapping different parts of the wellness market.

A trading company veteran who quit to farm "weeds"

Mugwort's path forward is not without obstacles.

Hironori Morii, head of Fukayoshino Yomogi in Nara, told FNN that the unit price for raw mugwort is low and that most of the yomogi consumed in Japan is actually imported from China. Few Japanese growers can make a living from it.

One person trying to change that is Masafumi Shimizu. Five years ago, Shimizu was working at a trading company. He saw a business opportunity in the small scale of domestic mugwort production and quit to become a farmer. According to FNN, neighbors mocked him at first — "What are you going to do, grow weeds?"

His strategy was branding. He registered his mugwort under the trademark "Aozora Yomogi no Shimizu" ("Blue Sky Mugwort by Shimizu"), and rather than selling raw leaves, he produces and sells finished consumer goods like bath additives and culinary powder. By controlling the brand and the product format, he has been able to raise the unit price substantially. He told FNN: rather than selling cheap things cheaply, the goal is to add value and sell at a margin where everyone in the chain can be happy.

This is exactly the playbook the Japanese tea industry has been running for decades — Uji matcha, Yame gyokuro, Tamba black soybeans. Take a humble raw material, attach geography, technique, and trademark, then climb the value ladder. Yomogi is now starting that climb.

What it would actually take to be the "next matcha"

Matcha's global success was not inevitable. It rested on a stack of conditions: a centuries-old tea ceremony tradition; specific regional brands like Uji and Nishio; technical practices like shade-cultivation and stone-grinding; and crucially, adoption by global café chains like Starbucks.

For yomogi to truly cross over, several walls would need to be cleared.

The first is grading. Matcha has industry definitions ("ground tencha leaves") and tiers (ceremonial vs. culinary grade). Yomogi has none of this standardization. Without it, the same problem now plaguing matcha — cheap powdered green tea sold abroad as "matcha," sometimes called matcha laundering — could replicate itself in mugwort.

The second is regional branding. Higashiyoshino Village in Nara has a legend that the famed Buddhist monk Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi) ate the local mugwort, and cultivation in the area is believed to date back to the Heian period (794–1185 CE). That is a thousand-year story. Translating it into language that resonates with overseas consumers is the next job.

The third — and biggest — is differentiation from Korean ssuk, which already owns the international "mugwort latte" conversation. Japanese yomogi will likely need to lean into what is genuinely Japanese about it: the kusa-mochi tradition, the wagashi (Japanese confectionery) context, the tea-ceremony adjacency. That is the unique angle Korea cannot copy.

What about your country?

Behind the matcha boom, a nostalgic Japanese green herb is starting to spread its wings.

When you think about it, "a bitter, green, traditional ingredient that gets pounded into a paste, mixed with grain, or steeped into something hot" is not unique to East Asia at all. Italians have stinging-nettle (ortica) pasta. Mexicans have nopal cactus paddles. Brazilians have jambu. Eastern Europeans simmer sorrel into soup. North Africans cook molokhia. Even modern wellness culture's kale and spirulina fall into the same broad family of green, slightly bitter, traditionally medicinal foods.

So here is the question: in your country, what is the bitter green plant that grandmothers used to forage and turn into something delicious? Is the younger generation still eating it, or is it slipping away? Tell us in the comments.

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