Buying guide
Seven tins, priced per gram in Canadian dollars from each seller’s own listing on one day at one exchange rate. That much is checkable. The tasting has not happened, so there are no verdicts here and nothing is ranked.
Nothing on this page has been tasted yet. The prices are real — read off each seller's own product page and converted at a dated Bank of Canada rate — but a price is not a verdict. There is no ranking here, and there will not be one until seven tins have been bought, decanted by somebody else and drunk blind, exactly as described at how we test. Until then this page can tell you what these cost per gram and what each seller claims about them, and nothing more.
Disclosure: We buy the matcha we review. Some links on this page earn us a commission at no extra cost to you — it never changes a ranking or a verdict. How this works.
Shortlisted
The Kyoto reference point, in the smallest size anyone sells it in
ceremonial · Uji, Kyoto · 20 g box · harvest: not stated
$ 0.96/g
listed · $19 a tin, before shipping
Not yet tasted
Check price at Ippodo Tea (opens in a new tab)Shortlisted
The cheapest first-harvest Uji on this list per gram
ceremonial · Uji, Kyoto · 1.4 oz (40 g) · harvest: first
$ 0.87/g
listed · $35 a tin, before shipping
Not yet tasted
Check price at Naoki Matcha (opens in a new tab)Shortlisted
Certified organic, and it ships from inside North America
ceremonial · organic · Blend — Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Shizuoka, Uji · 30 g tin · harvest: first
$ 0.93/g
listed · $28 a tin, before shipping
Not yet tasted
Check price at Encha (opens in a new tab)| Matcha | Grade | Origin as stated | Harvest | Listed price | Per gram, est. | Buy |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Naoki Matcha Organic All Purpose Culinary · 1.4 oz (40 g) | culinary organic | Not stated | Not stated | US$14.99≈ $21 | $0.52 | Check price for Naoki Matcha Organic All Purpose Culinary (opens in a new tab) |
| Encha Barista Grade Latte · 30 g tin | culinary organic | Blend — Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Shizuoka, Uji | Second | US$11.99≈ $17 | $0.56 | Check price for Encha Barista Grade Latte (opens in a new tab) |
| Naoki Matcha Superior Blend · 1.4 oz (40 g) | ceremonial | Uji, Kyoto | First | US$24.99≈ $35 | $0.87 | Check price for Naoki Matcha Superior Blend (opens in a new tab) |
| Encha Ceremonial Grade · 30 g tin | ceremonial organic | Blend — Kagoshima, Miyazaki, Shizuoka, Uji | First | US$19.99≈ $28 | $0.93 | Check price for Encha Ceremonial Grade (opens in a new tab) |
| Ippodo Tea Sayaka-no-mukashi, 20 g box · 20 g box | ceremonial | Uji, Kyoto | Not stated | JP¥2,200≈ $19 | $0.96 | Check price for Ippodo Tea Sayaka-no-mukashi, 20 g box (opens in a new tab) |
| Naoki Matcha Chiran Harvest · 1.4 oz (40 g) | ceremonial | Chiran, Kagoshima | First | US$33.99≈ $47 | $1.18 | Check price for Naoki Matcha Chiran Harvest (opens in a new tab) |
| Naoki Matcha Nishio Bloom · 1.4 oz (40 g) | ceremonial | Nishio, Aichi | First | US$39.99≈ $56 | $1.39 | Check price for Naoki Matcha Nishio Bloom (opens in a new tab) |
These are the sellers' own listed prices, read from their product pages on August 13, 2026, converted at the Bank of Canada daily average exchange rate for August 12, 2026. Shipping and tax are not included, and nothing here has been tasted — so the per-gram column compares what these cost to order, not what they are worth. Origin, harvest and grade are quoted from the seller.
Ceremonial grade spans a factor of about 1.6× on this shortlist alone — from $0.87 a gram to $1.39 a gram, all of it sold as ceremonial, all of it first harvest where the seller says so at all. The word on the tin is not doing the work people think it does, which is the argument the grades guide makes at length.
Culinary grade costs between about 37% and 60% of ceremonial, not a tenth of it. The cheapest culinary tin here works out at $0.52 a gram against $0.87 for the cheapest ceremonial. That is a real saving on a latte habit and a smaller one than the marketing on either side implies. It is also the reason to own both rather than compromise on one.
2 of the 7 tins will not tell you when the leaf was picked. Harvest is the single most useful thing a seller can state and the cheapest thing to leave out, so the column is on the table above with the silences marked. Read it before the price column.
The cheapest ceremonial matcha per gram is a trap, and the arithmetic proves it. Encha lists the same ceremonial powder in a 500 g bag at US$189.99 — about $0.53 a gram at the rate used above, which undercuts every tin in the table and matches culinary grade. It is also 250 bowls. At one bowl a day that bag is eight months old before you finish it, and matcha holds its sweetness for four to six weeks after opening. Price per gram is the right way to compare tins of a similar size and the wrong way to compare a tin against a sack.
Work out what you will do with it first. If you are drinking it in water, buy first-harvest ceremonial from a named region and expect to pay for it. If it is going under milk, buy culinary and put the difference in the bank. Then compare on price per gram in Canadian dollars with shipping included, not on the number on the tin — a $30 30 g tin and a $60 100 g bag are not the comparison they look like.
Four things, and none of them is the word on the front. The first is harvest: the spring flush, ichibancha, has spent the winter building sugars and amino acids, and later flushes have not. The second is shade. Growers cover the bushes for roughly the last three weeks before picking, which starves the leaf of light, keeps the theanine in it and holds the bitter catechins down. That is where sweetness in matcha comes from — not from anything added.
The third is what gets ground. Real matcha is milled from tencha: steamed leaf with the stems and veins taken out first. Powdered whole sencha is a different, cheaper product that is legal to sell and often sold as the same thing. The fourth is the mill. Granite wheels turn slowly enough to take about an hour to produce a tin, and slowly enough not to cook the powder; a high-speed grinder is faster, hotter, and you can taste the difference as a flat, toasted note.
You can check exactly one of those four in a shop, which is why colour matters so much — the grades guide covers the rest, and how to spot fake matcha covers what to do when a listing tells you none of it.
Vivid jade
First harvest, well shaded, recently milled. What you are paying for.
Grass
Good everyday matcha. A shorter shading, or a few weeks open.
Olive
A later picking, or a tin that has been sitting with air in it.
Khaki
Culinary grade. Fine under milk and sugar, thin and bitter alone.
Yellow-brown
Oxidised. Stale, or barely shaded to begin with. Do not drink it straight.
Colour dulls with later harvests, less shade, and air. It is the one grade check a label cannot fake — the other five are here.
Start with the good news, because almost every guide gets this wrong: there is no duty on matcha. Green tea sits under heading 0902 of the Customs Tariff, and the Most-Favoured-Nation rate on it is Free. Japan also has a preferential rate with Canada, and that one is Free as well. No tariff applies to the tea itself at any value.
What applies is sales tax. Goods sent from anywhere other than the United States or Mexico are exempt from tax and duty only up to CAD $20, under the Courier Imports Remission Order and its postal equivalent. A $20 tin arrives with nothing owing. A $60 tin is assessed GST, or HST if you live in an HST province, on its value — and then Canada Post charges $9.95 to collect it. Couriers charge their own brokerage instead, and it is usually worse.
So the real premium on importing directly is the tax plus roughly ten dollars, once per parcel — which is an argument for ordering one large tin rather than three small ones, and against it if the tin will go stale first. Matcha oxidises from the moment the seal breaks. A 100 g tin is better value per gram and worse value in the cup if it takes you five months to drink, which is why the per-gram column in the table above is a starting point and not the whole answer.
Tax rules change. These were checked against CBSA on 12 August 2026; if you are reading this much later, check them again before trusting the arithmetic.
Every tin is bought at retail with our own money, decanted by someone else so the tasting is blind, and drunk as usucha in one sitting at a kitchen counter. The full protocol — grams, water temperature, the order, what we refuse to claim — is published in advance at how we test, so it cannot be rewritten afterwards to suit a result.