The company was founded in 2021 and is headquartered in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka prefecture.
Blue Farm’s business models: MatchaaS and ChaaS
Readers outside Japan may be better acquainted with matcha’s global popularity than this Japanese writer is. Interest in it grew as travel to Japan picked up after the pandemic, and related posts began circulating on social media. Last year brought shortages of tea leaves and sharp price rises in Japan, with knock-on effects reported abroad.
Raising production, however, is extremely difficult. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun reports that the area of tea fields in Japan’s main producing prefectures stood at 25,400 hectares (about 63,000 acres) in 2025, a fall of 10,000 hectares from 2015. Behind the decline is a shrinking number of people working in production, and given the further fall in Japan’s population to come, this will not be easily reversed.
Against that backdrop, Blue Farm’s approach is to secure tea fields itself and farm them organically. It forecasts annual demand from the wholesalers, retailers and cafés that become its customers, calculates the area of tea field required, and secures the raw material accordingly. Blue Farm calls this arrangement “MatchaaS” (matcha as a service).
There is a second business model: a corporate service built on the tea fields themselves. A client company signs a contract to conserve a particular Blue Farm tea field and is supplied with data on the natural environment there, including how much CO₂ it absorbs. Beyond making its environmental contribution tangible, the client can buy drinks made from leaves harvested at the field it has contracted. For several decades now, a good many people in Japanese offices have drunk green tea out of PET bottles. Blue Farm instead puts the tea it makes here into cartons and aluminium bottles, creating conditions in which the packaging is easier to recycle. The company calls this set of services “ChaaS” (tea fields as a service).
Alongside the funding announcement, Blue Farm disclosed that it had established a subsidiary, Blue Field, positioned as the group’s agricultural production arm.
Local companies join the Series A
Participants in the Series A included AKaFUJI, a venture-capital firm; Suzuyo Shoji, the trading arm of Suzuyo Group, a well-known Shizuoka company; and TOKAI Holdings, which runs infrastructure businesses centred on the prefecture.
The proceeds will be used as follows.
- Securing tea fields and the production base
- Strengthening production, processing and supply
- Taking MatchaaS into overseas markets
- Strengthening data and organisational foundations
Daisuke Aoki, Blue Farm’s president, commented: “Drawing on the base of co-operation with tea fields and growers that we have built up through ChaaS, we will use this Series A round to begin the full-scale overseas expansion of MatchaaS.”
