Today, Explained - labubu matcha dubai chocolate

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

How TikTok reshaped the trend cycle. This episode was produced by Danielle Hewitt, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. A young woman holding an iced matcha latte. Photo by Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today explained Sean Romsferm, a thing about me is I don't drink coffee, but I can handle a matcha every now and then. Recently, I found myself in New York City at a very cute, straight out of Tokyo, tiny little matcha shop in Soho. And there was a line, of course, and one by one, I watched as almost every person ahead of me broke out their telephones and filmed like a mini documentary while getting it. their iced macha lattes. They were getting all the angles, selfies, regular camera, front-facing camera, peace signs, one with boo, one with the squad. And I was like, what is going on, you guys? It's a drink. And then I read that there was a worldwide matcha shortage. And then I was really like, what is going on? And it turns out La Bubu Macha Dubai Chocolate was going on. And for anyone who missed it, we're going to explain on the show today.

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All right, so we wanted to find out what's going on with macha, why it was seemingly everywhere this summer, why people were acting all Ken Burnsy about their beverages, why is there a shortage, is there a shortage? We asked Dr. Rebecca Corbett from the University of Southern California for the tea. she specializes in Japanese studies. Yes, there is a shortage of matcha right now. Like with any crop, the production cycle, it's cyclical, right?

Like it goes with the seasons. And so in late October and early November is when last year's crop is starting to run out and the new crop is about to hit the market. And I remember tea shops in Tokyo, where I was based, started putting signs up saying, you know, there's a matcha shortage. Each customer can only buy one can per day and things like that, and also warning that there would be price increases coming because of the shortage. Machia mania is sweeping the world.

Seems like everyone these days wants a cup of matcha, and there's so little supply to go around something. The Japan Ministry of Finance says the U.S. made up nearly 80% of the country's powdered green tea exports last year, 80%. Macha is powdered green tea. What's important to know is that all tea comes from the same plant. For green teas like matcha, the leaves are heated to prevent oxidation. That's what makes it different from black tea that is oxidised. Another important thing for matcha is that it's the freshest, youngest leaves of the plant

that are picked to go into matcha production. And they're picked by hand every year in spring. and then they're steamed and they're crushed and dried and those leaves are called Tencha and then their ground to become matcha. The grinding process

is also quite expensive and slow so there's these huge stone grinders that are used and they can cost like one piece of that equipment costs like tens of thousands of dollars and then we also have to consider that the amount of arable land available in Japan for growing tea is limited as well.

So it's not super easy for producers to just scale up because there's been this unprecedented spike in global demand. How long have humans been drinking matcha and which humans? Certainly over a thousand years. Macha's the Japanese term. But if we think of powdered tea, it was originally being drunk in China. It then came to Japan a few hundred years later in the hands of Buddhist monks.

So this was in around 1250, so mid-13th century, that matja comes to Japan from China. And then matcha drinking or powdered tea drinking really falls out of popularity and use in China about 100 years later or late 14th century. And it's only then for the next 700 years or so being, produced and drunk in Japan, and now we're in this global matcha boom where producers in other countries, including China, are starting to reenter the market. When did matcha really arrive in the West? It doesn't feel like it was actually this summer. It was earlier in that, wasn't it? Yeah, it wasn't this summer. I think it's just, like, exploded this summer. And I would say,

as a rough date, the matcha boom started around. 2021, but we can actually look back earlier than that. I have seen clips from the Today Show in 2015. So, are you ready to give it a try? How much do you have to consume? They did a little story on like matra as the newest superfood trend and they made some for the hosts to drink. And Al Roker's face when he drank the macho was like, yeah, he was not a fan. Oh. You guys all think it's bitter. It's like, why don't you hand me a handful of grass to eat?

It's healthy. It's the same. It starts bad and it gets worse. Rude, Al. Yeah. What took the West so long to catch up on macha? It has taken a while for Westerners to decide that they actually really like matcha, probably because these days people are mixing it a lot with sugar and milk and other flavorings.

I used to hate match match until I figured out how to make it to eat. This easy five-minute strawberry macho latte is my favorite drink of the summer. Salted honey, cold foam iced macho latte. Pumpkin spice ice machin latte. Mango and liloquois syrup almond milk mashal latte with a macadamia nut, pineapple cold foam. I would say though that in Charnu, a Japanese tea ceremony, which is an entire cultural practice and aesthetic practice based around preparing and drinking matcha, and we don't add anything to it, that has been very popular globally since the post-World War

2 period, so since the 1950s. But that's a very niche-specific practice. There's some thousands of non-Japanese and Japanese people around the world who practice that, but it's completely separate to the global macho boom and this huge rise in demand that we've seen since about Surely it can't just be the fact that people discovered that you can sweeten macha with sugar or honey that's led to the matcha craze of our particular moment. Was there something else going on? It's kind of caught those of us who work in the field a little bit by surprise as well. So I can't give you one clear answer. I think there's a confluence of reasons.

I think it is the kind of cool Japan image. The post-pandemic period, we've seen a huge tourism boom to Japan that's being fueled by the week yen. So that may be related as well. And then I think it's definitely clear that social media, especially Instagram and TikTok, that are very visual, have played a significant role. I mean, tell me where you can get a strawberry mantra that looks this majestic and magical. And it's not hard to. understand why because you have you have this beautiful bright green beverage right look at her she is

beautiful i'm a proud mother it's aesthetically pleasing it kind of looks fresh it looks natural this is how you're going to make a matcha that's amazing for your gut skin hair and nails all of the things that we associate with healthfulness i cut out coffee for 30 days and switched to matcha and here's what happened relax chill breathe have a match and then people also borrow from the aesthetics of Japanese tea ceremony in this way that looks sort of minimalist and trendy. So I think it's all like tied together in this sort of cool Japan slash appeal of East Asian culture

with the healthiness, healthfulness of matcha and then the just the role of social media. Do we know what the Japanese think of the Western adoption of their cherished drink? So what's interesting is that I would say some of the stuff that's happening in the global matchab boom, it's not just confined to the West. It's actually also happening in Japan and Japanese influences are involved in it as well. I would say that the main group I would be thinking about is people who are tea practitioners. So people who enroll in a school of Japanese tea ceremony and study it, because they have always been the core matcha drinkers, both inside and outside Japan.

And so among that group, like a lot of us are feeling that kind of bemusement and, but also frustration, and like we're kind of waiting for the boom to die a little bit so we can just go back to like the normal macha prices. But at the same time, I think we also feel like we want to share our knowledge with people and we just wish people were perhaps a little more interested in understanding this cultural practice that focuses on mindfulness and creating an atmosphere of peacefulness and tranquility, which is quite different from what's happening in the global macho boom. Dr. Rebecca Corbett, History, USC, go Bruins.

It's not just macha. It's also Dubai Chocolate and Labubu. Why the TikTok trends seem to be getting more and more random when we're back on Today Explained. Hey, Alex Heath here, founder of Sources. News and a contributor at The Verge. And I'm Ellis Hamburger. Tech reporter turned industry insider, working closely with today's hottest AI startups.

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Today, explain. My name is Amanda Moll. I'm a senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, and I write our buying power column about consumer culture. And you wrote about a strange group of items that had a very big summer. Well, I have to give full credit for this to Zoomer Internet users who sort of created this grouping of trends on their own. The Macha Lattees go along with Dubai Chocolate. Viral Dubai chocolate bars.

And the boo-boos. Oh, my gosh, this is a secret. And Love Island. And Benson Boone. And, you know, you can sort of spiral out from there. Hush, little macha, don't you cry. Everything's going to be Benson Boon Crumble Cookie

La Boo Boo Dubai This set of like weird recent trends I think is indicative of how weird the trend cycles have gotten in consumer goods You know in the past Trends have forever seemed a little bit weird

Because the average person doesn't have like a ton of insight On like where something Ultimately came from that is suddenly everywhere You know in the Devil Wars product The scene about cerulean. What you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue. It's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And blue sweaters sort of demonstrates that dynamic and that's existed for a long time. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from

the fashion industry when in fact you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff. But when you get down, to it, a lot of like sort of random-seeming trends in consumer goods from decades past have like a pretty easy way to explain them if you dig a little bit. Trends recently seem to have like even less connective tissue to culture at large than they used to, which is a real change in how trends are produced, how people become aware of things, why people buy things. And I think that Lubu's and macho lattes and Dubai chocolate and Benson Boone and crumble cookies and all of these things are sort of, um, that have arisen at like sort of the same time to each other are, are, um, good

examples of this phenomenon. So what binds all these things together, Dubai chocolate, macha latte, la boo-boos, Benson Boone is that they're kind of weird and they all are getting noticed. in a kind of weird ecosystem called TikTok? Yes. A lot of this is TikTok-fueled, but in general, this I think, is a phenomenon

of algorithmic social media because you, when you interact with things on these platforms, when you're presented with things on these platforms, you have, like, very little context. So you don't have the sort of traditional methods of learning about new pieces of culture, whether that's like word of mouth

or dissemination through, traditional media. You just have a series of things that you're presented with with no context and no connective tissue to anything else, really. Macha 24-karrut-Laboo do-bye chocolate Benson Boon Beam. It's not clocking to you that I'm standing on moonbeams. Get ready with me to try the new golden Labubu, Dubai chocolate, Macha Latte, Moonbeam ice cream, boba, crumble cookie on my biweekly trip to Japan. And that means that the things that catch on, the things that end up getting seen by a large audience, it's very, very difficult to trace. where they came from, why they became interesting to so many people, or what any of it means.

The algorithm certainly feels like a helpful explanation of how these random things sort of took the summer by storm. But I think you write in your piece about the fact that, like, we have seen stuff like these things become popular before. Like, I think the best example might be not Benson Boone, but like the bean. baby because it's so close to a liboo-boo-boo. And that happened, of course, in an age before algorithms. What was, I forget, algorithms existed, just not the kinds we have now. What was the difference then? And why did beanie babies happen then? Yeah. Well, Beanie babies are a fascinating story because they seem so random and so from nowhere and so one of one. But they're actually a really good demonstration of how trends. are traditionally disseminated through culture. They came around as collectibles sold in gift shops and stationary stores by a, you know, a relatively small toy company who was looking to increase sales by, you know, stoking demand

through the sort of traditional, well-known marketing tactics of, you know, false scarcity and limited editions and things like that. Here's a quick lesson on this Beanie Craze, a company called Todd. makes them, releases them with different names. They're all named after something, an animal, an animal, basically. They haven't done like funguses. Then retires them one at a time. Because they were an inexpensive item you could pick up at the mall for your child.

And now they're become collector's items. But they really took off because eBay was launching at the same time. So Americans were presented with this idea. that anybody could resell anything to anybody else in the country and you could do it from home and you could, you know, quit your day job by selling random stuff. From doctors, lawyers, just a regular white collar, blue collar workers, and they all want beanie babies. But isn't that cute? What would you rather have a new car or peanut the elephant? Beanie babies as like a financial instrument that was the response to a new type of commerce.

that's what really fueled them. And how does that compare then to like the Lububu thing? Well, the Labibu thing is sort of fascinating because in the sort of traditional trend environment, like with Beanie Babies, it really mattered if the thing you were selling or buying was real. Here's the certificate of authenticity right here, right? Correct. And this is what people need nowadays, isn't it? Well, it's a good idea if they're buying an expensive beanie.

In this video, I'm comparing a authentic Thai beanie baby Bronte, the dinosaur, versus two counterfeit bronties. People had sort of like rational beliefs about, and by rational, I don't mean reasonable. Let me be clear. They had reasons that were rational enough for wanting particular dolls at particular prices. With the Lububo's, there's not quite. much of that at all. In fact, there's very real demand for real lububoos, but alongside them, the market for fakes, which are, you know, adorably called lafoufus, has really exploded. The craze is fueled by people just wanting to clip one of these things onto their outfits.

It's not about the loboos themselves, really. Is that something else that binds all of these weird trends together, that they're all kind of, I don't like, no judgment, but like a little infantile. We're talking about like sweet treats and toys and Benson Boone. Yeah, I think so. The way that algorithmically mediated social platforms work is by sort of collapsing your capacity to understand the context of what you're looking at. And so if you're being served things that like you don't know why you're seeing this,

so you don't really know what it is. And then suddenly that thing is everywhere, you know, you sort of lose your capacity to use some of your more mature emotional skills to limit your reactions because you get sort of a split second to react to things. That is why stuff on social media tends to do the best and tends to get the most engagement if it's, like, highly stimulating, if it's colorful or incredibly delicious-looking or outrageous or maddening or offensive. Like, these are the sort of like emotional reactions that the algorithmic social media values

because they stoke engagement, they increase people's time on the platforms. So things that do well in these environments are sort of like maximally stimulating. And that means that you're going to get sold a lot of things that are mostly sold to kids because the sort of like maximal, colorful, sweet, cuddly, fun stuff is like generally made for children. How do we feel about that, Amanda? You know, I think that's pretty bad. I think that that's not doing anybody any favors culturally.

But I think that the sort of like persistent interest in staying power in like a few of these trends, including Lububoos, including Dubai chocolate, including macho lattes, I think is also like indicative of a real desire on the part of people who use these platforms to like try to make sense of the internet and online life in like real life, in physical reality. because these are all, by and large, these are all, like, objects or things or experiences that, like, you need to, like, get up and leave your house and go have. They are things that exist in physical reality that you're looking for or trying to get or wanting to try. And I think that, like, that these are the things that ultimately go the furthest for people, I think is a real indication that, there's still something that people want to do to reconcile their online lives with their offline lives. Those are not really separate anymore, and I think that some of these sort of like viral objects

are a way for people to sort of like emotionally, intellectually, like bridge that gap that they are constantly straddling. It's like a consensus experience. If you're having a macho latte, you are having an experience that a lot of people with a lot of different feeds than you have, like, also had recently. And it, I think, you know, gives people a little bit of a sense of participation in a sense of that the stuff they look at on their phone, like, is real. And is that a good thing? I mean, we talked about, like, the infantilization of adults being a bad thing, but is getting out and making, I don't know,

I don't know, a thing you see on your phone, a tangible consensus reality, good for us? I think it's a positive indicator that people still want a little bit of consensus reality, that people aren't entirely sort of like feed-brained at this point. I think it is indicative that people aren't like fully satisfied just with seeing things online and participating online. I think that any indicator that we have that people, want to have normal, physical, social experiences with each other is probably a good one. Amanda Mull, have a good one at Bloomberg.com.

Danielle Hewitt produced our program today thanks to Kendall Cunningham at Vox for her help. Amna Al-Sadi edited Patrick Boyd mixed. Laura Bullard maintains that the funny bone of the universe bends towards Labubu. The rest of today explained is Noel King, but also Peter Balinon Rosen, Denise Guerra, Abishai Artsy, Kelly Wessinger, Harimawaddy, Arianna Aspuru, Devin Schwartz, Adrian Lilly, and Miles Bryan. Our deputy executive producer is Jolie Myers. Our executive executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more about our shows, you can go to

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