Costco's Green Teabags vs Japanese Greentea Co's Teabags - What are the differences? Q&A

It's actually a meaningful difference, not just aesthetics. Flat square bags compress the leaves into a thin sheet, which means the tea can't fully expand when hot water hits it. The water mostly washes around the outside of the packed leaves rather than circulating through them. Pyramid bags give the leaves room — when the water hits, the leaves unfurl, rotate in the bag, and release their flavor more completely. You can taste it in a side-by-side: pyramid bags brew with more body and aroma at the same steep time.

This matters more for higher-grade leaf, which is why we use pyramid bags for our Gokuzyo Aracha tea bags. Mass-market teabags often contain dust and fannings (the small broken bits left from sorting whole leaves), which extract fast and don't need expansion space. Whole or larger-cut leaves do — they're slower to release flavor, and a pyramid bag respects that.

There's a real safety difference, and it's been getting more attention. Many mass-market teabags — including Itoen, Lipton, and most supermarket brands — use a fine plastic mesh (often nylon or PET) as the bag material. When you steep these in near-boiling water, research from McGill University in 2019 showed that a single plastic teabag can release billions of microplastic and nanoplastic particles into your cup. The long-term health effects of consuming microplastics are still being studied, but most people would prefer not to drink them.

Soilon is a plant-based mesh (made from corn starch) that's industrially compostable and doesn't shed microplastics into hot water. It's also genuinely biodegradable — the bag breaks down in commercial compost, which traditional teabags don't. We pay more per bag for Soilon, but the trade-off feels right.

If you don't want to switch teabag brands, the alternative is loose leaf — even a generic stainless steel infuser sidesteps the plastic question entirely. We sell paper filter bags too if you want something disposable but plastic-free.

Tea is unusually sensitive to soil — the leaves absorb minerals and even subtle organic notes from the dirt they grow in. Most Japanese tea farms use standard fertilizer programs, which produces classic green tea flavor: vegetal, slightly bitter, astringent on the finish. Our farm in Shizuoka mixes sugarcane fiber into the soil instead. The sugarcane breaks down slowly and feeds the soil with a particular mineral profile that softens the bitterness and brings out a sweeter, rounder finish.

It's not a flavoring — there's no sweetness added to the tea. The plant just expresses differently when the soil under it is different. We've worked with Shizuoka University on the soil chemistry for over 15 years, and the team adjusts the mix every season based on what the data shows. The result is what we serve in our Gokuzyo Aracha tea bags — a noticeably less bitter, more rounded green tea than typical supermarket Japanese tea.

This soil approach is part of why we won the Global Tea Championship three years running. The flavor difference is subtle when you describe it, but obvious when you taste it next to a Costco Itoen.

Honestly, it depends what you're using the tea for. If you drink green tea like coffee — fast, hot, just for the caffeine and antioxidants — Costco Itoen is fine. It's mass-produced from blended leaves across multiple farms and seasons, but it's clean tea and won't actively taste bad. We carried Itoen in our office for years before starting the company.

If you're someone who can taste the difference between a regional coffee bean and a generic supermarket grind, you'll taste the difference here too. Our 50-bag Gokuzyo Aracha pack is single-farm tea from Shizuoka, single-year harvest, sugarcane-fed soil, biodegradable Soilon mesh — none of which Itoen does. Per-bag, we cost more, but you're getting a different category of tea, not a marginally better version of the same one. For daily morning tea where you actually pay attention to what you're drinking, the upgrade is worth it. For volume drinking at the office, Costco might still be the right call.

If you go through a lot, the 100-bag pack brings the per-bag price down meaningfully. Many of our customers start with the 50-bag, decide they like it, and switch to the 100.

Yes, our teabags are designed to give a good second steep — and arguably a third for some people. Mass-market teabags can't really do this; the dust and fannings inside extract everything in the first 90 seconds, and any later cup is mostly hot water with a tea hint. Whole and larger-cut leaves like ours release flavor in waves, so the second steep tastes different from the first but still genuinely tea-like.

For the second steep, use slightly hotter water and steep about 1 minute longer than the first. The first cup is brighter and grassier; the second is mellower and a touch sweeter, since some of the astringency has already extracted out. A lot of Japanese drinkers actually prefer the second cup.

After the second cup, the bag is mostly spent. You can squeeze it gently for a third cup if you're committed, but the flavor falls off sharply by then. Put the leaves in your compost or sprinkle them onto plants — Japanese tea leaves are great soil amendments for camellias and gardenias.