The Philippines has suspended the export of fresh ube as the purple yam’s popularity across Asia and beyond has collided with a problem that can’t be solved at the pace of a viral food trend: there simply isn’t enough of it.
Ube, the fragrant purple yam traditionally used in Filipino sweets, has become a sought-after ingredient across Asia, with South Korean food chains and Singaporean bars among the latest to embrace it.
As international demand has grown and Philippine production fallen, the agriculture department has suspended the export of fresh ube and planting material to protect supplies needed to grow more of the crop, according to the Manila Standard.
“We severely lack planting material ourselves and we don’t want to export it to countries that could use Philippine ube varieties to compete with us,” agriculture secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr said.
Years of rapidly rising international demand have pushed ube far beyond Filipino food circles. Now, the subtly sweet yam has been turning up in lattes, doughnuts, cream buns, cocktails, and ice cream across East and Southeast Asia.
In the South Korean capital Seoul, ube has become hard to miss, as cafes and bakeries have embraced it as the latest photogenic flavour to follow matcha and Dubai chocolate.
Popular coffee and bakery brands like Twosome Place, Knotted, Starbucks, and Paris Baguette, as well as convenience-store chain CU have all introduced ube products, including an ube Basque cheesecake and a Dubai-style ube doughnut this year, according to The Korea Times.
Yonsei Dairy’s ube cream bread sold more than 50,000 units in four days, while Knotted experienced fluctuations in its supply of ube powder when demand surged earlier this year, according to The Asia Business Daily.
At a Philippine embassy event in Seoul earlier this year, visitors queued for ube champorado, a creamy purple-yam porridge similar to Korean juk, and ube milk tea, with all 200 prepared servings taken soon after the function opened.
Similarly in Singapore, ube has gone from a niche Filipino ingredient to a near staple on drinks menus. Dylan Yap, co-founder of drinks distributor JD SIP, told Channel News Asia that when he began pitching ube cream liqueur to the city’s bars in 2024, many businesses had never heard of the ingredient and were sceptical about it.
Barely two years later, the liqueur was being sold in about 150 bars, restaurants, and nightclubs, with sales going from 500 bottles a quarter to about 500 bottles a month within eight months. “Initially, we reached out to many bars, but now, bars are looking for us,” Yap said.
Ube is now caught in the same food-trend cycle that turned matcha and pistachio from specialist products to global obsessions, with social media helping spread demand far faster than supply can respond.
Native to the Philippines, ube is prized for its naturally vivid purple colour and a mild, creamy flavour with nutty and vanilla-like notes. Producing it at scale, however, is less straightforward than turning it into a social media-friendly drink.
The yam takes six to 12 months to mature, with cultivation requiring manual tilling and well-drained soil, according to the Philippine Root Crop Research and Training Center. Farmers also need tubers or other planting material to establish the next crop, and a shortage of quality planting material, along with erratic rainfall and rising temperatures, has become one of the biggest constraints in expanding production.
Philippine ube production fell to 12,483 metric tonnes in 2025, down from 13,381 tonnes the previous year and 14,000 tonnes in 2021, according to government data. At the same time, exports of ube and ube-based products reached about 1.7 million kilograms in 2025, up 20.4 per cent from a year earlier, generating $3.06m in export revenue.
Teresita Emilio, a farmer in Benguet province in northern Philippines, told the New York Times that she once had so much ube that she would throw some away. Now, almost all of her product is sold and she barely saves what she needs as planting material for the next season as growing ube from seed is slow and unreliable.
Ube is increasingly being processed into powder, paste, and jam for overseas markets, and the tuber itself is being exported to be used in everything from drinks and pastries to ice creams and cocktails.
The export suspension will cover fresh ube and propagative planting material whether shipments are intended for consumption, planting, or research. The bureau has also stopped issuing the certificates required for affected shipments, according to the Philippine Star.
The government is trying to expand domestic production before pushing exports further, with the agriculture department distributing planting material to farmers and backing tissue culture, faster propagation methods, and community nurseries. It distributed planting material to over 900 farmers earlier this year. Researchers are now also working on varieties that can be grown year-round.
The export ban is intended as a temporary safeguard while these efforts gather pace.
China and Vietnam have already been expanding their own purple-yam production, creating potential competition for the Philippines.
There is another problem: not everything sold as ube is Philippine ube. Purple sweet potato and other yams are increasingly used as cheaper substitutes as demand rises.
This makes the race to scale up a gamble as Ube’s long cultivation time leaves Philippine farmers trying to respond to a food trend that can move to the next viral flavour in a fraction of that time.
Jeremy Chua, chief technical officer at biotechnology company Bio Ark Global, told Channel News Asia that farmers in Southeast Asia often took a wait-and-see approach before switching crops.
“In Southeast Asia, it's really a choice of what I know, and a question of ‘Will this feed my family?’” he said.
For Filipinos, though, ube is not simply the latest ingredient to arrive on the global dessert circuit. It has long been tied to home cooking, celebrations, and regional food traditions, and its rise abroad has given Filipino chefs a reason to celebrate while also raising questions.
Chef Rhea Castro SyCip told Philstar ube was considered “sacred” to the people in Bohol, an island province in the central Philippines, where it became an important food source during the Japanese occupation.
She welcomed the attention, but worried that careless use of artificial ube flavouring could eventually leave consumers with something that no longer resembled the natural ingredient.
Chef Sau Del Rosario said that while the international attention was “one of the most thrilling culinary developments” for the Philippines, farmers were already struggling to keep pace with a crop that was seasonal, slow-growing, labour-intensive, and climate-sensitive.
