Last December, Pantone crowned “Cloud Dancer,” a billowy shade of white, as the Color of the Year for 2026. Just a few months later, there is evidence to suggest that the go-to hue specialists may have staged their latest coronation a shade prematurely.
From coffee shops in New York to bakeries in Sydney and beauty retailers in London, a purple reign is taking root across the globe. Ranging from vivid violet to light lavender, the exact tone varies but it can be traced back to the Philippines.
More specifically, to just below the archipelago’s surface to a native species of yam. It’s a starchy root vegetable with many names — dioscorea alata, uwhi, Guyana arrowroot — but is most often known locally, and increasingly internationally, as ube.
Meaning “tuber” in Tagalog, a language spoken across the Philippines, ube (pronounced oo-beh) is becoming an increasingly lucrative Filipino export as the rest of the world seeks to sate its appetite for the earthy purple ingredient with a nutty or vanilla-like taste.
Almost 1.7 million kilograms of ube products, worth over $3.2 million, were exported by the Southeast Asian country last year, according to data shared with CNN by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) of the Philippines, a 20.4% rise from 2024.
Nearly half of those ube exports, roughly 956,000 kg worth $1.5 million, went to the United States. That’s double the volume the US imported the previous year, surpassing the five next biggest markets — Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and New Zealand — combined.
Ube-r popular
Look no further than Starbucks, which rolled out an iced ube coconut macchiato across its US stores earlier this month as a “trending” addition to its refreshed spring menu.
Citing its popularity last year among customers at the coffee chain’s Reserve stores — flagship locations with unique drink offerings — Starbucks has added even more ube products in Europe, centering it in both iced and traditional vanilla lattes.
Some variations are infused with matcha, the Japanese green powdered tea that took the world by storm across the last decade, starring in almost 700,000 TikToks (aka MatchaTok) by last September.
Sure enough, videos of users sampling newly released ube drinks — which have also been launched this month by UK-based coffee-shop chain Costa— are already rippling across the social media platform.
The parallels in two particularly picturesque products becoming viral hits are not a coincidence to Bettina Makalintal, a senior reporter at food and dining culture website Eater.
“It’s that immediate visual impact,” Makalintal, who was born in the Philippines before moving to the US at five years old, told CNN.
“Even if there’s something that’s very familiar and simple, if the color is different or exciting — like the rainbow bagel, like the acai bowl, like strawberries that are paler than a regular strawberry, like matcha — it helps bring that appeal.
“Ube felt like an obvious candidate based on both, ‘Here’s a new flavor that’s not very challenging to people, but also fits into this desire to have aesthetically pleasing food.’”
Drinks are only one branch of the ube supply chain. When it is mashed and boiled with milk, sugar and butter, a thick spread called ube halaya — also known as halayang ube — is formed.
While a standalone dessert, the jam is also used as a topping, filling or base in a range of desserts. Kora, a Filipino pop-up bakery in New York City, amassed a 10,000-person waiting list in 2021 due in part to the overwhelming popularity of its ube brioche doughnut. A permanent shop opened in Queens last March.
Cheesecake, flan and ice cream likewise boast ube-inspired variations across the globe, while Trader Joe’s ube mochi pancake and waffle mix has proven to be a smash hit upon its limited-time release each year since 2020.
Even the beauty world is capitalizing on the trend, with cosmetics brand Huda Beauty launching a collection of ube-inspired products, including setting powder and lip gloss, globally in January 2025.
“Today it [ube] is everywhere,” UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in the Philippines Lionel Dabbadie said in a speech at the International Farm Tourism Conference in the Filipino city of Baguio earlier this month.
“Ube ice cream in New York, ube cakes in London, ube lattes in Tokyo. It is an incredible success story.”
Strain
Yet that success is putting huge pressure on those tasked with ensuring supply can keep pace with the world’s accelerating demand for the purple yam.
Annual ube production in the Philippines has dropped from above 15 million kilograms in 2021 to roughly 14 million kilograms across the last two years, according to the New York Times, with the majority of that produce being set aside for national consumption. In recent years, Vietnam and China have accelerated their production of purple yams, the New York Times added.
Unlike rice, corn and other mass-produced crops, ube is typically grown on small, seasonal patches of farmland. With many plots spread across the Central Visayas region, the tuber requires ample moisture throughout its growing period before being harvested roughly 10 to 11 months after planting, between November and February.
That makes it particularly vulnerable to changes in conditions — not ideal in a country that is becoming increasingly accustomed to extreme weather.
Last November, Typhoon Fung-wong was the 21st named storm in a year to impact the Philippines, as the climate crisis continues to disproportionately affect the Global South.
Additionally, many farmers are seeking to cash in on the current global interest in ube by selling as much of their harvest as possible while prices are higher, a February report by British multinational research firm BMI found. With ube typically grown by burying cut-up pieces of the tuber, the subsequent shortage of material for the following harvest is only deepening supply issues, the report argued.
All these factors contribute to the increasing difficulty for Makalintal and wider Filipino American communities, like those in the “Little Manila” enclave of Woodside, Queens, to source authentic ube.
“Many people that I’ve talked to, most of the Filipinos I know, can’t really get the real root vegetable,” Makalintal, who lives in New York City, said.
“Demand has grown, but the availability and import market hasn’t necessarily kept up.”
Roots
Beyond logistics, there is a creeping concern raised by ube’s global uptake: that a beloved national staple is becoming detached from its cultural roots.
Generations of Filipinos have toasted hot summer days and celebratory occasions with a tall glass of halo-halo, an iconic shaved ice dessert where ube halaya headlines a hodgepodge of colorful toppings, from candied jackfruits and sweetened beans to tapioca pearls.
The yam often serves as the centerpiece of other national dishes, such as “champorado,” a sweet rice porridge, and “mamón,” a sponge cake, but some fear its importance is being diluted upon arrival on foreign shores.
“I couldn’t believe it when I read that very few people know that ube comes from the Philippines,” Dabbadie continued in his conference speech.
For Makalintal, that contributes to a “troubling” self-fulfilling prophecy, whereby a lack of cultural understanding and supply issues often lead to vendors substituting true ube for extract products, sweet potatoes, or even omitting it entirely and relying solely on purple coloring to “take advantage” of the trend.
It’s an issue exacerbated by ube’s inherently understated flavor. When reduced to an extract, or mixed with dominating flavors like coconut, many people trying the litany of products marketed as ube-flavored are sampling only a trace, or nothing at all, of an ingredient that Makalintal and countless others feel passionately protective of.
“Everyone’s drinking ube now, but they don’t even really know the flavor. They’ve reduced it to this thing that’s just purple,” she said.
“The thing that’s hard is that it feels like one of those things where it feels like the byproduct of your culture … hitting the mainstream, where you just lose control of it in the cultural conversation. That is the trade-off of visibility.”