The Purple Gold Rush: Can the Philippines Keep Up With the Global Demand for Ube?

A majority of Halaya Melbourne’s clients are non-Filipinos, according to Elbert Estampador, co-owner of the Australia-based, single-ingredient bakeshop.

“We’ve been serving ube latte for about 6 years,” he said in a June 17 Google Meet interview.

“Every time we serve an item people are not familiar with, we think, ‘Oh, maybe it’s a one-off, and they’ll never come back,’ but they keep coming back and say, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever had as a coffee drink.’” 

“We expected [the demand] to plateau, but it kept going,” he added. “It’s a great opportunity for us to claim it in Filipino iconic culture.”

“Ube” is a purple yam native to the Philippines that has recently become a popular flavor worldwide. 

The market export value for ube-derived products in 2025 was about $3.2 million, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority.

Ube offerings have risen by 231% across restaurant menus in the U.S. in the past four years, the food and beverage analytics firm Datassential reported. Consumer awareness of ube has grown to 27% today from 15% in 2021.

“The US and Canada historically remain the Philippines’ traditional and established markets for ube and ube-derived products, including frozen purple yam, ube puree, ube jam, and ube powder,” Patricia Blacer, supervising trade-industry development specialist of the Department of Trade and Industry's Export Marketing Bureau, said.

“We are also seeing emerging demand in other markets such as parts of Europe and Asia,” she said in a remote June 22 interview.

The supply side thus far cannot keep pace with the demand, however.

“There’s really no industrial-scale plantation of ube. Supply has been sporadic,” Blacer said.

Production at the moment supplies only 1/4th of the local demand, according to Marlon Tambis, a Visayas State University professor and expert in root crop production.

Bohol, he told The Business Manual on June 5, accounts for 35% of the national ube supply.

The Philippine Root Crop Research and Training Center, of which Tambis is director, aims to improve national propagation of the tuber by considering other regions in the country.

Mindanao, he said, harvests ube year-round, whereas other areas experience seasonal harvest between September and February.

His team, with project funding from the Department of Science and Technology- Philippine Council for Agriculture, Aquatic and Natural Resources Research and Development of the Department of Science and Technology, has also identified ube varieties appropriate for this year-round planting, including ‘Baligonhon,’ ‘Inoringnon,’ ‘Kabus-ok,’ ‘Zambal (VU2),’ and ‘Ubi Kinampay.’

The team’s work has likewise advanced a propagation technique that increases output to more than 30 quality planting materials from a single kilo of the root crop.

Traditional ube farming, in contrast, requires planting large sections of a whole "mother" tuber, yielding 7 to 10 planting materials per kilogram of ube.

“Two days ago, I proposed to the DA [Department of Agriculture] a massive, national-level trial to identify promising varieties with the desired yield or harvest volume per hectare,” Tambis said in the same interview.

The bottlenecks to ube production are:

• Limited access to quality planting materials,
• Increasing production costs, 
• Climate-related risks, and
• Insufficient post-harvest and processing facilities.

National ube production has yet to return to the peak levels of over 30,000 metric tons recorded in 2006, according to Philip C. Young, undersecretary for High-Value Export Crops and Agri-Fishery Export Development and Promotion at the DA.

“The DA has allocated P16.28 million for Fiscal Year 2026 to support strategic investments across the Philippine Ube Value Chain,” his office emailed on June 26.