Korean hydrolyzed, collagen-infused beverage brand Clöud Café is the latest addition to Wellness by Ulta Beauty after launching on March 16. Clöud Café touts as the first-ever coffee and matcha brand within wellness, showing a growing market appetite in the ingestible beauty market.
Crafted in Korea with specialty-grade ingredients including marine collagen, hyaluronic acid and multivitamin blends, Clöud Café’s beverages will initially be on sale exclusively online before being made available in 400 stores beginning March 29—becoming Ulta Beauty's first-ever coffee and matcha partnership.
With Clöud Café being the first coffee and matcha brand within wellness, the launch signifies a broader industry pivot in how retailers are approaching the pressing intersection of wellness and beauty.
"In the Western market, there’s always been this 'forgotten' half to skin care and beauty— a lot of people still don’t realize that it’s not just about what you apply topically, but also what you put into your body," Clöud Café founder, Olive Kim, tells Global Cosmetic Industry. "On the other hand, the supplement category in the U.S. is traditionally bland and lacking in flavor. Collagen-based consumables are quite common in Korea, so I saw an opportunity to introduce this internal ritual to the West with my own twist— something enjoyable and delicious that you can integrate into your daily routine."
Clöud Café will enter Ulta Beauty with customer-favorite flavors, including Black Coffee, Strawberry Matcha Latte, Royal Milk Tea, Matcha Latte, Strawberry Milk Zero, Vanilla Latte, and Hot Choco Zero, using "specialty-grade ingredients". Additionally, the brand will debut exclusive new flavors as part of this new retail partnership: Ube Latte and Pistachio Matcha.
"Having formulated over 20,000 products for my previous K-Beauty brand, I had fostered a laser approach to formulation," says Kim. "When developing Clöud Café products, we opted for marine collagen as our hero ingredient because we found that it’s absorbed up to 1.5x more effectively and has a higher bioavailability than bovine or porcine collagen. Collagen in general is also difficult to be absorbed topically, which is why we wanted to make it one of our consumable hero ingredients."
While Clöud Café's partnership with Ulta Beauty amay indicate that lifestyle-integrated, ritualistic formats like morning coffee and matcha are replacing purely functional supplements, Kim says their motivations with Clöud Café are to make an otherwise monotonous routine a little more fun: "My biggest goal with Clöud Café has been to introduce fun and tastiness to the category, and to make the consumable experience as elevated and seamless as possible, so that it’s an easy no-brainer to plug into your daily routine. What’s so fun about this journey is that we’ve been building a category at an intersection you don’t typically see out there— beauty, wellness, and pantry—and shifting the perception of the space into something you can actually be excited about. Clöud Café creates an experience so that it’s not a chore to take supplements, but instead an enjoyable part of your at-home coffee and matcha routine."
