Until now, the Korean-inspired collagen beverage brand was primarily sold through direct-to-consumer channels, Amazon and select Asian marketplaces.
“At Ulta Beauty, we’re always looking for ways to help our guests find their feel-good through beauty and wellness,” Laura Beres, vice president of wellness at Ulta Beauty, told NutraIngredients.
“We’ve seen growing interest in solutions that seamlessly fit into daily routines, which made functional beverages a natural new addition for our wellness assortment.”
The launch reflects the wider ongoing shift in how ingestible beauty products are being positioned in retail. In Asian beauty markets, collagen drinks and other ingestible products have long been positioned alongside topical skincare as part of overall daily beauty routines.
In the United States, however, ingestible formats have historically been concentrated in traditional supplement categories, often delivered through powders, capsules, functional nutrition products and increasingly gummies. Beverage formats tied to existing rituals, such as coffee or matcha, are emerging as one way brands are attempting to fill that gap, combining familiar consumption habits with ingredients commonly associated with skin health.
K-beauty traditions shape ingestible approach
For Clöud Café founder Olive Kim, those differences between markets helped shape the brand’s direction.
“In the Western market, there’s always been this ‘forgotten’ half to skincare 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,” she said.
“On the other hand, the supplement category in the US is traditionally bland and lacking in flavor,” she added.
Therefore, rather than positioning collagen in conventional supplement formats, the brand built its products around familiar drink occasions.
“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,” Kim said.
Marine collagen anchors formulation approach
Clöud Café’s drinks are built around café-style formats such as coffee, matcha and milk tea. Each beverage pairs those formats with ingredients commonly associated with beauty-from-within formulations, including marine collagen, hyaluronic acid and multivitamin blends.
Kim said ingredient selection reflected lessons learned from years of product development within the Korean beauty sector.
“Having formulated over 20,000 products for my previous K-Beauty brand, I had fostered a laser approach to formulation,” she added.
Marine collagen ultimately became the anchor ingredient.
“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,” Kim explained. “Collagen in general is also difficult to be absorbed topically, which is why we wanted to make it one of our consumable hero ingredients.”
Flavor and texture remain formulation hurdles
Taste and mouthfeel remain challenging for collagen beverages, especially when competing with everyday café drinks, and, according to Kim, achieving that balance demanded extensive iteration during development.
“This was one of our biggest challenges, as I wanted to ensure that Clöud Café beverages brought fun and tastiness to the category— something that you could look forward to integrating into your daily routine,” she said.
South Korea’s beverage manufacturing capabilities also influenced the final formulations.
“Many people may not know that South Korea is actually a top manufacturer for hydrolyzed coffee, so we drew a lot from this expertise to get our formulations to the perfect place,” Kim explained. “It took many iterations and rounds of testing to get here, but I’m so proud of the blends we’ve been able to achieve and offer for the U.S. consumer.”
‘Beauty, wellness and pantry’ converge
Clöud Café is entering Ulta Beauty with several existing beverage varieties including Black Coffee, Strawberry Matcha Latte, Royal Milk Tea, Matcha Latte, Strawberry Milk Zero, Vanilla Latte and Hot Choco Zero. Two additional flavors, Ube Latte and Pistachio Matcha, will debut exclusively through the retail partnership.
The brand’s approach to combining familiar beverage rituals with beauty-focused ingredients aligned with the retailer’s expanding ingestible assortment.
“Clöud Café stood out for its thoughtful approach to beauty-from-within, marrying morning coffee and matcha rituals with wellness and beauty benefits through ingredients like collagen,” Beres said.
“As we continue to evolve Wellness by Ulta Beauty, we remain focused on thoughtfully curating ingestible offerings that meet our standards for quality, ingredients, and efficacy while making beauty and wellness more accessible in our guests’ daily lives.”
Kim said introducing ingestible beauty into a retail environment traditionally associated with topical products also highlights the convergence of multiple consumer routines.
“We want to continue to introduce our brand and K-Wellness to more people,” she said. “What’s so fun is that we’ve been building a category at an intersection you don’t typically see out there— beauty, wellness and pantry.”
She added that “with this excitement also comes the challenge of educating consumers about a new concept and building familiarity around a new routine.” Clöud Café plans to meet this challenge head-on by supporting “Ulta Beauty’s mission to be a welcoming space for all guests and champion diverse brand partners.”
