La Colombe is moving beyond its Draft Latte® heritage, launching a three-SKU line of ready-to-drink Matcha Lattes that the Chobani-owned brand says is designed to replicate café execution at retail scale. The launch follows a 188% surge in matcha sales across La Colombe's brick-and-mortar café network since 2023 — a demand signal the brand is now converting into a broader off-premise play.
The Product Specs
The lineup comprises Everyday Matcha Latte, Strawberry Matcha Latte, and Vanilla Matcha Latte, each packaged in 11-oz cans. Every SKU delivers 65 milligrams of natural caffeine and is formulated as a good source of protein. Ingredient sourcing is positioned as a competitive differentiator: the matcha is single-origin from Japan, and the milk base is lactose-free whole milk from Michigan farms. The protein-forward, lactose-free positioning targets a broad daypart window — morning ritual, afternoon pick-me-up — without excluding dairy-sensitive consumers.
Chobani's RTD Playbook
Neil Sandfort, Chief Innovation Officer at Chobani and La Colombe, framed the launch as a category-creation move rather than a trend chase. "We challenged ourselves to create a product with the highest quality ingredients that raises the bar for what consumers should expect from RTD matcha," he said. The framing echoes La Colombe's original Draft Latte® positioning from over a decade ago, when it introduced nitrogen-textured cold lattes in cans and helped reshape the RTD coffee shelf.
For foodservice operators, the parallel is instructive. La Colombe built its RTD coffee volume on the back of a café concept with credible craft equity — the same scaffold it is deploying for matcha. The brand operates cafés in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, and Washington, D.C., giving it a live proving ground for consumer taste and LTO iteration before committing to mass retail SKUs.
Matcha's trajectory in the broader beverage segment supports the timing. The ingredient has migrated from specialty tea shops into QSR menus, convenience channels, and premium grocery at an accelerating pace, driven by consumers seeking functional caffeine alternatives to espresso-based drinks. The 188% in-café growth figure La Colombe cites outpaces typical seasonal LTO lifts and suggests sustained consumer pull rather than novelty demand.
Retail & Channel Outlook
The Matcha Lattes are rolling out online and at major retailers nationwide in September 2026. La Colombe did not disclose specific retail door counts or AUV projections for the new line. Parent company Chobani — which acquired La Colombe in 2023 — brings significant retail distribution infrastructure across grocery and club channels, a supply-chain advantage that should accelerate velocity targets for the new SKUs.
For foodservice buyers and distributor partners, the launch signals that the RTD cold-beverage category is widening beyond coffee into adjacent functional formats. Operators stocking La Colombe Draft Lattes in hotel minibars, office pantry programs, or noncommercial venues may find the Matcha Latte line a natural adjacency to broaden their premium beverage assortment without adding a new vendor relationship.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
