Proffee Graduated From Fad to Shelf Category, and the Fight for It Is Just Starting

Every category has a moment where the trend piece stops being about whether something is happening and starts being about who wins now that it is. Proffee, the inelegant portmanteau for protein coffee, crossed that line sometime in the last year. It started as a DIY stunt, a scoop of whey blended into cold brew, and it has turned into a full shelf set with its own pricing tier, its own retail real estate, and its own casualties waiting to happen.

The legacy players moved first, because legacy players always move first once a trend gets big enough to threaten their own fountain. Starbucks rolled out Protein Lattes and Cold Foam drinks carrying up to 36 grams of protein. Dunkin' countered with 15-gram Protein Lattes back in January. Bulletproof, the brand that built an entire identity on butter in coffee before the wellness crowd moved on to other ingredients, launched a 12-gram High Protein Iced Coffee in September 2025. Bulletproof's Harry Lewis put the shift plainly: "Protein moved from performance to every day... we felt the big opportunity was not asking consumers to add a new behavior." That's the whole category thesis in one sentence: don't ask people to change their ritual, just upgrade what's already in the cup.

The more interesting fight is happening below the legacy brands, where specialists are treating protein coffee as the whole business rather than a seasonal menu add. Super Coffee's PROTEIN+ line, 25 grams of protein at 130 calories, became "far and away" the brand's fastest product ever to clear $10 million in shipments, according to Super Coffee's Jordan DeCicco, who said the team "was very patient... as soon as it launched, we knew it was going to be successful." Projo's Power Coffee is chasing the same 25-gram number and rolling out to roughly 1,755 Target stores. Slate sits at 20 grams. Throne Sport Coffee, at a more modest 10 grams, is leaning less on the macro and more on its founder story: Patrick Mahomes and a former Coca-Cola executive, which is less a coffee brand than an athlete-ambassador play wearing a coffee bag as a costume.

Retail is picking winners as fast as the brands are picking formulas. Whole Foods gave Wandering Bear's Cold Brew Latte, 11 grams of protein per 8 ounces, an exclusive slot inside a wellness set the chain has expanded by 30%. Target is running its own parallel 30% wellness expansion to make room for Projo and its peers. Whole Foods' Charlie New summed up why retailers are clearing the shelf space without much resistance: "Protein has become mainstream. Consumers associate it with energy, strength and feeling full. When you combine that with coffee, you end up with a product that feels like it earns space in the fridge." That's a category occupying two of the most defensible positions in beverage at once, caffeine habit and protein virtue, while the $125 billion energy drink market watches its "better for you" flank get picked apart from a completely different aisle.

None of which means this holds. Butter coffee, collagen coffee, and mushroom coffee all ran the exact same playbook: rapid hype, saturated shelf space, then a quiet retreat into a small, loyal niche once the cultural moment passed. A recent industry take from Perfect Daily Grind argues proffee is next in that cycle, warning that "health framing is often used to justify premium pricing" and that brands are already chasing the next buzzword ingredient, fiber, instead of building something people actually want to drink every day for its own sake. Everyday Dose CEO Kyle Thibaut put the real test bluntly: "The real test is whether a product delivers an outcome people value and want to return to every day." A good chunk of proffee's current tailwind, GLP-1 adoption pushing protein intake up everywhere, fitness culture rewarding macro tracking, and marketing incentives rewarding anyone who can slap "25g protein" on a label, is borrowed momentum, not demand a brand actually built.

So here's the honest read on the field of play: the brands that survive the inevitable shakeout won't be the ones with the highest protein number on the can, they'll be the ones that built an actual daily ritual instead of a trend-cycle SKU. Super Coffee and Starbucks already have the ritual; they're adding protein to something people were drinking anyway. Projo, Slate, and Throne are betting they can build the ritual and the protein claim at the same time, which is a harder trick and a much bigger bet. Proffee isn't a fad anymore. But a shelf category and a brand are two different things, and right now, most of this field has the first one and is still auditioning for the second.

Source: BevNET

Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →