Plant-based protein brand TRUBAR is moving beyond the snack aisle with a limited-edition collaboration alongside cult matcha café Cha Cha Matcha, introducing a co-branded bar at retail and a suite of branded menu items inside Cha Cha Matcha locations — a structure that doubles as a sampling campaign and a new-channel proof of concept.

The centerpiece is the Love You So Cha Cha Matcha bar: white chocolate coating, sweet green tea notes, 12 grams of plant-based protein, and 12 grams of fiber, available at all Cha Cha Matcha locations in New York and Los Angeles, on TRUBAR.com, and on Amazon while supplies last. On the café side, TRUBAR's Get in My Belly, PB & Jelly flavor — which grew 113.0% year over year and now accounts for nearly 10.0% of brand sales year to date — is being adapted into a limited-edition PB&J Matcha drink. A TRUBAR Protein Cold Foam is also available as an add-on to any drink at participating locations.

The Channel Logic

The structure here is worth unpacking for operators and brand-launch teams alike. TRUBAR is using an established café footprint to create a trial occasion that a grocery end-cap cannot replicate: the consumer is already in a wellness mindset, already spending on a functional beverage, and now being introduced to a protein bar in context rather than in the shelf fixture. The cold foam add-on is particularly efficient — it layers TRUBAR's brand onto existing high-margin beverage orders without requiring a dedicated menu slot or significant ops lift from Cha Cha Matcha staff.

This is a pattern emerging across the better-for-you snack and supplement space: brands using specialty café and fitness-studio partnerships as a third channel — neither DTC nor traditional retail — to reach consumers at the point of a wellness decision. The collab with The Bar Method (complimentary drop-in classes in NYC through September 27 with promo code SIPSNACKSHAKE) reinforces that framing, stitching together café, fitness, and retail into a single acquisition loop.

What Operators Should Track

For foodservice and café operators, the cold foam mechanism is a vendor pitch worth evaluating on its own terms. Protein-enhanced add-ons are appearing on menus from regional coffee chains to hotel lobby cafés, and the unit economics — incremental ticket lift on an existing beverage with minimal prep complexity — are favorable. TRUBAR's willingness to create a co-branded ingredient (rather than simply selling bars at the counter) signals that the brand is actively building a foodservice sales motion alongside its retail business, now distributed across more than 32,000 retail doors nationwide.

For brand-launch and growth teams, the SKU selection discipline is notable: TRUBAR didn't build the café activation around a new flavor — it anchored it to a proven performer with documented velocity data. That's a repeatable framework for any brand-launch team pitching a retail buyer or a chain operator on a limited-time program.

The launch event at Cha Cha Matcha's Flatiron location on September 19, featuring influencer Kit Keenan, golden-ticket giveaways for a year of free product, and limited-edition merchandise, is functioning as earned-media ignition for what is otherwise a tightly scoped distribution play. Operators and growth-marketing teams running their own LTOs should note how the components stack: a credible co-brand, a proven hero SKU, a fitness-studio tie-in, and a single anchor event designed to generate social content that extends reach well past foot traffic.

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.