“Cloud” is having a moment that has nothing to do with weather. Pantone named Cloud Dancer its Color of the Year for 2026. Khloé Kardashian’s snack brand is called Khloud. Brooklyn Beckham’s hot sauce line is Cloud23. On the surface, that looks like coincidence, three different founders and forecasters landing on the same word for very different reasons.
Underneath it, something more specific is happening, and it’s measurable. Consumers are chasing a particular kind of texture: light, airy, whipped. The word “cloud” just happens to be what the culture reached for to describe it.
The signal: an aesthetic built on air
Pantone describes Cloud Dancer (PANTONE 11-4201) as a “billowy, balanced white” with an “aerated presence,” positioned as a counterweight to a noisy, overstimulated culture.¹ Color forecasting tends to lead category behavior rather than follow it, which makes this worth watching closely. When a color authority builds its entire year-ahead narrative around lightness and air, it’s a signal that “aerated” is about to show up everywhere, including on shelf.
The data: cold foam has left the coffee shop
This is where the trend stops being aesthetic and starts being commercial. According to Spate, consumer interest in cold foam is up 114.5% year over year, with another 25.5% growth predicted heading into 2026.² What began as a coffee shop customization is now a grocery aisle category:
- Coffee Mate’s canned cold foam is up on Spate’s popularity index 839.1% YoY
- Chobani’s frothed coffee cream is up over 1,000% year over year
- International Delight’s flavored creamers and canned cold foam are up 66.5% year over year, with 11.2 million average monthly searches²
This is Gen Z-driven and TikTok-amplified behavior: consumers recreating café-level froth at home, then sharing it.³ It is not a novelty limited to one format. Dairy, coffee creamer, and RTD brands are all converging on the same texture cue at the same time.
Why this keeps happening
This isn’t the first time an airy, whipped format has gone viral. Dalgona coffee and whipped lemonade did the same thing in 2020 and 2021, both born from the same instinct: a simple drink turned into something visually striking and a little bit of an event. The pattern recurs because it works on two levels at once, it photographs well, and it reads as a small indulgence during a stressful moment.
That’s precisely the emotional register Cloud Dancer’s messaging is built on: calm and lightness as relief from a noisy, overstimulated culture.¹ The difference this time is scale. Dalgona and whipped lemonade were largely at-home, DIY, single-moment trends. What’s happening now is showing up at retail, in CPG, and across categories simultaneously, which suggests this cycle has more staying power than the ones before it.
The other “cloud”: emulsions, not just foam
Foam isn’t the only place “cloud” already lives in beverage formulation. Cloud emulsions, sometimes called clouding or weighting agents, have long been used to give beverages a visually opaque, hazy appearance: think the look of a juice drink, a flavored water, or a citrus soda. It’s not limited to non-alcoholic formats either; RTD cocktails and hard seltzers are a genuine growth niche for clouding systems, since brands use the same effect to signal richness and mimic the look of fresh juice in a shelf-stable can.⁶ These systems shape how a beverage looks in the glass as much as how it tastes, and they’re an established part of formulation work, not a new trend chasing a color forecast.
That’s a useful reminder as “cloud” trends upward culturally: part of what brands are chasing visually already has a formulation playbook behind it. The newer, harder question is texture, not appearance, and that’s a different problem to work through.
The part that’s actually hard: formulating for texture
Foam is essentially air suspended in a thin film of water, fat, protein, and other components, the same fluid the beverage is made of, whipped in and held together. Over time, gravity takes over: the fluid drains out of that film, the barrier between air bubbles weakens, and the bubbles start merging into larger ones until the foam collapses.
Ingredients like proteins, emulsifiers, and hydrocolloids can slow that process down, but they can’t stop it. And there’s a ceiling on how far you can push it: stabilize a foam too aggressively and the product gets too thick and stops tasting right. That’s part of why nitro beers and nitro coffee don’t try to preserve a poured foam at all, they build the foam-creation mechanism into the packaging itself (the nitrogen widget in a can), so it’s recreated at the moment the consumer opens it rather than held in stasis for months on shelf.
That reframes the real question. It’s not “how do we make cloud-like foam last longer,” it’s closer to “does this call for an ingredient-based approach, a packaging-based one, or some combination,” and that’s exactly the kind of decision worth working through with a development partner rather than guessing at internally.
Where this goes next
“Cloud” isn’t confined to one category, coffee and matcha are both drawing on the same aerated, whipped texture cue right now. But scaling it isn’t really about who “solves” foam stability first. The physics means there’s no version of a foam that stays fresh-whipped for months on shelf without some real tradeoff. The actual decision is which tradeoff to make: a packaging-based approach that recreates the moment at the point of use (the way nitro beverages already do), an ingredient approach that manages the stability-versus-sensory balance deliberately, or simply keeping it a made-fresh, foodservice-forward experience rather than forcing it into a format it isn’t built for.
Whether you’re exploring visual clouding systems, weighing packaging versus ingredient approaches to aeration, or just trying to figure out where “cloud” fits in your own portfolio, that’s a conversation Imbibe is set up to have. Connect with our team to talk through what’s possible for your next launch.
- IndexBox, “Beverage Clouding Agent Market in Asia-Pacific,” 2026
- Pantone Color Institute, 2026 Color of the Year announcement, December 2025
- Spate, “Cold Foam: From Café Indulgence to Grocery Shelf Staple,” September 2025
- Tastewise matcha trend data, as reported by Yahoo Creators, May 2026
- Bar & Restaurant, “Matcha, Nitro, and Beyond,” April 2026
- FoodNavigator-USA, “TikTok cold foam trend brews new market for manufacturers,” August 2025
