Collagen 101: What 10g Actually Does for Your Body

Collagen is a protein made up of amino acids, particularly glycine, proline and hydroxyproline. Your body produces its own, and production naturally changes as you age.

Supplemental collagen is usually hydrolysed, meaning it's been broken down into shorter chains called peptides. That's what makes it dissolve into a drink instead of setting into a gel, and it's the form we use — marine collagen, sourced from fish.

Skin, joints and connective tissue are where collagen is most concentrated, which is why those are the areas people associate with it.

We're deliberately not going to tell you what a scoop will do to your skin or your knees. Research in this area is ongoing, results vary between people, and we'd rather be the brand that under-claims than the one that gets it wrong.

Plenty of drinks list collagen on the front and then carry a token amount of it. We chose 10g per scoop because it's a meaningful, honest serving rather than a label decoration.

It also has a practical upside: 10g of collagen peptides contributes real protein to your morning, in something you were going to drink anyway.

Every scoop of ʼkôfē Black Coffee includes 80mg of vitamin C, and Matcha Collagen carries vitamins too. Vitamin C contributes to normal collagen formation for the normal function of skin, bones, cartilage, teeth, gums and blood vessels — an authorised nutrition claim, and the reason it belongs in the same scoop.

It's a small addition that costs almost nothing to include, so leaving it out never made sense to us.