Delaffe: Korea's Convenience-Store Coffee Brand That Cut Its Price to ₩900

Delaffe is the Korean convenience-store coffee brand nobody outside Korea can look up. Somewhere in the ambient shelf of a Korean CU — not the fridge, the ordinary room-temperature shelf — there is a row of foil pouches with 델라페 printed across them. They cost less than a bottle of water. They are not refrigerated. And if you ask an English-language search engine what they are, you get essentially nothing.

That gap is strange, because Delaffe sells about 150 million units a year. It has run for fourteen years. And in March 2026 it did something almost nothing else in Korean food retail did that year: it got cheaper.

Delaffe Is Not a Drink Company

This is the thing most visitors get wrong, and it changes how you shop.

델라페 is not a beverage manufacturer with a marketing budget. It is a private label — a house brand owned by BGF Retail, the operator of the CU convenience-store chain, launched in March 2012. Every other Korean chain runs its own equivalent: 7-Eleven has 세븐셀렉트, Emart24 has 성수310, GS25 runs a flat-₩1,000 line. Delaffe is simply the biggest and the oldest of them.

That matters practically. You cannot buy Delaffe anywhere except CU. If you found one you liked and you are standing in a GS25, the answer is not "look harder" — it is "buy the GS25 equivalent," which is a different product with a different flavor.

It also explains the format. A pouch has no bottle to chill, no cap, no rigid packaging, and it can sit on an ambient shelf instead of occupying expensive refrigerated space. That is a retailer's decision, not a beverage designer's one, and it is why the drink and the ice arrive as two separate purchases.

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The Name Is a Whole Sentence

델라페 reads, to a Korean ear, as a made-up café word — vaguely Italian, vaguely French, the same register as a thousand neighborhood coffee shops.

BGF's own account of the name is that it stands for 하루의 기분을 즐겁게 해주는 내 마음속의 카페 — "the café in my heart that makes the day feel good." It is a brand statement compressed into three syllables, and it tells you exactly what the product is positioned against: not other drinks, but going to a café at all.

Keep that in mind, because in 2026 the positioning stopped being aspirational and became arithmetic.

In March 2026, Five of Them Dropped to ₩900

On 11 March 2026, CU rolled out eighteen new Delaffe varieties and put its five best-selling ones at ₩900:

Bought with an ice cup, CU puts the pair at about ₩1,500.

That number is the whole story. Korea's low-cost café chains are genuinely cheap — 컴포즈커피 is ₩1,800 and 메가커피 ₩2,000 for a made-to-order iced americano — and for years the honest answer to "is the convenience store cheaper?" was no, not against those. At ₩1,500 it now is, by ₩300, at four in the morning, with no queue.

Against a ₩4,700 tall iced americano at Starbucks Korea it is not a comparison at all.

Fourteen Years, and the Price Curve Bends Backwards

The interesting thing is not that the price fell once. It is that it fell twice, deliberately, into rising demand.

In February 2025, CU cut five coffee pouches — 블랙아메리카노, 제로 스윗 아메리카노, 제로 헤이즐넛, 바닐라라떼 and 캐러멜라떼 — by ₩100–200, and froze the price of seven more including cold brew and decaf. The stated reason was 커피플레이션, "coffeeflation," a word Korean media coined for café price rises. Then March 2026 took the headline flavors to ₩900.

Meanwhile Delaffe's iced-drink sales had grown 10.3% in 2023, 12.4% in 2024 and 11.0% in 2025.

Companies do not usually cut prices on a line growing at 11% a year. This is not a clearance; it is a chain using a house brand as a weapon against café chains, and paying for it out of margin it could otherwise have kept.

The Sizes, Because There Are Four of Them

Delaffe is not one pouch. Since 2021 it has run at 230 ml, 335 ml, 500 ml and 1 L, and CU has sized the ice to match — the 벤티컵얼음 holds 400 g against the standard cup's 180 g.

The pouch also grew once: it went from 190 ml to 230 ml in 2018, which is when the bundle price moved to ₩1,200. Worth knowing, because Korean blog posts written before 2018 quote a smaller pouch and a different price, and those posts are still the top results for a lot of Korean queries.

Practical rule: match the pouch to the cup, not to your thirst. A 230 ml pouch over a 400 g venti cup is thin coffee-flavored water by the halfway point. If you are buying the big cup, buy the big pouch.

The Flavor Graveyard

Delaffe has carried more than fifty flavors across fourteen years, and more than half of them are discontinued. 얼음속 오미자 — omija, the Korean five-flavor berry — is in that list, along with a long tail of ades, lattes and teas that existed for a single summer.

This is normal for a private label and it is worth understanding before you get attached to one. A retailer's own brand is a shelf-space experiment: the chain can launch eighteen varieties in a month because it owns the shelf, and it can delete them just as fast. If you find one you love, it may not survive the season. Buy two.

The packaging has changed with it. Delaffe was redesigned in 2013, ran a LINE Friends character collaboration from 2015, and moved to CU's in-house 헤이루 프렌즈 characters in 2017 — so the pouch in a 2016 photograph and the pouch on the shelf today do not look like the same product.

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Honest Notes

It is concentrate, and it behaves like concentrate. This is a syrup-and-extract pouch designed to be diluted by melting ice, not a brewed coffee. If you pour it into a glass without ice it is unpleasantly strong and sweet. That is not a defect; it is the format.

There was a recall. A batch of Delaffe 아이스 초코 failed a food-safety inspection in 2016 and was withdrawn. One batch in fourteen years across an enormous volume is a good record rather than a bad one, but it is the kind of thing English coverage never mentions because English coverage does not exist.

₩900 is five products, not the brand. The rest of the range sits above that, and the 1 L and premium lines cost considerably more. Do not walk in expecting everything on the shelf to be ₩900.

CU only. Worth repeating because it is the single most common source of confusion. In a GS25 you are looking at a different house brand entirely.

The ice is where the price moves. Ice cups rose across the sector in June 2026. The pouch got cheaper; the cup did not. If your bundle costs more than you expected, that is why.

FAQ

Q: What does 델라페 mean? A: BGF Retail's own account is that it stands for 하루의 기분을 즐겁게 해주는 내 마음속의 카페 — "the café in my heart that makes the day feel good." It is not a real Italian or French word.

Q: Where can I buy Delaffe? A: CU convenience stores only. It is BGF Retail's private label. Other chains have their own: 세븐셀렉트 at 7-Eleven, 성수310 at Emart24.

Q: How much is it? A: Five headline flavors are ₩900 as of March 2026, roughly ₩1,500 bought together with an ice cup. Other varieties cost more.

Q: Do I have to buy the ice separately? A: Yes, and that is the design. The pouch sits on an ambient shelf; the ice cup is in a freezer near the door. Buying them together gets you a bundle price.

Q: Which one should a first-timer get? A: 블랙 아메리카노 if you drink coffee unsweetened, 복숭아 아이스티 if you do not. Both are on the ₩900 list.

Sources Checked

• Korean-language reference sources for the March 2012 launch by BGF Retail, the brand-name statement, the 2013 redesign, the 2015 LINE Friends collaboration, the 2017 move to 헤이루 프렌즈, the 190 ml to 230 ml size change in 2018, the pricing history, the fifty-plus flavor count, and the 2016 아이스 초코 recall.
• BGF Retail's own newsroom for the February 2025 price cut of ₩100–200 across five coffee pouches, the seven frozen prices, and the stated 커피플레이션 rationale.
• Korean business and consumer press for the 11 March 2026 launch of eighteen new varieties, the ₩900 pricing of five bestsellers, the roughly ₩1,500 bundled figure, the ~150 million annual units, and the iced-drink growth rates of 10.3% (2023), 12.4% (2024) and 11.0% (2025).
• Korean trade press for the March 2021 four-size expansion and the 400 g 벤티컵얼음.

Convenience-store pricing in Korea changes on short notice and varies by promotion. Verified August 2026.