K-wellness is coming.
On the heels of Korean beauty’s post-pandemic global takeover, a nascent — but fast-growing — cohort of wellness players from the region are looking to similarly rise to the top, and they’re starting with the U.S. market.
In January, Kylie Jenner posted a 45-second TikTok video promoting pomegranate-flavored cutting jelly sticks by Foodology, describing the Korean snack, which are priced at $24 for a 10-pack and said to “cut” cravings and support digestion, as a “new favorite” addition to her routine.
The video garnered more than 19 million views, 1.1 million likes, and propelled Foodology’s TikTok Shop U.S. sales in January to nearly $500,000, per data from Charm.io. (On Amazon, the brand is meanwhile estimated to be doing more than $700,000 in monthly revenue, according to Market Defense.)
Cutting jellies are just one of many ingestibles offered by Foodology, which also makes metabolic support capsules and drink powders, and is a top wellness brand at South Korea’s largest beauty retailer, Olive Young. More broadly, it is one of many Korean wellness brands taking a page out of the digital-first playbook previously employed by Korean skin care and makeup players to permeate the U.S. market.
Foodology remains the only brand for which Kylie Jenner has done a paid TikTok post in 2026. Prior to that, she partnered with Medicube for multiple posts of the like in 2025.
Getty Images; Foodology
According to NIQ, K-beauty broke $2 billion in sales in the U.S. in 2025, up from roughly $1.5 billion the year prior, and not even $1 billion the year before that. Most of this growth has been driven by next-gen brands in the category — Medicube, Beauty of Joseon, Skin1004 and Fwee among them — which exploded on Amazon and TikTok Shop beginning in 2024, before being snapped up by brick-and-mortar retailers like Ulta Beauty, Target and Sephora.
Experts said that with Korean wellness, lightning can and will strike twice.
“Korean wellness brands are likely to follow a similar trajectory to Korean skin care, but the path will probably be much faster this time,” said Sarah Chung Park, founder and chief executive officer of Landing International, which since 2017 has helped Ulta curate its K-beauty assortment. “Because the credibility of K-beauty is already well established, the learning curve for retailers and consumers is much shorter. Instead of needing years to build awareness, K-wellness brands can move quickly from online discovery to physical retail distribution in the U.S.”
Besides, a brand like Foodology isn’t leaving things to chance: Spate data shows that more than 90 percent of the brand’s views on TikTok are of paid content, indicating Foodology is going full-throttle on amplifying its visibility in the market.
Most of the other K-wellness brands looking to make it Stateside also play in supplements — unit sales of which were up more than 6 percent in the U.S. in 2025, per NIQ — as well as gut health and women’s health.
These emerging brands include Inertia, which is the number-one feminine care brand at Olive Young; Esther Wellness, a supplement brand best known for its dissolving, glutathione-infused oral strips; Lacto-fit, which offers probiotic powder sachets; Returnity, an at-home ear-seeding brand, and BB Lab, which makes chewy collagen jellies. There’s also Sleeping Bottle, known for its herbal — and melatonin-free — sleep beverages, and K-Nutra, whose products range from probiotic bedtime mints to bloat-reducing enzyme supplements.
Esther Formula’s hero Liposomal Glutathione Strips, priced at $36.99 for a 30-pack.
“The Korean wellness ethos revolves around prevention. It is about balance, gut health, skin health and that inner-outer connection,” said Michelle Lee, chief marketing officer at Landing. “Basically, it looks a lot like where we’re seeing the modern wellness movement going.”
While beauty’s growth is tempering — Circana data shows that in 2025, U.S. unit sales grew just 3 percent in prestige and 2 percent in mass — wellness has only been accelerating. Globally, the wellness economy is expected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029, up from $6.8 trillion in 2024, according to Global Wellness Institute, with the U.S. being both the largest and fastest-growing market.
Wellness is also booming in South Korea. Just this January, Olive Young opened its first wellness-focused store, called Olive Better, in Seoul with products ranging from protein shakes to salads to feminine care and beyond. Last year, the retailer reported that its “inner beauty” category saw 55 percent year-over-year sales growth from January to May, driven in part by tourist purchases.
“Products and trends coming out of Korea not only have a cool factor, but also a halo of innovation and, generally, affordability,” Lee said. “And they’re great at user-friendly formats.”
K-Nutra’s K-collagen Soft Peach jelly sticks, priced at roughly $30 for a 30-pack.
Yami, a California-based e-tailer that sells consumer goods from all across Asia, has taken Olive Better’s opening as a cue to double down on its U.S. K-wellness business, which includes Foodology products, herbal hangover remedies by Jung Kwan Jang and more.
“We are aggressively expanding our K-wellness products and brands,” said Yami senior manager Betty Liu, adding that Korean brands currently make up about 15 percent of Yami’s total health sales, but the category is growing more than 50 percent year-over-year.
New York-based K-beauty e-tailer, Soko Glam, is similarly engaging in discussions with brands like BB Lab and Hustle & Heart in an aim to bring K-wellness to its assortment for the first time, said founder Charlotte Cho.
As far as brick-and-mortar expansion goes, most U.S. beauty retailers including Ulta, Walmart and Target are doubling down on both wellness and K-beauty, meaning these brands have options. The exception is Sephora, which shuttered its supplement business this year, though it remains to be seen whether the retailer’s newly inked deal with Olive Young could offer an opportunity to reenter the category at a later date.
“Korean wellness still represents a very early-stage category in the U.S., but the potential is significant,” said Chung Park, who is already working to bring brands including K-Nutra, Sleeping Bottle and Returnity to yet-unspecified retail shelves as early as this fall.
