Three cans before noon

Andrew and I met back in 2020, but a couple of years later we were having lunch and he started going off about Yerba mate.

His father is Argentinian, and he'd grown up drinking the stuff. Yerba mate is basically the national drink of Argentina — they consume more of it than coffee. Andrew was ranting about how it boosts dopamine, may trigger GLP-1 production, and gives you hours of clean energy without the jitters or crash. He was evangelical about it.

Every product he'd tried was loaded with sugar and tasted terrible. There had to be something better out there.

I flew back to Victoria thinking about Yerba mate.

I tasked my team with finding the best Yerba mate on earth. Oddly, it was right under our nose in Montreal.

A couple named Nic Beaupré and Elodie Simard had started Mateina after Nic fell in love with mate while teaching skiing on a volcano in Chile. He'd gone to learn Spanish and within days was sharing mate with locals. When Elodie joined him in Peru, she discovered that mate gave her something coffee never had — hours of calm focus without the jitters. She has ADHD and hated medication. Mate felt like a cheat code.

They came home to Montreal and started sharing it with friends, who immediately wanted more. In Nic's words, "We became their unofficial mate dealers."

When they couldn't find anything in Canada close to the quality they'd had in South America, they flew to Argentina, met with farmers, and found a fourth-generation family in Misiones province who air-dried their mate instead of smoking it. Most mate on the market is smoked, which introduces carcinogens. Mateina's is air-dried, organic, and fair trade. They started in 2017.

The product was incredible. But they were a fart in the wind.

A tiny company in Montreal that couldn't raise money. They had traction in Canadian grocery stores, but the beverage business is brutal.

It might actually be one of the world's worst businesses:

• Cans expire in 12-18 months — unsold inventory gets destroyed at your cost
• It's heavy and expensive to ship, so e-commerce barely works
• Getting shelf space requires massive upfront fees, and keeping it is even harder
• Gross margins are razor thin — a can that costs $1-2 to make retails for $3-4

I ordered a pack anyway, started drinking it daily, and sent Andrew a case.

He loved it. But instead of becoming a daily drinker, he became a three-before-noon drinker. Every single day.

After getting to know Nic and Elodie, we struck a deal: they would work with Andrew to formulate a new zero sugar version, he would promote it, and Tiny would fund the growth. Think about it: a neuroscientist who grew up on the stuff and happens to have millions of health-obsessed followers. Two scrappy founders in Montreal who'd built the best product on the market but couldn't get it in front of anyone. And us, with capital, scale, and network but no product.

One of those rare 1 + 1 = 5 situations. And it's turned out to be an amazing partnership.

We've kept quiet about it until now. A few highlights:

• We've nearly quadrupled revenue in two years, growing 56% last year alone
• Mateina is now in every Whole Foods in North America, Erewhon, Sprouts, and just rolled out in Costco across Canada. Oddly, my local Costco in Langford, BC is our best-selling location.

We've been funding all the growth ourselves. Now we're looking for a partner who knows the beverage industry — someone who's done it before. If you know the right person, I'd love an intro. Email austin@tiny.com.

And if you haven't tried it yet — grab a 12-pack. My favorite is the Mint Limeade.

Originally published in the I invited 150 people to an island issue of Never Enough.