In 2016, Nicolas Beaupré went on an immersion trip to Chile expecting to improve his Spanish and work as a ski instructor. He did both, but he also fell in love with yerba mate, a move that would change the course of his life. Mate is an herbal tea made from the ilex paraguariensis plant, popular in parts of South America including Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. It’s traditional to drink it from a gourd with a bombilla, a metal straw, and passed around creating commensality.
“Mate made me speak Spanish better,” Beaupré jokes.
When his partner Elodie Simard tried mate, she felt the same way, and found it also helped her ADHD. When the pair returned to Canada, they shared their mate with friends who instantly wanted more. The couple found themselves placing orders for their friends and family. “We became their unofficial mate dealers,” Beaupré says.
A year later, they decided it was time to scale up their operation. They didn’t feel like the branding for existing mate products would play well with a Canadian market since much of it was in Spanish. “Mate is sold as a commodity like sugar or flour in South America,” Beaupré says. In addition, most of the mate they could find was smoked, a process that is linked to carcinogens.
They flew to Argentina and met with several farmers before meeting a grower who dried mate with air instead of smoke. In order to stay true to mate’s origins, they decided not to sell carbonated versions of the drink. Instead, they based their formula on tereré, traditional iced mate flavored with herbs or juice.
The result is their company Mateína, founded in 2017, which sells loose-leaf yerba mate, and yerba mate mixed with flavored juices in cans. The loose-leaf tea is rich and earthy, reminiscent of pu’er. The canned versions are fruity while still retaining traces of yerba mate’s flavor.
Last week, Mateína entered the U.S. market in partnership with Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology at Stanford and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, and Tiny, a Canadian venture capital firm. “We envision a world where yerba mate is a highly accessible and health-forward beverage that is consumed by hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and around the world, in the same way coffee and tea are today,” Simard says.
Something borrowed?
As Beaupré and Simard chatted about their story, I wondered how consumers would react. On the one hand, bringing food and beverages from other countries can help people learn about other cultures, and American cuisine is nothing if not a smorgasbord of foods from different cultures that have been adapted for an American palate.
On the other hand, we’re in an environment where customers are demanding more and more sensitivity from brands. Ralph Lauren recently got into trouble for copying indigenous designs in its clothing. Trader Joe’s received backlash for using “Trader José” for Mexican food and “Trader Ming’s” for Chinese food (although it ultimately defended the names). British chef Jamie Oliver, meanwhile, has hired specialists to vet his menus for cultural appropriation.
Beaupré and Simard don’t see Mateína as cultural appropriation. They point out that they put thought into their product, making sure not to change it, and making sure that they are good partners with the communities they are working with. (Huberman, who with Tiny now owns a majority stake in the business, is half Argentine.)
In the end, it’s unclear where consumers may draw these lines. What triggers outrage and what do consumers let slide?
Dr. Angela Cruz, a senior lecturer in marketing at Monash University in Australia, who recently published a study on consumer attitudes around cultural appreciation versus appropriation, said it boils down to a few key factors.
First, does the brand contextualize the cultural heritage of the product? In other words, is there an acknowledgement of the origins and an attempt to engage with the originating culture rather than pass it off as a new discovery? Second, is the branding respectful? Does it avoid obvious stereotypes or harmful depictions of the group at hand? Finally, she noted, often the answer is in the eye of the beholder. Some consumers are more inclined to see appropriation while others believe sharing culture is appreciation.
“It’s tricky terrain because best practices are still evolving,” Cruz says.
Sabrina Sands, 31, is a translator who grew up in Argentina and now lives in Florida. “Mate is like my best friend,” she says. “I drink it all the time.” For Sands, cultural appreciation is about acknowledging where a product comes from, as well as preserving its sanctity. One example of cultural appropriation she described was when she’d read about a man who claimed to have invented a straw for drinking coffee. “I looked at it and thought, that’s a mate straw,” she says. “He didn’t invent anything.”
Sands says she’s excited about Mateína, although she feels like it’s a little weird to see mate being marketed as a health drink. “As long as it tastes like the real thing, and makes it easier for me to buy mate, I’m on board,” she says.
She’s also excited that Mateína is fair trade. She pointed out that in Argentina, mate growers are often paid pennies on the dollar. “This could be a good thing for growers to be paid fairly and for Argentine mate companies to actually be forced to pay more because of competition,” she says.
Cami Poggi, 29, who was born and bred in Argentina and completed her MBA at University of Chicago, says cultural appropriation isn’t even a large part of the dialogue in Argentina.
“If we see someone abroad drinking mate, we get excited,” she says. She points out that mate is meant to be shared. “It creates an environment of trust where if you are sipping from someone else’s straw, it feels like you’re family and can talk about anything.” In fact, she noted, sharing mate is so entrenched in Argentine culture that the Argentinian government had to run a campaign during the COVID pandemic to get people to stop sharing mate straws.
“Personally, I’m really excited to see French Canadians selling yerba mate,” she says. “Part of the culture of drinking it means we go out of our way to share it.”
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