Nicolas Beaupré & Elodie Simard

Nicolas Beaupré and Elodie Simard built Mateina on a product thesis that most beverage brands approach backwards: instead of creating a drink and finding its market, they identified a consumer behavior — the search for clean, sustained energy without the crash architecture of coffee and conventional energy drinks — and built the product to satisfy it precisely.

The result is a yerba maté brand that has achieved something genuinely rare in Canada's beverage category: cultural credibility and retail distribution in the same company.

Yerba maté is not a new ingredient. It has a centuries-long history in South America as the substance of choice for extended concentration and physical endurance.

What was new, in the context Beaupré and Simard were building into, was the convergence of that ingredient with a North American wellness culture that had finally developed the vocabulary to understand what yerba maté was actually offering. They moved at precisely the right moment — early enough to establish category ownership, late enough to avoid educating a market that wasn't ready.

The most significant external validation Mateina received came from an unlikely direction: Dr. Andrew Huberman, the Stanford neuroscientist whose podcast has become one of the most influential platforms in the global wellness space, became associated with the brand.

In an environment where influencer endorsements are ubiquitous and largely ignored, a Huberman connection carries genuine weight — not because of celebrity, but because of his audience's specific belief in evidence-based performance optimization. The people who follow Huberman are not passive consumers. They are active evaluators of what goes into their bodies.

Getting that audience to trust a product is a different kind of endorsement.

In conversation on The Montreal Entrepreneur Podcast, Beaupré and Simard speak with the candor of founders who have learned category-building from the inside. They are direct about the specific challenges of building a brand in a product category that required simultaneous consumer education and brand differentiation — the difficulty of explaining what yerba maté is while also explaining why Mateina is the best version of it.

Their story is one of timing, precision, and the willingness to build slowly in a market that rewards patience — a rarity in a consumer brand landscape shaped by founders who confused initial product-market fit with durable category leadership.