Yerba mate has become the caffeine of choice for Zoe Saldaña, Lionel Messi, and a booming U.S. market. Is it healthier than coffee?
Zoe Saldaña keeps a rule about coffee, which is that she mostly avoids it. For over two decades she has reached instead for yerba mate, the bitter South American infusion steeped from the dried leaves of a holly-family shrub, saving coffee for the days when she is in Europe or back home in the Dominican Republic. Her reasoning runs to mood as much as chemistry. “It doesn’t give me that kind of irritability that coffee does,” she told the Wall Street Journal in July.
The preference she describes is one a growing share of Americans have adopted. Yerba mate, for generations the everyday drink of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and southern Brazil, has traveled from immigrant kitchens and soccer benches to Erewhon coolers and studio green rooms. The United States market reached roughly $722.7 million in 2025 and is expanding at about 6 percent a year. Drinkers between eighteen and thirty account for close to 45 percent of consumption worldwide. The gourd, once a sign of where a person came from, has become a sign of how a person prefers to be caffeinated.
Long before wellness culture found it, the drink was crossing borders in the luggage of its most devoted exports. Viggo Mortensen, who spent much of his childhood in Argentina, has carried mate through airports for years, and said that security officers kept mistaking his supply for marijuana because he had packed the loose leaves in a Ziploc bag rather than their original wrapping. He refuses to travel without it, a devotion that looks ordinary to any Argentine and eccentric to nearly everyone else.
The version most Americans meet first is not loose leaf in a gourd (or Ziploc) but a cold can. Yerba Madre, the nearly thirty-year-old California company known for its bright yellow cans, rebranded from Guayakí last year, and now sells in more than 45,000 retail locations across the United States and Canada. The Austin brand Clean Cause, which packs 160 milligrams of caffeine into each can and directs half its profits to addiction recovery, expanded into hundreds of 7-Eleven stores across Texas, California, and Oregon last year.
Why yerba mate feels different from coffee
A serving of yerba mate carries about 80 milligrams of caffeine, roughly what a cup of brewed coffee delivers, according to Healthline. What drinkers tend to describe is a difference in the texture of the lift. Mate also contains theobromine, the gentle stimulant found in chocolate. Regular drinkers “often report that it enhances alertness like coffee but without the jittery side effects,” Healthline notes, though it is careful to add that “these testimonials have not yet been scientifically proven.”
That is the entire argument for the drink, and it maps neatly onto the complaint Saldaña makes about her mornings. She takes her mate the way most devotees eventually do, which is to say without sugar, and she carries the habit through 4:30 a.m. film call times and long days on location. The ritual is portable in a way a drip machine is not, requiring only dried leaves, a gourd or a thermos, and hot water that has stopped short of a boil.
Studies suggest mate may have helpful effects on cholesterol, weight, the heart, inflammation, and even cancer risk, while cautioning that more research is needed to confirm any of it. Lara offered the athletes’ version of the same case to the Herald: “It is very low calorie, 12 to 15 calories in a cup, improves digestion, can reduce LDL, the bad cholesterol, and has vitamin A, C, E and zinc.”
There is a genuine caveat, though: People who drink very large amounts over long stretches, on the order of one to two liters a day, show a higher risk of cancers of the mouth, throat, and lungs, according to the Mayo Clinic, and that risk climbs for people who also smoke or drink alcohol. The tradition of taking mate scalding hot is thought to be part of the mechanism, which is a good argument for letting the water cool before it meets the leaves.
From Messi’s gourd to the Inter Miami locker room
The most fluent mate drinkers on the planet are professional soccer players, and Lionel Messi is their patron saint. He has been photographed with a gourd in Rosario, Barcelona, Paris, and Fort Lauderdale, and he long ago abandoned the sweetened version he grew up on. “I like a hot and bitter mate. I used to drink it sweet, but then I got used to the bitterness and I drink it like that,” he said in a 2019 interview with the Spanish sports daily Marca.
His club has organized itself around the habit. Inter Miami travels with the equipment the way other teams travel with tape and ice, and when the squad flew to Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and Japan for preseason, the staff packed twenty-five pounds of yerba mate, the team nutritionist Daniela Lara told the Miami Herald. “Many players bring their own, but we always travel with a few different brands of yerba, some are more bitter, some are less bitter, as the players have different tastes,” Lara said. “I would say at least half the team drinks mate, partly because the caffeine is a stimulant like coffee, so it wakes them up and makes them more alert and less fatigued, but also for its nutritional values and because it helps teammates bond before and after practice and games.”
While ready-to-drink options fill the refrigerated sections of convenience stores and supermarkets, bonding is the part of the longstanding yerba mate ritual outsiders miss. When drinking loose mate, one person fills the gourd, then passes it around a circle, everyone drinking through the same metal straw, called a bombilla. “For those of us from Argentina and Uruguay, mate is an indispensable part of our culture,” Sebastian Saja, the club’s goalkeeper coach, told the Herald. “We can’t imagine a locker room without mate, or without a circle of people passing around a mate.”
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