The first thing you'll notice about the new Teko has nothing to do with any of the numbers below.
The flavors are the same four: Limõ, Marakuyá, Melokotón Narã, Anana. They just taste more like fruit now and less like a drink mix.
That was the whole point of the reformulation. Everything else here is what stayed the same.
Still zero. Both of them.
0 calories. 0 grams of sugar.
Not "low." Not "lightly sweetened." Zero, on both. One stick into 16–24 oz of cold water, and the nutrition panel doesn't move.
The sweetness comes from a small amount of USDA organic stevia extract. That's it. No sucralose, no aspartame, no acesulfame potassium. Nothing artificial anywhere in the formula.
What's actually in a stick
Yerba mate isn't a flavor we add. It's the base of the drink — an extract of unsmoked green Ilex paraguariensis, the same plant Paraguayans have been drinking for centuries. Unsmoked matters: smoke-drying is what gives a lot of traditional mate its heavy, bitter, ashy edge. Ours skips that step, which is why the fruit comes through instead of fighting through.
Here's the full picture per stick:
| Compound | Amount per stick |
|---|---|
| Calories | 0 |
| Sugar | 0 g |
| Vitamin C | 100% Daily Value |
| Polyphenols | 200 mg+ (floor) |
| Chlorogenic acid | 100 mg+ (floor) |
| Caffeine | ~32 mg |
| Theobromine | Naturally occurring |
200mg+ polyphenols
Polyphenols are plant compounds. Yerba mate is naturally dense in them, and because Teko is made from an extract rather than a loose leaf you steep and discard, the compounds come with you into the glass.
Research associates dietary polyphenols with antioxidant activity — that is, with countering oxidative stress from free radicals at the compound level.
The number on our spec sheet is a guaranteed floor, not an average. Batches test above it. We publish the floor because that's the number you can count on in every single stick, not the number from our best run.
100mg+ chlorogenic acid
Here's the part most people haven't heard of.
Chlorogenic acid is a specific polyphenol group. And in our yerba mate extract, it isn't a minor component. Chlorogenic acid accounts for the overwhelming majority of the identified phenolic compounds in the extract. It's studied in the nutrition literature as a dietary antioxidant.
Why nobody else prints these numbers
Go look at the back of any other instant drink mix, hydration stick, or flavored water enhancer on the shelf. You'll find calories, sugar, sodium, maybe a vitamin blend.
You will almost never find a polyphenol figure. You will essentially never find a chlorogenic acid figure.
There are two reasons for that. The first is that most of these products don't have meaningful amounts to report. The second is that reporting a number means committing to it — you have to hold a supplier to a floor, batch after batch, and you lose the ability to quietly reformulate downward when input costs move.
We'd rather commit to the number.
The one antioxidant claim we'll actually make
Each stick delivers 100% of your Daily Value of Vitamin C
Vitamin C is an essential nutrient and an antioxidant that helps neutralize free radicals, with well-established roles in collagen formation, iron absorption, and normal immune function.
The rest of the label
Yerba mate extract, natural flavor, citric acid, stevia extract, tricalcium phosphate, sodium citrate, mint extract, ascorbic acid.
Eight ingredients. Gluten-free. Vegan. Non-GMO ingredients. Dissolves clean in cold water in a few seconds — no clumping, no shaker bottle, no waiting.
Made where mate is from
Teko is produced in Asunción, Paraguay, by Paraguayans. Not sourced from South America and blended in a facility in New Jersey — actually made at the source, in the country where this plant is the national drink.
That's not a marketing detail to us. It's the reason the flavor names are in Guaraní, and it's the reason we went back into the plant to fix an aftertaste that most brands would have shipped and forgotten about.
