The Founder

Enough of the third person passive voice. My name is Andrew Wilcox, and I have started the Complete Leaf and am bringing to market a yerba product that I developed while in the Peace Corps living in a tree house in rural Paraguay. The development of both Complete leaf as an enterprise and Yerba Mate Buds as a product spent around two years incubating while I made relationships with people I may never have known and I learned about things I never imagined I would have the opportunity to (the guaraní language, tropical botany, and small-scale agriculture).

I left for Paraguay May 29th, a year to the day after I graduated from college. Luckily, my assignment brought me to the east of the country near Ciudad del Este in a small Paraguayan colony in the heart of what was formerly the vast Atlantic Rainforest. My colleagues were to be members of a small cooperative that produced yerba maté but whose factory had burned down the year prior. In the following months, during weekly afternoon meetings, we planned and wrote a grant to USAID to rebuild our charred barbacuá and resume production. That year we raised production from just under one ton to just under 25 tons. I worked almost every night from 4 in the afternoon when a few tons of the fresh leaf would arrive until about 1 in the morning when we would wrap everything up and leave the semi-dried leaf to slowly dry overnight in our new barbacuá oven.

planting parsley seeds with the kids

At this point, my mind starting wandering about how to share this unique beverage that I drank at least 3-4 times a day as maté (hot) and tereré (cold). I was very interested by the mechanics of the market and also the fact that yerba cannot be grown anywhere but around the Paraná river. I had always thought of global commodities as the enemy of the small scale farmer due to their price fluctuations and (usually) high and costly chemical inputs. Yerba seemed the opposite, it was native to Paraguay, could be integrated into agroforestry systems, can't be mechanized, and needed very little fertilizer and pesticide.

As I clocked into the factory, I started to notice an odd inefficiency in the market for fresh yerba leaves: all parts of the plant were created equal, the tenderest leaves and the woodiest stems received the same price. Meanwhile, I had been doing a lot of research into tea (camellia sinensis) production and had been learning about its cultivation and processing. On top of that, I noticed that the majority of the yerba offered in the United States was somehow masked with mint, rooibos, or some other additive, or was sold as a flavored extract. Also this product that I thought of in terms of cents per kilogram was being sold for around ten dollars a pound!

With all of this swirling around in my head, I began to think of treating the yerba plant as tea is treated in Asia. Planting it at higher densities, classifying the production, and using hands instead of machines for processing. At this point, serendipity struck. I went to Iguazu Falls for the weekend and while checking out of the hotel, spotted the Argentine National Yerba Institute's 2008 report on the study of yerba maté. This tome provided all the confirmation I would need to begin making this idea into a reality: studies regarding high density plantations, bitterness in the buds vs the leaves, the frequency of bud sprouting, and even the viability of steaming the leaf. For my birthday in October, I decided to head to Posadas, Argentina to visit the Yerba Institute in person where they provided me with a wealth of materials regarding yerba maté.

Getting to know the country on a 400 kilometer raft trip down the Paraná river

I spent a large portion of the next few months in the yerbal, the yerba field, studying the plants, harvesting buds, and testing out various processing methods based on what I had learned about green tea processing in William Ukers' All About Tea, the definitive technical text on tea production. A few months earlier I had started working with a group of women who wanted to find a value-add project they could do. Once I convinced them that forming a cooperative would be a good idea, we became a perfect fit. This past February we came together and using a prototype factory, produced the very first batch of yerba maté buds in the world. Today I am using this product to conduct taste-tests and other preliminary market testing to see if this project is viable.

Sunset at Ñacunday Falls