Barron Trump, 20, has been formally named as one of five directors of SOLLOS Yerba Mate Inc., a new South Florida-based beverage startup preparing for its first product launch, according to corporate filings submitted in Florida and Delaware in January 2026. Florida public corporate filings list the youngest Trump as one of the directors of the venture, while a January filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission shows the company, filed under the name Soulstice, Inc., sold $1 million in equity in a private offering. The company is planning to release a single ready-to-drink beverage in pineapple and coconut flavors, sold in 12-packs, with a launch date now set for May 2026.
SOLLOS Yerba Mate is built around yerba mate (pronounced yer-bah mah-teh), a caffeinated herbal tea made from the dried leaves of the Ilex paraguariensis plant, a tree native to South America. Yerba mate is a traditional South American drink that’s gaining worldwide popularity, made from the leaves and stems of the Ilex paraguariensis plant, with the leaves typically dried over a fire and steeped in hot water to make the tea. For centuries, it has been a staple of daily life in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, and in recent years, it has found a growing audience in the United States as a cleaner alternative to conventional energy drinks.
Spencer Bernstein, a Villanova University student who previously attended Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach with Barron Trump, described SOLLOS on LinkedIn as “a lifestyle beverage brand built around clean [and] functional ingredients.” The brand’s name draws directly from the Spanish word for sun: “SOL,” meaning sun in Spanish, represents the sun rising and the beginning of the day; “LOS,” which is “Sol” spelled backwards, represents the sun setting and the end of the day, so together SOLLOS captures the full cycle of the sun and the idea that “It Begins Where It Ends.”
What the Florida Business Filings Actually Show
Sollos Yerba Mate Inc. was incorporated in Delaware on December 3, 2025, and was then incorporated in Florida on January 12, 2026, registered as a foreign profit corporation – meaning a business entity incorporated under the laws of another state that has registered to do business in Florida. This dual-state registration is a common move for startups seeking to combine investor-friendly Delaware corporate law with a home-state presence elsewhere.
Barron Trump’s names director of new beverage startup
According to the Form D filed with the SEC on January 23, the offering’s total size was $1 million, and the full $1 million had already been sold, with the first sale taking place on January 8, and there was one investor. The filing also says the proceeds were not earmarked for payments to the executives, directors, or promoters named in the document. In other words, the seed round closed fast and fully – a meaningful indicator that this is not a casual side project, even if the public record doesn’t tell us who the single investor is.
Barron is listed among five partners, including Spencer Bernstein, Rodolfo Castello, Stephen Hall, and Valentino Gomez, with Bernstein listed as the brand’s Chief Operating Officer. Hall and Bernstein both attended Oxbridge Academy in Palm Beach alongside Barron Trump, maintaining a pattern familiar in early-stage ventures where personal connections shape leadership; Castello is identified on LinkedIn as a business analyst at McKinsey & Company.
The company is set to launch in April, according to business registration documents filed in Florida and Delaware in January – though the launch date has since been pushed to May. Newsweek also found that the $16 million five-bedroom house in Palm Beach, near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, that the business is registered to, is owned by Jay Weitzman, according to records provided to Newsweek by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s Office. Weitzman, a businessman, is a long-time friend of Trump who has previously donated to the president and whose parking business receives federal contracts. Weitzman told Newsweek he has no investment in SOLLOS and that the company uses his address because his grandson, Spencer Bernstein, lives with him. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing.
What Is SOLLOS Yerba Mate?
For anyone unfamiliar with the SOLLOS yerba mate company, it describes itself as a premium lifestyle brand targeting health-conscious consumers, particularly those in the South Florida market. The SOLLOS Yerba Mate team told Newsweek via LinkedIn that “in the foreseeable future, Sollos will only have one recipe,” explaining: “We didn’t set out to make a flavor lineup; we set out to make the perfect drink. Most brands launch with five flavors, hoping you’ll like one of them. We spent all of our time, energy, and resources obsessing over a single recipe until it was flawless.”
The brand’s most recent LinkedIn post, on April 8, featured a clip of the individual beverages moving through a factory space, with light blue cans featuring the brand’s logo, showing “SOLLOS” in bold letters in front of an orange and yellow graphic sun. Stephen Hall, now a student at the University of Notre Dame who also attended Oxbridge Academy, said the beverage company is preparing for a spring consumer launch, though an official date has not been announced beyond May 2026.
The single-recipe approach is a deliberate branding choice that borrows a page from other cult-favorite beverage brands. Rather than flooding the market with a range of options, SOLLOS is positioning itself on the strength of one carefully tested product. Whether that bet pays off in a market crowded with established players is the question every new entrant has to answer.
Barron Trump’s Business History Before SOLLOS
The SOLLOS yerba mate startup is not Barron Trump’s first business venture named director. In July 2024, Trump co-founded Trump, Fulcher & Roxburgh Capital Inc., a real estate company that was dissolved after the 2024 presidential election, with no plans to reestablish it during the second presidency of his father. One of his partners told Newsweek the company was wound down purely to avoid election-season media attention, with plans to relaunch.
Before the real estate firm, Barron had already been drawn into the cryptocurrency world. By September 2024, he was listed as a “DeFi visionary” for World Liberty Financial; according to The New York Times, Steve Witkoff, a real estate investor with ties to Trump, envisioned Trump’s role as a deterrence to memecoins and to give him business experience. DeFi, short for decentralized finance, refers to financial services built on blockchain technology that operate without traditional banks. He previously co-founded the cryptocurrency platform World Liberty Financial with his father and brothers, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
SOLLOS marks a clear pivot. It’s his first direct play in the consumer products space, and his first venture built around a physical product that everyday people buy off a shelf. For Barron, a sophomore at the Stern School of Business, this marks his first significant move into the retail sector, following prior interests in real estate and cryptocurrency. He’s currently studying at NYU’s Stern School of Business, having transferred to the Washington D.C. campus after his freshman year in Manhattan.
Whether Barron plays an active day-to-day role in the company is genuinely unclear. What remains unclear is how hands-on Trump will be in daily operations, when the brand will hit store shelves at scale, and whether Sollos plans to compete as a premium lifestyle label, a mass-market energy drink, or something in between. That ambiguity is worth keeping in mind as the story develops. His name on the filing is confirmed. His involvement beyond that is not publicly documented. Spencer Bernstein wrote on LinkedIn that he had “decided to postpone my final semester at Villanova University to focus on something I’ve been building for the past 8 months,” noting that “since the end of last school year, I have been working alongside my co-founder, Stephen Hall, and a few close friends on SOLLOS Yerba Mate.” Hall and Bernstein are the ones publicly stepping away from school to run the company full-time.
What Science Actually Says About Yerba Mate
Readers curious about the product will want to understand what they’re actually drinking. Yerba mate is not just a trendy newcomer to the functional beverage space. It has been consumed for hundreds of years and has accumulated a meaningful body of research.
Yerba mate contains numerous secondary metabolites, especially purine alkaloids (caffeine and theobromine), polyphenols (phenolic acids, flavonoids), and terpenes (saponins, carotenoids), as well as minerals and vitamins. It is a rich source of methylxanthines, especially caffeine (1-2% of dry weight), theobromine (0.3-0.9%), and trace amounts of theophylline. In plain terms: it contains caffeine (the same stimulant found in coffee), theobromine (the mild stimulant found in chocolate that tends to produce a smoother, calmer energy effect), and a wide array of plant-based antioxidants – compounds that help protect your cells from damage.
At 80 milligrams (mg) of caffeine per cup, yerba mate contains about the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee, and, just like any other caffeinated food or beverage, it may increase your energy levels and make you feel less tired. Caffeine can also affect the levels of certain signaling molecules in your brain, making it particularly beneficial for mental focus.
The reason many people report a smoother energy experience with yerba mate compared to coffee comes down to this mix of compounds. Theobromine balances out the stiffness and other physical effects, such as jitters from caffeine consumption, which allow people who drink mate to experience mental clarity and alertness without increased heart rate and negative sensations in the body. It’s worth noting these are largely self-reported experiences, and they haven’t all been rigorously proven in controlled clinical trials. But the biochemistry gives them a plausible basis.
For heart health, some research is genuinely encouraging. Yerba mate contains antioxidant compounds, such as caffeoyl derivatives and polyphenols, which may protect against heart disease, and in humans, yerba mate seems to reduce cholesterol levels – with a 2019 study of 119 females with overweight finding that daily consumption of yerba mate led to reductions in total and LDL (bad) cholesterol over a 12-week period. LDL cholesterol is the kind that builds up in arteries and raises the risk of heart attacks. The same study found that triglycerides (a type of fat in the blood) also dropped when yerba mate was paired with a lower-calorie diet.
A post hoc analysis published in BMC Nutrition looked specifically at postmenopausal women, a group at higher cardiovascular risk. The group that consumed more than 1 liter per day of mate infusion had significantly fewer diagnoses of coronary disease, dyslipidemia (abnormal cholesterol or fat levels), and hypertension, and serum glucose levels were also lower in the higher-consumption group. These are meaningful findings, though the study design means we can’t draw firm causal conclusions from them alone.
There are also important caveats to know. Using yerba mate long-term, especially with alcohol or nicotine, has been linked to an increased risk of various types of cancer, including stomach, kidney, lung, and mouth cancer. Some research has shown a potential link between yerba mate and cancers of the throat and mouth, especially when consumed at high temperatures. The cancer-associated risk appears to be connected to very hot consumption and the combination with smoking or alcohol, not to moderate consumption of chilled, canned yerba mate drinks like the one SOLLOS is launching. That distinction matters, though anyone with a personal or family history of these conditions should talk to their doctor first.
You can explore more on natural coffee alternatives and their real effects to put yerba mate in context alongside other options like matcha and green tea.
The Market SOLLOS Is Entering
This is not a simple launch into an open field. The global energy drink market, which yerba mate products often compete with, was valued at roughly $85 billion to $90 billion in 2025 and is projected to grow significantly in the coming decade. Within the broader functional beverage category – drinks that go beyond basic hydration to offer targeted health benefits – the U.S. functional drinks market generated a revenue of $48.5 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach $77.97 billion by 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 8.3% from 2025 to 2030.
That’s a lot of competition. Established brands like Guayaki, which has been selling yerba mate beverages in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, already have dedicated shelf space, loyal customers, and distribution deals with major retailers. The global energy drink market, valued at approximately $85-$90 billion in 2025, is projected to exceed $125 billion to $157 billion by the early 2030s. The rapid growth highlights increasing demand for functional beverages, including those positioned as healthier or plant-based alternatives. With SOLLOS Yerba Mate preparing for its debut, the company enters a competitive but lucrative market, where branding, flavor innovation, and consumer trends are expected to play a key role.
At the same time, the shift toward cleaner, plant-based energy is genuinely real and growing. About one in four U.S. consumers is influenced by natural ingredients and low/no/reduced sugar claims when purchasing an energy drink. A single-recipe, clean-label brand with a strong South Florida identity could carve out a niche – especially one with a high-profile name attached. But the road from a $1 million seed round to meaningful shelf presence is long, and most startups don’t make it.
SOLLOS has also drawn some early criticism from traditional yerba mate drinkers online. The yerba mate community has not exactly rolled out the welcome mat, with early reactions on Reddit’s r/yerbamate forum being caustic. That tension is common whenever a deeply cultural product gets turned into a consumer packaged good – and it won’t necessarily hurt sales in a mainstream U.S. market that’s largely unfamiliar with the traditional gourd-and-bombilla experience.
What Questions Remain Open
The Barron Trump Florida business registration story has several threads that are still unresolved. His actual involvement in daily operations has not been documented. The public record supports a narrower claim than some social media chatter suggests: what is verified is that Barron Trump is listed as a director of the company, that the company is using the SOLLOS Yerba Mate name in Florida, and that its Delaware entity reported raising $1 million through a private equity offering in January. What remains unclear is how hands-on Trump will be in daily operations, when the brand will hit store shelves at scale, and whether Sollos plans to compete as a premium lifestyle label, a mass-market energy drink, or something in between.
On the ethics front, the registered address and its connection to Jay Weitzman – a longtime Trump associate whose parking business holds federal contracts – raised eyebrows for some government watchdog observers. Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the director of government affairs at nonpartisan government watchdog the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), told Newsweek the links between Weitzman and SOLLOS Yerba Mate looked “fishy from the standpoint of government ethics and conflicts of interest.” Weitzman’s own explanation – that Bernstein is his grandson and lives with him – is straightforward, and the company has faced no legal scrutiny. But it’s a detail worth tracking as SOLLOS grows.
The Trump family business background, more broadly, brings its own weight to the story. As Fox Business noted, the company may benefit significantly from name recognition alone, regardless of the degree of active involvement from its most famous director. In the history of Trump-branded ventures, from casinos to steaks, the name has often done much of the commercial work. Whether SOLLOS succeeds on product merit or on brand halo – or both – is a story that May 2026 will begin to answer.
What This Means for You
If you’re someone who already reaches for a can of yerba mate in the afternoon instead of a third cup of coffee, SOLLOS represents a new player in a space you know well. If you’re curious about yerba mate for the first time because of this story, the short version is: the research is genuinely promising for moderate consumption, especially for energy, mental focus, and potentially some cardiovascular markers, but it comes with the same caffeine-related cautions as any other stimulant. Stick to 1-3 servings a day, avoid drinking it extremely hot, and skip it entirely if you’re pregnant or have underlying heart conditions.
As for the broader business story, the key takeaway is this: Barron Trump is confirmed as a named director of the SOLLOS yerba mate startup through Florida and Delaware business filings and SEC documents. The company has raised $1 million, completed its first production run, and is on track for a May 2026 launch in pineapple-coconut flavor 12-packs. What isn’t confirmed is how much hands-on work Barron is putting into the brand day to day. The full picture will emerge slowly – but it’s a story worth watching for anyone interested in the intersection of wellness trends, startup culture, and the evolving business instincts of one of the most watched young people in the country.
