The Regenerative Organic Alliance — the certifying body behind the Regenerative Organic Certified (ROC) standard — has awarded its Gold-tier certification to Yerba Madre Brasil Produção e Comércio Ltda., making Yerba Madre's Traditional Air-Dried Loose Leaf the first yerba mate product in the world to achieve this distinction. The certification, issued on February 6, 2026, according to the Alliance's public registry, confirms that 100% of the yerba mate in the product is sourced from regenerative agroforestry systems operated by Indigenous and family farmers in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
What ROC Gold Means
Regenerative Organic Certified is a three-tiered standard (Bronze, Silver, Gold) that builds on USDA Organic requirements by adding rigorous criteria in three pillars: soil health and land management, animal welfare, and social fairness. Gold — the highest tier — requires demonstrable multi-year progress across all three pillars, including measurable improvements in soil organic matter, biodiversity indices, and fair labor practices. For a product like yerba mate, which is traditionally hand-harvested by seasonal workers in remote subtropical landscapes, the social fairness requirements are particularly demanding: they mandate living wages, safe working conditions, and transparent supply-chain governance.
Prior to this certification, the ROC Gold designation had been awarded to a relatively small number of agricultural operations worldwide, primarily in coffee, cotton, and grains. Its extension to yerba mate — a crop cultivated across three countries by thousands of smallholder producers — represents a significant validation of the agroforestry model that Yerba Madre (formerly Guayakí Yerba Mate) has promoted since its founding in 1996.
The Shade-Grown Seal
Alongside the ROC Gold certification, Yerba Madre is introducing the world's first Shade-Grown Yerba Mate seal — a proprietary designation that will appear on its air-dried loose leaf packaging beginning in 2026. The seal recognizes that the yerba mate was cultivated beneath the canopy of native forest trees, rather than in full-sun monoculture plantations — a distinction with both ecological and flavor implications. Shade-grown yerba mate develops different chemical profiles than sun-grown varieties, typically exhibiting higher concentrations of certain polyphenols and a more complex flavor profile, while the forest canopy provides habitat for birds and other wildlife.
Industry Recognition
The Traditional Air-Dried Loose Leaf has been named a 2026 NEXTY Award finalist — a recognition program administered by New Hope Network that honors the most innovative and progressive products in the natural products industry. The ROC Gold seal first appeared on Yerba Madre packaging in May 2025, giving the brand a multi-month head start in market differentiation before the NEXTY recognition amplified its visibility.
For the broader yerba mate industry, the ROC Gold certification raises the question of whether the regenerative standard can scale beyond a single brand. The agroforestry model that underpins the certification — in which yerba mate is grown as an understory crop beneath native forest canopy — is fundamentally different from the full-sun plantation model that produces the majority of the world's yerba mate supply. Whether regenerative certification will remain a niche differentiator or become a category expectation depends on consumer willingness to pay the premium that the model requires.