Yerba Madre — the yerba mate company that operated as Guayakí for nearly three decades before rebranding in 2025 — has completed a headquarters relocation from Sebastopol in Sonoma County to the Tapscott Building at 1910 Broadway in Oakland's Uptown district. The move, reported by Hoodline and confirmed through commercial real estate filings with Cushman & Wakefield, places the company's administrative and marketing teams in approximately 16,719 square feet of renovated office space in a five-story building that has been repositioned as a creative-class workspace in one of the East Bay's most transit-accessible neighborhoods.
Why Oakland
Yerba Madre cited three primary reasons for the relocation: proximity to BART and other public transit options (the 19th Street BART station is two blocks from the Tapscott Building), access to the East Bay's talent pool of marketing, creative, and operations professionals, and Oakland's diverse and multicultural workforce — a characteristic that aligns with a brand whose supply chain spans Indigenous and family farming communities in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The move also brings the company physically closer to the Bay Area's food-and-beverage ecosystem, which includes a concentration of natural products companies, venture capital specializing in CPG brands, and the Specialty Food Association's West Coast events.
From Rural to Urban
The Sebastopol headquarters, nestled among the vineyards and apple orchards of western Sonoma County, had been Yerba Madre's home base for years — a location that reflected the company's origins as a mission-driven, counterculture natural-products brand. The move to downtown Oakland represents a maturation of the company's operational identity: from a rural-headquartered startup selling through natural grocery to an urban-headquartered brand with national distribution, Anheuser-Busch-level retail partnerships, and a product portfolio spanning RTD cans, loose leaf, mate bags, and seasonal flavors. The company also maintains an office in Los Angeles, giving it a presence in both of California's major metropolitan markets.
For Oakland, the arrival of Yerba Madre adds to a growing cluster of mission-driven food and beverage companies that have established headquarters in the city, attracted by relatively lower commercial rents compared to San Francisco, strong labor-force diversity, and a political environment that is generally supportive of social-enterprise business models. The Tapscott Building itself — renovated and repositioned as a modern creative workspace — exemplifies the type of office product that is attracting tenants back to downtown Oakland after the pandemic-era vacancy spike. Whether Yerba Madre's relocation signals a broader trend of natural-products companies moving from rural Northern California to urban East Bay locations remains to be seen, but the company's stated rationale — talent, transit, and diversity — suggests that the calculus may have shifted.