Quietly, a homegrown energy drink is returning to shelves in North Carolina.
Mati Energy, the startup beverage brand founded in entrepreneur Tatiana Birgisson's Duke University dorm room, scored fans like AOL co-founder Steve Case before shuttering completely in 2020.
NOBL Beverages, a New Hampshire-based maker of cold-brew coffee, soon swooped in to buy the brand for an undisclosed sum. But it’s taken a while to find its new footing.
Connor Roelke, founder and CEO of NOBL, said part of the reason is a lack of corporate presence in North Carolina. The plan is to rebuild its local network, and Roelke said the firm plans to hire someone locally to double down on its North Carolina shelf presence in the coming weeks.
In an interview he talks about the buy and his hopes for the award-winning, Durham-born brand.
Bringing back the brand
NOBL Beverages didn’t set out to buy Mati — just its manufacturing equipment, from pasteurizers to giant steam tanks.
While in town to see the equipment, company officials learned the brand was coming up for auction. So it finalized buys of both the equipment and the brand in 2020.
Relocating Mati was a production. Roelke estimates shipping 11 truckloads of equipment from North Carolina back up to New Hampshire.
“We literally disassembled their entire plant and shipped everything out,” he said. “It took us three or four weeks to get everything moved.”
And that’s not counting the installation at the equipment’s new home.
Right around this time, the pandemic was causing shutdowns and supply-chain issues. Even so, the firm was able to restart production in the spring of 2020 using the original formula.
And demand from the customers the brand had left behind seemed strong.
“We had people reaching out that wanted whole palettes,” Roelke said of Mati's North Carolina fanbase. “It’s a little bit strange because there’s like an entire population reaching out to you asking about a thing you didn’t create.”
But selling the cans in North Carolina has been a challenge. NOBL is a New Hampshire company with zero presence in the Tar Heel State.
Like legacy Mati, its wares are for sale at places like Whole Foods. But its presence was really limited to New England. And its legacy brands were taking off — meaning a balancing act between sustaining and growing demand for what it already had in New Hampshire and meeting the needs of a new-to-NOBL market, North Carolina.
But today it’s starting to take off, with Mati available in the Triangle in places like Happy+Hale.
Roelke hopes to someday get the product back into Whole Foods in North Carolina — and the new hire, expected this winter, could help reinvigorate the brand in its native state.
“We would really love to be back in that region,” Roelke said.
The origin story
Roelke’s background is, in some ways, similar to that of Mati founder Tatiana Birgisson — who he said he has never met.
Roelke was interested in cold-brew coffee while at the University of New Hampshire. Birgisson started her company by brewing tea in her Duke University dorm room.
Roelke, however, didn’t have a business in college — just a dream. As he was leaving school, he initially thought he would start a brewery, but was faced with a challenging market.
“I pivoted and said, 'Hey, I’ve been doing this cold-brew coffee thing for awhile, I’m really interested in the process,'” Roelke said.
Just like Birgisson did with Mati, he started small, initially operating out of a 350-square-foot facility in a small town in New Hampshire. Six months later, demand allowed the NOBL to move into a 3,000-square-foot facility. Today, it’s operating out of a 35,000-square-foot facility, pumping out cans such as its best seller, its NOBL Nitro Cold Brew Black Cans.
Birgisson had a lot of local backing as she was building the company, including Duke Angel Network, Hatteras Venture Partners, IDEA Fund Partners and Harbright Ventures.
In 2015, she won both investment dollars and acclaim by taking the top title at Google Demo Day in Silicon Valley. That same year, according to Inc Magazine, revenue topped $5.5 million. Mati Energy would later grow into a manufacturing plant in Clayton as it worked to scale up.
But as the company got bigger, so did the business demands. Birgisson left the company in 2018 and was replaced with Eric Masters, a marketing veteran whose past firms had included Coca-Cola. When he was hired, Masters told the Triangle Business Journal that the goal was to “take it nationally and accelerate the growth.”
But while Masters would later say the brand made a “lot of progress” in 2019, it ultimately wasn’t enough to keep its lines running.
“We gave it a good shot,” Masters told Triangle Business Journal in January 2020 as the firm was winding down.
Today, Birgisson works at software firm Rippling as director for growth marketing, according to LinkedIn. And she is still a Mati customer. She said she is still "rooting for Mati and NOBL's success."
She is not alone.
Mati's fans in the Triangle said they would love to see the brand on more shelves.
“It is one of those products that experienced a lot of traction because it was very authentic and Tatiana, the founder, was able to brand it effectively as a local product,” said Lister Delgado, managing partner of one of Mati’s long-ago backers, Idea Fund Partners. “The local community, especially the entrepreneurial community, supported it from the very beginning.”
Anil Chawla, founder of ArchiveSocial, is another fan. Chawla, attempting to support a healthier lifestyle, made a conscious decision early on in his company "that if we were going to give everybody free food and drinks, we should not enable bad habits."
And Mati fit the bill — a healthier way for his employees to get their buzz than soda.
"I was a big supporter," he said.
