A 20-year-old college student launched a new beverage in May 2026. It sells for $39 for a 12-pack. That works out to $3.25 per can – more expensive per unit than a 12-pack of craft beer, according to critics who quickly did the math on social media. The student is Barron Trump, the youngest son of President Donald Trump, and the drink is SOLLOS, a canned yerba mate he co-founded with four Palm Beach friends.
The backlash was immediate and loud. But beneath the outrage over the SOLLOS yerba mate price lies a more substantive question: what exactly is in the can, who built this brand, and does the product justify what the founders are asking people to pay?
According to state corporation filings, the company was started by a group of close friends ages 19 to 23 who grew up in South Florida, with Barron Trump listed as one of five directors. The other named founders are Rodolfo Castillo, Spencer Bernstein, Stephen Hall, and Valentino Gomez – a group of Palm Beach friends who work with Barron, who is officially on the beverage brand’s board.
In the months leading up to the launch, two of the founders, Bernstein and Hall, who started with $1 million in private funding, announced on their LinkedIn profiles that they were pausing their studies at Villanova and Notre Dame, respectively, while another decided to step down from his role as a McKinsey analyst. Co-founder Spencer Bernstein told Fox Business the team “spent more than a year refining the formula and creating over 100 iterations to the recipe.”
What’s Actually in a Can of SOLLOS
The company’s debut flavor combines pineapple and coconut with organic Brazilian yerba mate, natural caffeine, raw honey, cane sugar, and monk fruit extract. Each can delivers 50 calories and 120 mg of caffeine, which is about the same caffeine ratio as Red Bull.
For context, yerba mate is a caffeinated herbal plant native to South America that has recently gained popularity in the U.S. as an alternative to coffee. The Mayo Clinic confirms it’s native to South American countries including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where it has been consumed as a traditional drink for centuries. A standard brewed cup delivers somewhere in the range of 80 mg of caffeine, according to Healthline – though canned functional versions like SOLLOS tend to concentrate higher amounts. At 120 mg per can, SOLLOS sits well under the 400 mg daily threshold that WebMD identifies as the point where caffeine consumption begins causing negative health effects.
The ingredient list – organic mate, raw honey, cane sugar, monk fruit extract, no artificial flavors – is designed to position SOLLOS squarely in the premium wellness-beverage segment. The 12-pack carries USDA Organic certification. Co-founder Bernstein framed the choice of yerba mate directly: “We believe yerba mate is the best source of caffeine because it is plant-based and provides a smooth, sustainable energy boost without the sharp spikes and crashes often associated with coffee and synthetic energy drinks. It’s also naturally rich in antioxidants.”
The Price Tag That Set Off Social Media
The SOLLOS yerba mate price is $39 for a 12-pack, which is the detail that stopped most people cold. A 12-pack of Red Bull, the country’s leading energy drink, sells on Amazon for anywhere from $17 to $25 – less than two-thirds the SOLLOS price, for a product with a comparable caffeine content. On X, the responses were blunt. “$39 for a 12-pack? A fool and his money are soon parted,” read one post. Others called it “absurd” and a “rip-off,” with one commenter comparing it unfavorably to a 12-pack of craft beer.
The brand’s registered address adds another layer to the disconnect. SOLLOS is registered to an address in Billionaire Beach, just a few blocks from the president’s Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, one of the country’s richest towns. The average annual salary in Florida sits at approximately $50,815, according to ZipRecruiter – already below the national average. Paying $3.25 per can for a wellness drink is a meaningful line item for most Florida households, even if it’s an afterthought for the crowd in whose neighborhood SOLLOS was born.
The company’s merchandise offerings amplified the criticism. SOLLOS is also selling branded merchandise: a $95 sweatshirt, $40 shorts, an $80 bag, and a $30 baseball cap. The full brand “starter kit” – a case of drinks and one of each apparel item – would run a buyer $284 before tax. That’s not a beverage play. That’s a lifestyle brand with a beverage entry point, pitched at consumers who already identify as premium wellness shoppers.
The company also came under fire on social media even before its launch for using a South American product and name while the Trump administration targeted Latinos via its current immigration policies. One commenter, as reported by The Daily Beast, wrote: “Oh wow, a family tied to anti-Latino rhetoric profiting off something deeply rooted in Indigenous (Guaraní), Paraguayan, and South American culture.”
How the Brand Responded
SOLLOS didn’t go quiet. While those who aren’t politically aligned with the Trump family might avoid buying the new energy drink, the company isn’t unaware that its famous co-founder might impact consumers’ decisions, and a recent post on the brand’s LinkedIn page addressed the controversy. The post read: “Not much is bipartisan these days. Enjoying SOLLOS is.”
The message was accompanied by promotional images of the cans overlaid with pull quotes from press coverage – including a line from Heather Schwedel, writing for Slate Magazine, who admitted, somewhat reluctantly, that the drink was actually pretty good. The quote read: “I guess I do think Barron and his twerp cofounders made a pretty good drink. (Heartbreaking: I would have preferred a good point!)”
As for the single-flavor approach, the brand was unapologetic. The SOLLOS website explained the deliberate choice: “Most brands launch with four flavors hoping you’ll like one of them; we have been obsessing over one flavor until it was flawless.”
The Family Competition
Barron isn’t the only young Trump who entered the energy drink market in 2026. His niece Kai Trump – an 18-year-old golfer and rising NIL star – launched her own signature flavor in a collaboration with Accelerator Active Energy. The launch marked Kai Trump’s first-ever branded product collaboration and resulted in a Blue Raz Slush flavor inspired, she said, by her love of blue raspberry movie theater slushies growing up. The drink features a zero-sugar formulation with 200 mg of caffeine from coffee beans and green tea. A 12-pack was listed at $24.99 on Amazon – more than $14 cheaper than a 12-pack of SOLLOS.
The two cousins’ drinks make for an interesting contrast. Kai’s collaboration comes via an established beverage brand already backed by athletes like Travis Kelce and Livvy Dunne. The drink didn’t stay on shelves long – it sold out in record time for Accelerator, becoming completely unavailable within two hours of launch. Barron’s brand, by comparison, is building from scratch: an independent label, a higher price point, one flavor, and a controversy baked in from day one.
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What This Means for You
A $39 yerba mate is easy to mock, and the internet was happy to oblige. But as a consumer, the more useful lens is the ingredient list and caffeine content. SOLLOS delivers 120 mg of natural caffeine per can from organic yerba mate with no artificial flavors, sweetened with raw honey, cane sugar, and monk fruit – a cleaner profile than most mainstream energy drinks on the market. Whether that’s worth $3.25 per can compared to $1.50 for a Red Bull is a personal call that depends entirely on what you’re optimizing for.
If you already buy premium sparkling waters, grass-fed everything, and organic produce, SOLLOS fits the same value system – and the USDA Organic certification means the claims on the label have been independently verified. If you’re buying a drink primarily for the caffeine boost, the math doesn’t work out in SOLLOS’s favor. Kai Trump’s Accelerator Blue Raz Slush packs 200 mg of caffeine at roughly $2.08 per can, zero sugar, and sold out within two hours. For most people watching their grocery bill in a high-cost-of-living environment, the choice between $17 and $39 for 12 cans of comparable energy is not a complicated one.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.