A Dorset firm that makes a drink containing a Brazilian 'super herb' is now selling its liquid infusion back to Brazil.

Shaftesbury-based Yuyo has announced it will export its innovative range of Latin American-inspired drink infusions to Brazil this year as part of its exporting growth plans.

Yuyo was founded in 2016 by Rosie Marteau and Charles Grummit after they travelled to Latin America and discovered yerba mate, a ‘super herb’ that is used in many traditional South American drinks. The company now stocks a range of yerba mate drink infusions across the UK through retailers like Ocado, Whole Foods and Revital. It also has its own e-commerce site

Due to Yuyo’s globally-appealing brand, the business has found international success in markets such as the US, Sweden and France.

Rosie said: “Exporting has always been fundamental to our business plans as we knew our products could have a global appeal. We’re finding international buyers are increasingly associating UK goods with high quality and on-trend packaging, and we’re looking to tap into this even more by reaching out to new markets including Brazil. Brazil is the home of yerba mate itself, but it looks to Europe for innovative brands like ours."

Rosie said she and Charles have faced the challenge of regulation around ingredients and labelling.

She said: "It’s very expensive to redesign packaging for a global market. We found a way around this at first by putting ingredients stickers over our current packaging so that it complied with international guidelines. This also gave us the flexibility to test our products in different markets without having to spend too much money. Once we'd proven our ability to trade internationally we created packs with seven different world languages on the back."

The business, which already exports to seven countries worldwide, boosted its international orders by 42 per cent between 2015 and 2017.

Exporting currently makes up 40 per cent of the company’s £100,000 annual turnover and Rosie and Charles now plan to increase this further by exporting to Brazil in the next three months and target Australia in 2019.

To support its exporting operations, the company received support from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) and Department for International Trade (DIT), who helped the business identify new international markets and register its intellectual property in the US, Europe and Australia.

Paul Shand, DIT’s Head of South West, said: “Yuyo is a great example of a local business that’s harnessing the wide range of benefits exporting can bring. It’s encouraging to see such a young company target new markets like Australia as well as continuing to make in-roads into its established markets, like the US and Europe."