The Quebec brand that reinvented breakfast by freezing it into cubes — and won over every Dragon in the room

The apartment kitchen where it started

Claudia Poulin and Dominic Dube were university students in Quebec in 2015 when they started making smoothies in their apartment. The problem they kept running into was not the smoothie itself — it was everything around it. Buying fresh fruit and greens meant buying more than you could use before it spoiled. Making a smoothie every morning meant hauling out a blender, measuring ingredients, cleaning up after. It was a good-for-you habit that required too much friction to sustain.

Their answer was to freeze the preparation. They developed a format where the exact ingredients for a single smoothie serving — organic fruit, vegetables, seeds, plant-based proteins — are portioned and frozen into individual cubes. To make breakfast, you take six cubes and add liquid. The portioning is done. The produce is at peak freshness. There is nothing to measure or chop. For most flavours you do not even need a blender — the cubes dissolve in liquid in a glass. This is not a minor convenience optimization. It is a structural change to how the product works, and it opened the brand to a different consumer than traditional smoothie products could reach.

Evive launched in 2015 and started building its way into the Quebec grocery market. By 2019, four years after that apartment kitchen start, the brand was generating just over one million dollars in annual revenue and had earned enough traction to take their pitch to national television.

All five dragons

On February 27, 2019, Claudia Poulin and Dominic Dube walked onto the set of CBC's Dragon's Den. They were seeking $100,000 for a 10 percent stake in Evive Nutrition. What happened next is genuinely rare: all five dragons made investment proposals. Manjit Minhas led with $150,000 for 10 percent, topping the founders' ask in both amount and implied valuation.

The founders left the Den without accepting a dragon's deal. Instead, they subsequently partnered with Fondaction — Quebec's CSN union-backed investment fund — and Vancouver's Renewal Funds, a firm that invests specifically in sustainable food and consumer businesses. It is the kind of outcome that tells you something about the founders' conviction in what they had built: you do not turn down television dragons if you do not believe the business is worth more than what is on the table.

The Dragon's Den appearance was the beginning of the national story. From $1 million in revenue and a Quebec footprint, Evive expanded to Loblaws banners nationally, Real Canadian Superstore, Metro, Sobeys, Super C, Maxi — and eventually into the United States. The product fundamentals that made five experienced investors compete for a deal turned out to be the same ones that built a 5,000-store distribution network.

What is actually in the cube

The Evive smoothie cube lineup includes Asana, Samurai, and Sapphire as confirmed SKUs in Canadian distribution. Each flavour is formulated around a specific nutritional profile using organic, plant-based certified ingredients. The Asana flavour is the most widely distributed in the Loblaw family of stores and appears on both Loblaws.ca and realcanadiansuperstore.ca. The full current lineup is at evivenutrition.com/collections/all.

The blender-free option is worth understanding specifically. Most frozen smoothie products assume you have access to a blender and ten minutes. Evive's cube format dissolves in liquid in a glass — it works in a dorm room, an office, a hotel room, or anywhere a blender is not available. That is a real expansion of the addressable use case relative to competitors whose format assumes a full kitchen setup.

Evive has also expanded beyond the original smoothie cube format into 2-in-1 lunch products, using the same frozen, pre-portioned approach. The core insight — that the barrier to nutritious eating is friction, not information — scales across more than just the breakfast moment.

How Evive stacks up in the quick breakfast category

The Canadian quick-nutrition breakfast category sits across frozen, refrigerated, and bottled formats. Here is how the options compare:

Formats and sizes reflect each brand's standard flagship SKU per publicly available product listings. Retailer availability reflects Canadian market presence as of July 2026.

The key distinction is format and origin. Daily Harvest has built a comparable frozen format in the United States but has limited Canadian distribution, primarily through its own direct channel. Cascadian Farm and Bolthouse sell the same end result — a nutritious smoothie — through entirely different formats: bulk frozen fruit and ready-to-drink bottles, respectively. Evive is the only Canadian brand in this comparison that built a format-first innovation, earned full national Loblaw-family distribution, and stayed founder-led and Quebec-based through all of it.

The founders as the proof of concept

Poulin and Dube have been the face of Evive since the apartment kitchen. They did not hire a founder persona onto a manufacturer's standard product — they built the product themselves and kept the company independent and founder-led through a national expansion, a televised pitch that attracted five simultaneous investor offers, and growth to 30 million units sold. The CDPQ (Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec) has featured Evive as an entrepreneur success story in its portfolio materials.

The Dragon's Den outcome is the clearest external signal of what the brand represents. Five experienced investors competing for the same deal means none of them wanted to be the one to walk away from it. That is a different signal than one dragon getting excited. It means the product fundamentals, the format differentiation, and the founders' execution track record were all legible to people whose job is to evaluate exactly those things — and all five came to the same conclusion simultaneously.

Where the brand lives online

Evive's primary social presence is on Instagram at @evivenutrition (120,000 followers), based in Montreal, QC. The brand content mixes product shots, nutritional content, founder presence, and recipe-style posts showing how to use the cubes. At 120K followers this is one of the larger brand accounts in the Canadian frozen food CPG category and reflects consistent platform investment over the decade since founding.

What the press has said

Evive has been covered across Canadian trade and consumer media since the Dragon's Den appearance. Here are the primary press placements:

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes directly to an Evive Nutrition product page or a retail listing — not the homepage — so you can find it without hunting:

For the full store list and product range, visit evivenutrition.com or use the brand's store locator.

Frequently asked questions

Bottom line

Five experienced investors rarely agree on anything. The fact that all five made offers on the same Evive pitch in 2019 is the clearest shorthand for what makes this brand worth knowing about. Poulin and Dube built something genuinely new — not a better smoothie, but a better way to make one — and then scaled it from a Quebec apartment to 5,000-plus stores and 30 million units across North America while staying founder-led and independent. If you are in Canada and shop at a Loblaws-family store or use Instacart, the Asana flavour on Loblaws.ca is the fastest way to understand what the format actually does.