Social Entrepreneurs

Justin’s Nut Butter: a squeeze play!

March 15, 2011

Little things matter.

Like squeeze packs.

I’ve surely tossed away hundreds, maybe thousands, of the little silvery plastic packs of ketchup, Gu and Power Bar gels, but I’d never thought much about the environmental impact of squeeze packs.

Then I was introduced to Justin Gold, the founder and CEO of Justin’s Nut Butter, a small but fast-growing company that sells gourmet, organic peanut, almond and hazelnut butters in 1.15 ounce on-the-go squeeze packs that retail for $0.69 to $0.99. These packs were great for business at the Boulder, Colorado-based company, which now gets about 80% of its revenues from single servings. But squeeze packs are a blight, albeit a small one, on the environment because they are made out of several layers of different materials that are welded together and can’t be recycled or composted.

Most small-company CEOs  would have shrugged their shoulders at this problem and moved on. Not Justin. [click to continue…]

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Why acai? Ask the Sambazon guys

November 23, 2010

Jeremy and Ryan Black, with acai

Sometimes, for an entrepreneur, not knowing what you are getting into is a blessing.

If brothers Jeremy and Ryan Black had known what they were up against back in 2000 when they started Sambazon, a company that makes juices, sorbet and smoothie packs from tiny purple berries that grow in the Amazon forests of Brazil, they might not have bothered.

Few Americans then had heard of acai, or knew how to pronounce it. (It’s ah-sigh-ee.) The little berries from tall skinny palm trees can be harvested only once a year, they must be frozen right away to retain freshness and then shipped to the U.S. It’s a cash business, so importers must pay farmers long before the products are sold. And who, for goodness sakes, would sell them?

Harvesting acai

Nor did Jeremy or Ryan know much about the food business. Jeremy, the older bro, who’s now 37, was a financial planner. Ryan, who’s 35, was pursuing a professional football career as a defensive back, hoping to get to the NFL, after a season in the European football league.

All they knew was one thing. “Acai is amazing,” says Jeremy. And they had an idea that if they could figure out how to turn acai into a real business, they could not only do well for themselves but do some good for farmers in the Amazon. Says Ryan: “If this berry became a household word, it could be a really strong force for sustainability in the Amazon.”

It’s taken the Sambazon guys a decade, but things are looking up these days for their company. The No. 1 producer of organic acai, Sambazon doesn’t disclose sales–they were reported at $25 million in 2008–but the company says it is profitable. It employs about 150 people, half of them based in Brazil. You can find its products not only at smoothie bars and Whole Foods, but at mainstream retailers like Safeway and Giant. And the investors in the privately-held company include savvy food guys like Steve Demos, who founded White Wave and put Silk soy milk on supermarket shelves, and Gary Hirshberg, the CE-Yo of Stonyfield Farms. They also secured investments from Root Capital, a nonprofit social investment fund that’s intended to support sustainable livelihoods in the developing world, and from the EcoEnterprises fund run by The Nature Conservancy. [click to continue…]

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The Internet of parking spaces

November 14, 2010

Have you heard about the “Internet of things”? It’s a relatively new idea to me, although I note that the phrase gets about 2.2 million Google hits (at last count) and it has its own Wikipedia entry and a YouTube clip or two. As best as I can tell, it means that many things–cars, buildings, the electric grid, appliances, smart phones, cash registers–could be equipped with sensors, networked and thus able to communicate with one another and, of course, with the rest of us. To bring the concept down to earth, think of RFID codes on supermarket items that tell grocers when to restock, GPS phones equipped with Urbanspoon software that identifies nearby restaurants, or the work of startups like Historic Futures that help companies trace the origins of everything in their supply chain.

How not to park

Or “smart” parking spaces. Streetline is a San Francisco-based startup that wants to equip parking places with sensors and software so they can to talk to cars and the people who drive them. The company’s service is being pitched as a sustainability play–as a way to reduce traffic congestion, gasoline use and carbon emissions–but its success will more likely depend on whether it helps cities realize more revenue from parking meters, either through more effective enforcement or dynamic pricing of parking.

Still, for anyone who has circled a block endlessly looking for a spot, the idea has appeal.

“You can stand up in a room of 10 people or 1,000 people and ask them if they have had trouble finding a parking place and just about everybody raises their hand,” Zia Yusuf, the chief executive of Streetline, told me when we met recently in San Francisco.

“The carbon impact, the pollution impact, the congestion impact–it’s just been completely ignored,” Zia says.

Zia Yusuf

Streetline has deployed what it calls “ultra low power mesh sensor networks” in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sausalito, CA. What this means is that the company has installed sensors in the ground at parking places which “know” whether a car is parked there, as well as sensors on meters that “know” whether there’s time remaining or not. [click to continue…]

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KaBOOM! What an impact!

August 24, 2010

Darell Hammond of KABOOM!

Fifteen years ago, Darell Hammond, a 24-year-old college dropout who was raised in group home outside of Chicago, had an idea. He wanted to build playgrounds for kids who needed a place to play. He started with a playground in southeast Washington, D.C., raising money from the Home Depot Foundation and others to pay for the job, and assembling a group of volunteers to do the work. Then he built another. And another. Since then, KaBOOM!, the nonprofit that he started  in 1996 (again with help from Home Depot, which remains a supporter to this day), has built 1,800 playgrounds across America, more than anyone. Lately KaBOOM! has done something even more unusual–it upended its business model, and decided to share everything it has learned about play and playgrounds, which happens to be quite a lot, with the rest of the world.

“We decided to open-source our model online,” Darell told me recently, when we met in the group’s playful surroundings–toys are scattered everywhere–on Connecticut Avenue in northwest Washington. “We realized we were a drop in the bucket, when compared to the demand.”

I’d run across Darell now and then over the years, but we’d never sat down to talk until then. He’s an impressive guy and, more importantly, he has built an impressive and deep organization. KaBOOM! brought in about $21 million in revenues last year, and it has a staff of about 75 people, including former senior executives from Ben & Jerry’s, U.S. Food Service, and Discovery Communications’ Animal Planet. More important, KABOOM! built 162 playgrounds last year, and mustered 40,880 volunteers to do so.

In every case, people from the neighborhood where the playground is located play get deeply involved in planning and building it. Typically, they spend three months planning and designing the space, involving kids and adults,  before as few as 200 and as many as 1,200 people gather to construct the playground in a single day. “Organized chaos,” Darell calls it. What happens next matters, too: Neighorbood groups often build a second playground, or organize a crime-watch group, or lobby a city for better services. [click to continue…]

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A dramatic story behind a soccer shirt

June 3, 2010

Devoted fans of Ghana will wear this soccer jersey, designed by Puma, when they cheer on their team this month during 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Puma-Ghana-AwayJersey-10-12-1

Fans of Cameroon, meanwhile, will don their team’s green World Cup jersey.

PUM_40085_A_big

Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast

Algeria

Algeria

Puma also sells replicas of the World Cup jerseys for Algeria and the Ivory Coast.

What all these shirts have in common is that they are manufactured  by Impahla Clothing, a supplier to Puma based in South Africa that was started a few years ago by a man named William Hughes.

Surely there will be drama when play begins in the World Cup, but it will have to be exciting to compare with  the drama in the life of William Hughes. He has known first-hand the joy of victory and the agony of the defeat.

Born in Kenya, Hughes, who is now 47, moved at a young age with his family to Zimbabwe. [click to continue…]

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Wind power gets high

April 25, 2010

Windlift Testing April 3 - 2009Not far from where Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the first airplane in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Rob Creighton and his partners at a start-up company called Windlift are testing a contraption designed to capture high-altitude wind energy and turn it into electricity for off-the-grid users.

Potential customers include the U.S. military, chic eco-resorts in remote locations and poor people in the global south in desperate need of power.

Creighton, an 36-year-old MBA who grew up in Minnesota, tests his machines in the Outer Banks for the same reason as the Wright brothers did: There’s lots of wind there. His company is one of several — others include Google-backed Makani Power, Joby Energy and KiteGen — working in a relatively obscure but promising corner of the renewable energy business. They are deploying different technologies and business strategies, but all are driven by the fact that winds increase in power and consistency as you get higher above the ground. (If you are a scientist or engineer and want to know more, here is a link to a 77-page PDF presentation that includes such topics as “dancing kites”!)

I met Rob last week at a conference on energy and climate organized by the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the Kenan-Flager business school at the University of North Carolina. Turns out that his obsession with kites goes back to his boyhood, when he enjoyed canoeing in the Boundary Waters; to help speed things up, he’d rig a makeshift kite to his canoe. [click to continue…]

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Fighting poverty and global warming in Africa

April 22, 2010

Tree planting in Tanzania

Tree planting in Tanzania

Rarely do you find a business that attacks two big problems–global poverty and climate change–at the same time.

This week, I came across two such ventures. As it happens, they have a lot in common: Both operate in East Africa, both work with the very poor, both were started by executives who came out of the fossil-fuel industry and both are made possible by 21st century cutting-edge technology.

One is called TIST, which stands for The International Small Group and Tree Planting Program. (You can tell it wasn’t started by a marketing guy.) TIST organize small groups of farmers to plant trees, generate income from global carbon markets and reverse the devastating effects of deforestation in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and India. It’s been operating for less than a decade but has signed up a remarkable 65,000 farmers.

“It’s growing on its own by 50 to 100% a year,” says Ben Henneke, a veteran energy executive who started TIST after visiting Tanzania on a church mission back in 1998.

The other is Dissigno. A San Francisco-based startup, Dissigno operates a power and lighting project in Tanzania that provides villagers with battery-powered LED lights that are recharged with solar power. The company, which also has solar businesses in the U.S. and the Czech Republic, has big plans, hoping to expand its power and lighting business to Ethiopia, Botswana and South Africa.

“There are 1.6 million people around the world who don’t have power,” says Gary Zieff, a founder of Dissigno. “That’s a business opportunity for us.”

I met Henneke and Zieff at an energy and climate conference organized by Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the Kenan-Flagler business school at the University of North Carolina. Next week I’ll tell you about another entrepreneur who spoke at UNC about his plans to bring high-altitude wind power to the global south. Since I spend most of my time writing about big companies and the government, it’s great to connect with entrepreneurial energy.

TIST traces its origins to a service at an Episcopal church in northern Virginia where parishioners including Ben Henneke and his wife, Vannesa, were encourage by the rector join in a service mission. As Henneke recalls, Vannesa whispered to him: “Maybe we’re supposed to go to Africa this summer.” He replied: “I hope you have a nice time, dear.” Six months later, they found themselves in Tanzania, and they were astounded by what they saw. People were poor even by the standards of Tanzania, where annual per capita income [PDF] is about $440 a year. [click to continue…]

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Selling water to the global poor

April 4, 2010

twi-1Entrepreneur and lawyer Kevin McGovern has founded 15 companies. Some are household names, like Sobe Beverages, which he sold to PepsiCo for a reported $370 million in 2000. Others are quieter money-makers, like Tristrata, which owns 150 patents related to alpha hydroxy acids, a key ingredient in skin care products.

None, he predicts, will have the impact of his newest venture, a startup called The Water Initiative that aims to help solve the world’s water crisis by treating contaminated water at the point of use. It’s a simple idea–sell  equipment that will purify water to local distributors in poor communities around the world.

McGovern and his company are  operating in a couple of cities in Mexico, selling water purifiers for about $150 each to distributors who then lease them to families for about $3 a week. “It’s franchise model, a multi-level marketing approach,” he says. The Mexican government recently asked him to expand the business nationally.

While the company is small, McGovern has lined up some big-name supporters. Producer-musician Quincy Jones is honorary chairman of The Water Initiative. Indian business mogul Ranan Tata is an investor and adviser. So is Cornell University professor Stuart Hart, a pioneering thinker about business and sustainability and co-author, with C.K. Prahalad, of the 2002 article “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world. [click to continue…]

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Can local food deliver the goods?

December 9, 2009

whitedogsignWhich will more likely bring us food that’s good for people and the planet?

The sustainability initiatives of global giants like Wal-Mart, McDonald’s and Monsanto, all of whom say they want to feed more people in ways that are better for the environment?

Or  locally-owned food co-ops, farmer’s markets, family farmers, ranchers and fishermen and restaurants like the almost-famous White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia, pictured here?

A new, book-length study called Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a  Global Marketplace argues that locally-owned food companies are poised to grow and compete, not just in their neighborhoods, but around the world. The report was produced by the Wallace Center at Winrock International and the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE), and it was supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Community food enterprises or CFEs–we’ll simply call then local food businesses–are better for the economic growth of communities, better for the environment and better for people’s health and well-being, says Michael Shuman, the research director at BALLE and lead author of the study.

Michael and I recently met for lunch (sushi, presumably not local) here  in Washington to talk about the report. He’s a smart guy, the author of a provocative book called The Small Mart Revolution and he knows about as much as anyone else about the local-is-beautiful movement. [click to continue…]

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The strange power of prizes

December 2, 2009

Prizes are powerful incentives.

secondary

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic to win the $25,00 Orteig prize.

The DARPA Challenge

Tartan Racing, a collaboration between students at Carnegie Mellon and General Motors, won a $2 million prize in the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge, a competition to develop an  autonomous ground vehicle for the military.

Cracker_Jack_Box

And, of course,  kids since 1912 have been tearing open Cracker Jack boxes to get at the prize inside.

Prizes are fun. The difference between a spelling test and a spelling bee is a prize.

These days, as never before, private companies, foundations and government are turning to prizes as a way to spur technological and environmental innovation. This proliferation of prizes tells us some interesting things about ourselves and about the limits markets, as I’ll argue in a moment.

Best known of the prize-givers is the X Prize Foundation, whose slogan is “revolution through competition.” It’s offering prizes of at least $10 million each for safely landing a robot on the moon (sponsored by Google),  for building a super-efficient car (sponsored by Progressive Automotive) and for breakthroughs in genomics. [click to continue…]

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