Dole turned pineapple leaf waste into revenue by supplying Piñatex maker

Pineapple farming leaves behind vastly more plant material than fruit: for every ton of pineapple harvested, growers in the Philippines generate roughly three times that weight in leftover leaves, which have no food use and are conventionally burned in the field or left to rot as waste — a disposal cost, not a resource, for producers who were only ever in the business of selling the fruit.

Meanwhile a separate, unrelated problem had already been solved elsewhere: Dr. Carmen Hijosa, after years observing labor and environmental conditions in the Philippine leather industry in the 1990s, spent seven years developing Piñatex, a leather-substitute textile made from pineapple leaf fiber, presenting it at her Royal College of Art PhD exhibition in 2015 and founding Ananas Anam to manufacture it. Ananas Anam's material needed a reliable, large-scale source of pineapple leaves; Dole had leaves it was burning.

Dole redirected leaves it already paid to burn to Ananas Anam, whose existing process turned them into revenue, converting a cost into a second stream.

Ananas Anam had already spent years perfecting Piñatex, so Dole needed no new technology.

The leaves already existed as a byproduct, so selling them had near-zero marginal cost.

The marketing campaign turned the deal into brand value, amplifying the financial gain.

If you sit on a byproduct you pay to discard, find the company that has already solved turning it into something valuable, and sell it to them as feedstock.

Piñatex sourced through the Dole partnership was reported in use by more than 1,000 brands across over 80 countries, including Hugo Boss, Nike and H&M, with the campaign's educational film reported to have drawn over 1.7 billion impressions and the partnership reported worth over $100 million to Dole. The collaboration won the Grand Prix for Creative Business Transformation at Cannes Lions 2022, along with five further Gold, Silver and Bronze awards.