#107 2021 · Dole Sunshine Company / Ananas Anam · Agriculture / textiles
The world's largest pineapple grower found it was burning three times as much leaf as fruit it sold, and started selling the leaves too
the problem
A harvest byproduct treated as waste to be disposed of is quietly a raw material nobody has bothered to sell
background
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. Dole Sunshine Company, the world's largest producer of fresh fruit and vegetables, farmed pineapple at exactly this scale in South Cotabato in the Philippines, generating leaf waste as an unavoidable byproduct of every harvest.
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.
what everyone would do
Keep burning or discarding the leftover pineapple leaves as an unavoidable cost of harvesting fruit, or try to build an in-house use for the byproduct itself -- the two paths available to a fruit grower whose business has always been selling pineapples, not developing new materials.
what they saw
Dole didn't need to solve the problem of turning leaf waste into something valuable -- that problem had already been solved by an entirely unrelated company that just happened to need exactly the raw material Dole was burning. The insight wasn't inventing a new use for the leaves, it was recognizing that its disposal cost was someone else's supply-chain bottleneck.
the move
Dole began supplying pineapple leaf fiber from its own Philippine plantations directly to Ananas Anam starting in 2021, formalizing what had been a disposal cost into a raw-material supply relationship — the leaves are processed into fiber in the Philippines and finished into Piñatex textile in Spain and the UK — and backed the partnership with an educational marketing campaign explaining both the waste problem and the material solution to fashion brands and consumers.
why it works
Because Ananas Anam had already spent years developing the process to turn pineapple leaf fiber into a viable textile, Dole didn't need any new capability or technology of its own to participate -- it only needed to redirect material it was already generating and already paying to dispose of toward a buyer who wanted it. That converted a pure cost (burning three tons of leaves for every ton of fruit sold) into a second revenue stream at very low marginal cost, since the leaves already existed as a byproduct of normal operations regardless of whether Dole sold them or burned them. Pairing the supply deal with an educational marketing campaign let Dole capture additional brand value from being seen as solving a waste problem, not just quietly monetizing a byproduct.
the payoff
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.
where it breaks
The mechanism depends on someone else having already built genuine, reliable downstream demand for the byproduct -- without an existing buyer who has solved the harder conversion problem, a producer sitting on agricultural or industrial waste has no partner to sell it to and the disposal cost remains a pure cost. It also depends on that downstream partner's business actually surviving and scaling; Ananas Anam's own 2025 insolvency shows that an upstream supply relationship can be genuinely well-executed and honestly award-winning while the downstream material company built on top of it still fails for reasons entirely outside the supplier's control.
what came after
The partnership is cited as a reference case for turning agricultural waste streams into branded raw-material supply chains rather than treating byproduct disposal purely as a cost center — though the case carries an honest caveat: Ananas Anam, the company that manufactures Piñatex itself, entered administration (UK and Spanish insolvency proceedings) in October 2025, a reminder that even an award-winning upstream sourcing partnership doesn't guarantee the downstream material business built on it survives.
references
- [1]Cannes Lions 2022: Dole and Ananas Anam's 'Piñatex' gives pineapple leaves from the Philippines a second lifeadobo Magazine, 2022adobomagazine.com
- [2]Textile innovator Piñatex heading for liquidationFashionUnited, 2025fashionunited.uk
- [3]PiñatexWikipedia, 2025en.wikipedia.org