There are entrepreneurs who launch amazing businesses with great products, teams, marketing, logistics, and profit structures that can sustain a company for decades. Then there’s the dynamic duo of Mandy Cabot and Peter Kjellerup, who go the extra mile by mixing in a “do the right thing” approach across product, people, and planet.
Their formula fueled a successful 28-year run that saw Dansko become a cornerstone comfort brand while serving as a beacon for best sustainable and philanthropic practices. Dansko did a lot of good while selling tons of clogs and other styles. In 2018, the couple’s plan was to kick back in Belize, a tropical paradise they’d started visiting a few years earlier and fallen so in love with that they’d bought a second home there. But you know what they say about the best-laid plans…
“We really had no intention of embarking on what is now chapter three, following Five Star Farm (equestrian business) and Dansko when we retired,” Cabot says. The pair originally thought of planting a few crops for their own consumption and returning full circle to the farming that her husband did in Denmark before moving to America.
Well, one thing led to another and now the couple find themselves in full-on, rapid-growth mode as the heads of Silk Grass Farms (SGF), a vertically integrated agribusiness covering nearly 8,500 acres and processing a wide variety of crops into value-added products such as juices, juice blends, creams, milks, honey, and oils. “I guess we’re not the ‘retiring’ types,” Cabot says, though she admits that “We never really saw ourselves lounging on a beach with nothing important to do.”
Their plans took shape when an opportunity arose to purchase a “crazy-big” piece of land. Cabot and Kjellerup went for it, resolving to preserve the wild parts of the land parcel and rehabilitate the farmed parts. Though they had no hands-on industrial-sized farming experience, they took the plunge, diving in the same way they dived into the footwear business years earlier. “Go big or go home, right?” she says.
The decision seemed easier after the couple got to know several impact investors—people whose business model was Dansko’s “do the right thing” approach on steroids. (Think Newman’s Own and Patagonia’s Perpetual Purpose Trust models.) At SGF, 100 percent of the profits from the farms and factory go to preserve the 24,500 acres of adjacent rainforest that Cabot and Kjellerup have permanently protected as the Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve. “This is a quintessential circular economy: Profits from the agribusiness support the surrounding ecosystem, which in turn provides the nourishment on which our business depends,” Cabot explains. “That’s clean air and water, thriving habitats for pollinators and beneficial insects, thriving biodiversity, etc.”
The more Cabot and Kjellerup explored the impact business model, the more excited they got. “We can protect this incredibly important wildlife corridor from development, illegal logging, wildlife extraction, etc., and totally rehabilitate the farm as the economic engine that ultimately supports the whole shebang,” Cabot says.
That shebang now includes:
• three more farms (another 6,000 acres), which increases the supply of citrus, cacao, coconuts, and mangos
• a new, built-from-scratch, 130,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art food processing facility
• new employee housing, as well as a rec center, commissary, laundromat, and cafeteria
• a new two-megawatt solar array to power the entire operation
• a one-ton/hour biorefinery to turn biowaste, like coconut shells and fruit peels, into biochar, both for carbon credits and as a soil amendment to the farmland
• rebuilding and repurposing the original owner’s residence into a modern field station to house visiting researchers for the Silk Grass Wildlife Preserve
• planting hundreds of thousands of native trees as riparian buffers, windbreaks, nitrogen-fixers, and erosion controls
• building the Sandy Creek Academy, an onsite school for the children of SGF employees
That is walking the impact model walk. But that’s not all. SGF, Belize’s first certified B Corp business, also offers employees pensions, free medical and psychological care, and free education for their kids. Few, if any, Belize companies do all that.
“Why on earth wouldn’t we want to offer these things if it means a stronger, more resilient, more educated workforce?” Cabot says, adding, “If a business can’t truthfully claim that it enhances the quality of life of everyone it touches, then it should go back to the drawing board. Why else should a business even exist?”
Life for Cabot and Kjellerup is really good. They’re now permanent residents of Belize and live on a mile-long stretch of mostly deserted beach. SGF is in the foothills of the Maya Mountains, about a 35-minute drive northwest of their home. “‘Rush hour’ might see half a dozen cars on the road and about as many motorbikes and bicycles during our commute,” Cabot says, noting that temperatures fluctuate between the high 60s and the low 90s year-round. “The seasonal changes are much more nuanced, unlike Pennsylvania, when the changing seasons can smash you over the head.” Cabot adds, “The official language is English, and I’ve never met friendlier people.”
SGF, Cabot promises, is their “grand finale” as businesspeople. (She is now 70, and Kjellerup is 80.) Their goal is to get SGF to financial sustainability within their lifetimes, though the pair have never been profit-motivated. “With Dansko, we wanted to be our stakeholders’ favorite shoe company. Full stop,” she says. “We had something great to share, and the sharing would fuel the business and generate the profitability. With SGF, profitability is required to achieve financial sustainability, our ultimate goal. We’re not looking to extract a penny of value from the enterprise.”
Indeed, Cabot and Kjellerup bought the land to rebuild, restore, enrich, and leave it better than they found it. Ultimately, “Our intention is to return to Belize what was rightfully their land and natural resources, reversing decades of extraction economics by the British,” Cabot says, noting that they’re applying everything they learned during their shoe industry days to SGF. “Operationally, structurally, culturally, financially—we want to share those learnings with the next generation of leaders,” she says. “Belize is hungry for this impact business model that hopefully other Central American countries can follow. SGF can be its North Star. This is our legacy.” •
