Coconuts + water = energy and success for Mark Rampolla
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So how does a guy from Baldwin find his fortune in coconut water? Shoot, how does anyone find a fortune in coconut water?
"It's a combination of timing, luck, stupidity and refusal to fail," says Mark Rampolla.
His Southern California company, Zico, claims retail sales of well over $100 million a year. Its little blue boxes started selling seven years ago in Manhattan yoga studios but now can be found everywhere from Target to Giant Eagle. It's hard to believe this all started with a Central American hangover.
That may be stretching things, but only a bit. Mr. Rampolla, a 1984 graduate of Baldwin-Whitehall High School, first saw coconut water sold on the beaches of Costa Rica while serving in the Peace Corps there. It beat drinking the hair of the dog after a long night of partying, and it was a good post-exercise tonic, too.
Mr. Rampolla, with a business degree from Marquette University, was helping the locals, many of them single mothers, launch small businesses that might appeal to tourists flocking to Costa Rica's rainforest. When his hitch was up, he got a master's in business administration from Duke and met his wife, Maura.
He landed a job in business development with International Paper's beverage packaging division and traveled through Latin America, Asia and Europe showing people how great juice in cardboard cartons can be.
Because he and his wife, who had done volunteer work in Nicaragua, wanted to get back to Latin America, he volunteered to run the company's packaging plant in El Salvador.
"There are not a lot of people fighting to move to El Salvador," he said, but he grew the business and wound up running the entire Latin American division.
By then, he and his wife had two daughters. Not wanting to be a corporate guy all his life, he kept bringing new business ideas home. His wife kept telling him one was dumber than the next until he suggested coconut water.
"We always drank it and loved it," he said, and he had just "enough knowledge to be dumb enough to think I could pull this off."
First Published September 15, 2011 12:00 am
