The Sunshine Approach: Economic transformation in emerging markets
Guest Post by Don Larson, CEO & Founder
Don Larson, Founder and CEO of Sunshine Nut Company in Mozambique, works across faith and cultural lines to revive the country’s cashew business. The secret of his success in what he calls a “reverse tithe” – giving 90% of the profits back to investment in Mozambique and developing a fair-trade supply chain rather than expatriating the profits.
Fifteen years ago, I sat in the pew of my church and in the silence of my office contemplating life. I was successful by the world’s definition. I had risen to CEO level and was a respected and well-established member of my church. But I felt the Lord telling me He had a different type of success planned for me. That prompting was accentuated by the fact that I was not fulfilled, and I was restless. Was there more than what the world offered? Did I have the courage to search out His plan for my life?
The feeling overwhelmed me to the point that I surrendered my life completely into His hands in 2007 to see where that destination might be. Most call it a mid-life crisis, but I left a successful corporate life to pursue the questions of ‘why was I put on this earth?’ and ‘what was I created to do?’ I stopped working on purpose and went on an 18-month spiritual journey…and it led to Project Sunshine. I had started seminary and was involved in missional efforts.
Just at the point where the world’s pressures were starting to bear down on me, God delivered my calling and it was so perfectly clear, almost audibly. On that day back in 2009, He delivered the challenge to “Build food factories in 3rd world nations to bring lasting economic transformation....and name it Sunshine”. It was the last thing on my mind and something I really didn't want to do, but my love for the Lord dominated my life. The doors started to open, and I found great excitement in walking through them. I developed “The Sunshine Approach Business Model” over the next few months and then moved my family to an unknown Mozambique in 2011 to open the Sunshine Nut Company.
Fast forward 11 years later and we have penetrated the main selling markets of the USA, UK, Europe, Middle East, and Africa offering a premium roasted cashew line that is differentiated in the marketplace. There is reason for that freshness. We grow, roast, and package in Mozambique cutting out loads of middlemen, travel, packaging, and complexity.
But selling cashews is only the end of the process that allows us to deliver the means…lasting economic transformation of lives in developing nations. You see, God interrupted me in 2007 to surrender my life to Him. He then reinserted me back in business, but to do it His way and not the world’s way. The Sunshine Approach business model uses subsistence farmers’ harvests to make premium food products sold in the finest retailers around the world. Those exports provided the income for the farmers to be paid fairly and the proceeds from the sales of those products are given under a reverse tithe commitment (90% donated to projects to uplift the poor, widowed, and orphaned of Mozambique).
There are three main projects done by our philanthropic arm – the Sunshine Approach Foundation. They are the Sunshine Homes Project (creating families), the Sunshine Villages Project (growing communities) and the Sunshine Employment Project (creating jobs).
Our seventh house is being built in our Sunshine Villages Project and we have accepted responsibility for 27 children (once orphaned and trying to survive) being mothered by six women (once widowed or vulnerable). Our first three joined us in 2004. All our children are flourishing.
We were recently visited by a senior leader of UNICEF who excitedly exclaimed that our concept of alternative care (away from orphanages) was best in class in all of Mozambique, maybe the world. She asked my wife, Terri, and I what was our metric of success. I looked at Terri and the answer was evident. I replied “Tears of Joy! We regularly break into tears seeing how the lives of these children have changed for the better”.
Those same tears of joy appear in our other two projects. For the Sunshine Employment Project, we have expanded our main factory 250% this year as we are introducing new product lines (cashew butter) and pack sizes (airline snacks). We have two factories underway in the villages to partially shell the cashews right where they are grown on the community farms. This allows us to finish the shelling of cashews at our main factory and be able to say we shell, roast, and package on the same day. That same process can take up to a year or more for most of our competitors. It is why we have unparalleled freshness, flavor, and crunch while they have a stale, bland, and chalky result.
But the culmination of our work is investing in the subsistence farming communities. We have embarked on Project Sunshine. While we attracted Total Energies as a funder, we now have the interest of other partner companies who have problems surrounding their installations offering solutions for community care and employment. Our healthy concern is that the foundation is growing so fast that we must grow the company to match the foundation’s efforts.
How do you bring people out of generations of systemic poverty when 80% of the population are subsistence farmers and jobs do not exist. In short, we create jobs. You first create the market which creates jobs rather than create jobs and go searching for a market. Searching for markets is where middlemen and exploitation creep in. We are pairing up with 8 villages this year and have plans to extend to 8 more each year for a total of 40 in 5 years.
We ask each village to allocate land which allows every family to have a 2-hectare parcel for cash crop farming. We provide the water wells, the hybrid cashew saplings, the education, the farm utensils, and a lot of coaching and encouragement. But most importantly, we provide the market through Sunshine Nut Company and when that market produces profit through export sales, we bring back those proceeds for further upliftment to the community. So far, we have 25 farmer associations formed to provide the structure we need for negotiations, education, traceability, organic practices, and deciding how best the community can prosper. The business model’s slogan is value-based business, where dignity, love, and community come together with excellence.
Equally important is training, encouragement, and opportunity. The objective is to create jobs locally. Many of our villages’ elders have talked about our project bringing their children back home. Since there were no prospects for prosperous lives in the villages, the children headed to the cities for search of employment. What they find in many cases are drugs, crime, prostitution, and an equally difficult life.
Our cashew tree nursery staff started with a young crew which we initially hired to clear the land. What we found was an enthusiastic bunch who helped our consultant build the nursery, fill the sapling bags, install an irrigation system, and grow all of these amazing 150,000 cashew trees. They have proven their hard work ethic, a willingness to learn, and the desire to see the project succeed for the benefit of their people.
This team from the nursery is now our planting team who will take their saplings and go out into the fields with the families to assist each family with their hundreds of cashew trees. As we grow throughout the years, we are looking to promote and give more and more responsibility to those who have proven themselves.
We also hired people to clear the land by removing the grassland, cutting down the scrub trees, digging up the stumps, clearing for roads, and marking off individual parcels of land. They have exceeded all of our expectations for putting in a hard day’s work. This is the team preparing our land for a village cashew shelling factory. Each village will have the 300-hectare community farm but also a village factory for the farmers to add value to their crop. The factory will introduce factory work while also allowing the farmers’ harvests to increase in value by 50% with very little effort involved to shell those cashews.
Each factory is an off-grid operation not requiring electric service as the waste cashew shell is converted to charcoal to fuel most of the equipment through a boiler. The little electricity needed is provided by a solar panel system to make the factory sustainable and able to be located anywhere.
The overall objective is trust. This is not given but earned. With each step of the way, we gain more and more trust with people who have been promised much but never had much delivered. They were guarded and skeptical and we understood why. Now that trust keeps building. Soon we expect the prosperity to take hold and peace to enter the land. After all, it was the Prince of Peace who gave me the assignment and who leads our efforts.
Our motto is ‘Hope Never Tasted So Good’. As we continue to grow this vertical integration project, our taste will continue to keep getting better and the hope will continue to increase. God put an end to my restlessness and gave me the abundant life. That woman asking me about my metric of success for our project and my reply being “Tears of Joy”. I believe the abundant life involves tears of joy. Isn’t that a better life goal. With that goal comes fulfilment and a life with no regrets.
