Today we visited Sibo Chocolate, Riverside, and went to Universidad Latina to learn about medical technology, and I think the best example of the triple bottom line was at Sibo Chocolate. The triple bottom line measures business success by people, planet, and profit instead of profit alone, and today has made that concept a lot more understandable. At Sibo, the founders noticed Costa Rica was exporting raw cacao and importing finished chocolate from Europe, so they walked away from their careers and spent three years learning how to make chocolate to fix that. The decision that stuck with me was that they pay three times the market price for quality cacao while big companies buy the cheap stuff, which is money left on the table on purpose because their mission is to keep value inside Costa Rica rather than shipping it off raw for someone else to profit from. When cacao prices jumped 300% in ten months because of climate change, that commitment got significantly more expensive, and they did not budge on it. Most businesses would have adjusted their sourcing and moved on, but Sibo’s entire model is built around the idea that conservation and commerce can support each other rather than go against each other.
Riverside tells the same story through its design. Daniel Harris bought a burned down building, and instead of starting fresh, he kept the original floor, the charred wood, and the old walls, then built everything else around what was already there. The ash from the wood-burning oven goes into compost, the compost fertilizes the backyard garden, and the garden feeds directly into the kitchen, creating a loop that is built into how the place operates rather than used as a marketing talking point. The medical device industry fits this idea too, where Costa Rica bet on workforce quality and political stability over cheap labor and now hosts 13 of the top 20 global medical device companies in the country. All three of these places made deliberate tradeoffs that most businesses would never consider, and what they have in common is that their mission came first, and the business model was built around it.
