Adventures in Eco-Land

Main house at Punta Mona, where everything is self-sustaining.

A different era: Norman Brooks as North Miami dentist.

Dried mango (the best seller), goldenberries, and the packaged products.

Whole Foods display: Kopali distribution went nationwide this past January.

On the bus: Mobile office, mobile home, and ecological showroom.

By Harriette Yahr
Special to BT

It’s not every day a successful dentist retires his floss and drill for a life as a Green Warrior, but Norman Brooks and his family are not your everyday people.

The Brooks clan — dad (Norman), mom (Bonnie), daughter (Lisa), and son (Stephen) — hail from North Miami and are making sustainable waves with a couple of eco-green businesses, Costa Rican Adventures and Kopali Organics, which produces some of the most delectable “good for the planet and good for you” food you’ve ever tasted.

It’s a sign of the changing times that a company winning the 2007 Socially Responsible Business Award for natural, organic, and sustainable products is located in the thick of Miami — near 79th Street, actually — rather than in a place like, say, Santa Cruz, California, or Portland, Oregon, where organic, fair-trade, and vegan lifestyles are not just for hippies anymore.

“You don’t equate Miami and consciousness,” says Norman as he looks out over the construction that holds this part of Biscayne Boulevard in gridlock. “But in the last few years there are signs of a green awakening here. It’s exciting to be part of the paradigm shift.”

Kopali Organics’ products include organic dried mango, organic banana vinegar, and tasty, can’t-get-much-healthier snacks like chocolate-covered cacao nibs and organic trail mix (goji berries, cacao nibs, mulberries, and pistachios). The company’s tag line: “Good for you, Good for Farmers, Good for the Earth.” Everything is all natural and all organic — no added anything here. The packaging itself doubles as a primer in Green Lifestyle: What are superfoods? Why care about the farmers? Why organic? And in the fine print, reminders like “We Are What We Eat” and “Breathe Deep,” lest we forget as we go about our hectic days.

Kopali’s goal is to make radically pure, extremely healthful food produced in the most compassionate and sustainable way possible. “But it’s not enough for our products to be just nutritious,” insists Norman, who offers a visitor some organic fair-trade chocolate-covered goji berries. “We also like to think of them as being delicious and righteous as well.”

For Bambi Liss, marketing specialist for the Aventura Whole Foods market, the Brookses are “a delight to work with” and Kopali “very much ties into what Whole Foods market is about — making a positive impact on communities and the environment.” The market’s biggest Kopali seller? “Oh, the dried mangoes,” she answers. “Once you start you just can’t stop.”

* * *

Norman Brooks’s path seemed lighted enough. Born and raised in Miami Beach, he attended the University of Florida undergrad then returned to Miami with a DDS from the University or Maryland in 1974. For 35 years he built a successful dentistry practice in North Miami — and even married his junior high school sweetheart, Bonnie. They’ve been together for over 48 years. Norman retired in 2005 to focus on Kopali.

“I was a very traditional guy. I wanted to be a dentist from age eight,” explains Norman, now a youthful 62, with radiant blue eyes and an infectious smile. “I think it had to do with the fact I grew up very poor and I knew that my dentist played golf every Wednesday.” He reels off important dates in his life: June 3 (graduated), June 5 (went to work), October 25 (had his first child). “In many ways my choices were laid out for me,” he says.

He then returns to the present as he savors organic goldenberries. “My generation wasn’t necessarily an evil generation, but we were certainly uninformed. We didn’t mean to pollute the environment like we did.”

It was Norman’s second child, Stephen, now 34, who got the green bug early on. He cites an epiphany in 1992 as his call to the eco side. Stephen, who can best be described as a mix between an ecological Energizer Bunny and a benevolent Pied Piper — his passion for making the world a better place matched only by his beaming, high-vibe energy — was on a trip with his girlfriend in Costa Rica.

The setting seemed normal enough. It was a sunny day. They walked past a banana plantation. Suddenly Stephen saw a crop-duster flying up ahead. “It had a trail of pesticides behind it, like a cloud of dust,” he recalls. “It flew over us, and our noses, our eyes, everything started burning.” Stephen watched the plane fly over a group of children playing. He was horrified. “Then I wondered, Who is responsible for this? I realized it was me. I was responsible, every time I sliced a Chiquita banana onto my Cinnamon Life cereal growing up.”

In 1995 Stephen founded Costa Rican Adventures, an ecotourism company in equal parts fun (think white-water rafting) and educational (think runoff from pesticides poisoning the river in which you’re rafting). As a tour guide, Stephen hiked through the rain forest enumerating the beauty of Costa Rica — and its mounting environmental problems (“It wasn’t just the Chiquitas and the Doles with their bananas and pineapples wrecking havoc”) until one day he decided to play a bigger role in the solution.

So in 1997, with the help of his family, he bought 30 acres of land “off the grid” — no electricity, no running water, a three-hour hike on foot to get there — on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica. Today the Punta Mona Center for Sustainability and Education (Punta Mona or Monkey Point for short) is a world leader in tropical, sustainable agriculture and sustainable living techniques. The center, *CK which now encompasses nearly 100 acres, grows more than 190 varieties of tropical fruits, nuts, and spices (Stephen says he’ll name his son Durian, after his favorite fruit) and is fully powered by solar energy, with methane gas from the septic system fueling the kitchen, and filtered rainwater for drinking and bathing. That means all your basics are covered in Punta Mona, from food to energy, and even the waste is put to use.

One day Stephen’s buddy Spider, who lived at Punta Mona, called him out in an exchange that went something like this: “Do you go back to the States, Stephen?”

“Yeah, Spider, five or six times per year.”

“So, friend, do you realize that airplane seat you sit in is equivalent in zapped resources and carbon emissions to about 800 hours of continuous driving?”

Five months later Stephen founded the Sustainable Solutions Caravan, a nonprofit organization promoting sustainable living through the use of alternative fuels. From 2003 to 2005, Stephen and his team of eco-missionaries drove buses running on recycled vegetable oil from San Francisco to Costa Rica. They met with agricultural ministers, distributed organic seeds, held press conferences — all to spread the message of eco-sustainability.

Soon something else took root in his conscience: his concern about the well-being of his Punta Mona neighbors, the farmers who toiled for lousy wages in soil often drenched in toxic chemicals.

Turns out that, at the time, the father of Punta Mona’s farm manager was the regional president of Whole Foods in Southern California. He visited, met Stephen and his colleague Zac Zaidman, fell in love with the green duo’s mission, and, recalls Stephen’s dad, “He said, ‘Bring me a great product with a great story and I’ll put you into Whole Foods.’”

Kopali Organics was born, a partnership between the Brooks family and the Zaidman family (Zac and brother Zev). Their first product was organic banana vinegar manufactured by Punta Mona’s neighbors, 76 Afro-Caribbean families who were selling bananas to Gerber’s baby food and not making a living wage.

Other early products included coffee and coconut oil, sourced from farmers in Costa Rica. That was in 2005, back when Kopali’s office was a small, windowless space on NE 108th Street, and mom Bonnie would take breaks from her Realtor business to run sample demonstrations up at Aventura’s Whole Foods. Today the company is based in a remodeled loft building off of 79th Street in Miami. Their products, including a new line of “supergood superfood snacks,” are now distributed exclusively through Whole Foods. This past January they went nationwide.

* * *

Looking around Kopali’s office, it seems ordinary enough: computers, desks, a shelf with sample products. What’s different are the wide-open, uncluttered spaces, the nontoxic dishwashing soap (from Seventh Generation), and in the kitchen a picture of a hibiscus flower (from Punta Mona) by the sink.

Andrew Alves, a laid-back twentysomething wearing a T-shirt and cargo shorts, doubles as sales marketing coordinator and bookkeeper. He’s been at Kopali for a year, after searching for an organic organization to join following college. Kopali inspired him. “It was mission-driven and had a triple bottom line,” he says. “Plus I had a chance to work with small family farmers in cooperatives around the world, bringing their products to market.”

Alves points to the paintings of Costa Rican artist Juan Vasquez lined up along one wall, and then to the original banana vinegar and dried mango packages on which the art has been reproduced. He offers me some chocolate-covered bananas (yes, organic; yes, delicious), then picks up what looks like a stone for me to smell. He tells me it’s actually a resin. “Kopali,” he says, “is an ancient Mexican Nahuatl word meaning ‘incense,’ associated with aromatic resins used ceremoniously by descendents of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.” Resins like from the kopa tree he has just shown me, which smells kind of like cedarwood. “It represents our commitment to indigenous cultures and is a reminder we are all connected on this planet.”

That’s what “triple bottom line” is, a business model in which profit is calculated not solely on financial gains but also on a company’s social and ecological impact. Alves tells me that Kopali Organics is the first company to offer organic goldenberries (nationally) through Whole Foods and the first to sell Rainforest Alliance-certified dried mango (think uber-organic certification). A woman’s cooperative in Anatolia, Turkey, uses heirloom seeds (passed down for five centuries) for Kopali’s mulberries (think textured and subtly sweet).

You get a clear sense from Alves, the two other twentysomething Kopali employees I met, and their older Brooks family bosses that their pride in the company is not tied to ego. (I don’t see the Sustainability Award framed anywhere.) Their motivation springs from genuine caring, the foundation of a business model for the new 21st Century, in which cooperation replaces competition, and everyone wins.

Kopali Organics’ mission of doing good all around, from the health of the consumers to farmers to the land, is paying off. To date they’ve helped hundreds of family farmers around the world, like the Costa Rican banana farmers now making a living wage, and have educated thousands about the benefits of sustainable living. Norman Brooks breaks out e-mails from customers. Sentiments like “Thank you” and “I appreciate what you are doing for the planet” are common. There’s even one guy “hooked” on Kopali’s dried mangoes who’s looking for information about the mango farmer — Ernesto in Mexico — so he can know more specifically where his food is coming from.

* * *

These days Stephen Brooks is a bit of a rock-star in the eco-green world. He’s friends with eco-celebs like Darryl Hannah and Woody Harrelson, and if you YouTube his name, you’ll be taken on an eco-trip from his vegetable-oil-fueled bus in San Francisco to his farm in Costa Rica to food markets around the world as part of the show he hosted on the Food Network called Edible Adventures: From the Field to the Plate, about where your food is really coming from. Lately Stephen’s eco-globetrotting is aimed at spreading the love and mission of Kopali, from Colombia (visiting the facility that dries their goldenberries and the farmers who grow their cacao beans), to Turkey (where their mulberries are grown and sun-dried by the woman’s cooperative), to Thailand (for R&D into new organic fair-trade products).

Soon you’ll be able to catch Stephen in food-whiz mode as one of the field reporters on the Discovery Network’s PlanetGreen. “I’m their fruit guy!” Stephen laughs as he dashes off to Germany for an organic trade show. The program airs in June.

* * *

Back on Biscayne Boulevard, at Kopali Organics’ headquarters, Norman oversees the day-to-day operations. He’s a master green-hat switcher. This morning he cleared up a logistics problem. “I couldn’t get hold of a driver to verify a pickup down in Homestead,” he says. “But I just did.” Kopali Organics also helps Homestead farmers bring their products to market. There was a need. Whole Foods wanted to support local organic farmers, but who was going to do the pick-up and delivery? Enter the Brooks family.

Once each week Kopali picks up locally grown avocados, star fruit, and the like, and delivers the produce to the Whole Foods warehouse in Pompano. Keeping with Kopali’s mission of sustainability, the delivery truck runs on waste vegetable oil, conveniently gathered from Whole Foods’ own kitchen.

The Conscious Caravan Bus has now evolved into the Veggie Bus, the wheels of the Conscious Goods Alliance Tour. Decked out with bamboo cabinets, a headliner of sustainable hemp, and a renewable-energy kitchen (and much more), the bus functions as a mobile office, mobile home, and ecological showroom for conscious lifestyles and products — like Kopali Organics.

Norman goes over the schedule. Today it is in Dallas, soon Houston. He then turns back to his computer. The manager at Punta Mona wants to know if a date has been set for a Costa Rican high-school field trip. An e-mail soon chimes in: Someone wants information about Kopali Communities, builders of ultra-sustainable communities in Costa Rica. Norman is one of four managing partners, along with Miami resident and project developer Steve Feldman. The first project, Valle de Machuca, is a 45-acre community featuring super-green technology such as a sand-filtered water supply system, solar energies, and permaculture food.

And how does his new green business life compare to, say, dentistry? “It’s much more stressful,” affirms Norman, though as he leans back in his chair, he acknowledges that this new work environment is more relaxed. You can see he traded in his leather shoes for Crocks. “I feel freer here. The organic world is a kinder and gentler world. But it’s still business. Even doing conscious business — it’s still business.”

He also has his family by his side now. Daughter Lisa, after graduating from Harvard with a master’s in education, took over operations of Costa Rican Adventures in Oakland, California. And thanks to Lisa, there’s a new member of the Brooks clan: Eidan, her three-year-old son. “He’s the love of my life,” gushes Norman. So will Eidan grow up to be a green business guy too? “Well,” Norman grins, “when you ask him who makes the best mango, he says, ‘Kopali.’”

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