I Built a Tequila Brand. Then I Turned Its Waste Into a Business.

What running two companies on opposite ends of the same supply chain taught me about sustainability, scale, and the opportunities hiding inside environmental problems.

Most conversations about sustainability start with responsibility. Reduce your footprint. Do less harm. Make better choices. 

I understand the impulse. But after building a tequila brand from the ground up in Mexico, I’ve come to see sustainability through a completely different lens. The most powerful environmental solutions I’ve encountered didn’t come from a desire to be responsible. They came from staring at a problem so long that I finally saw the business hiding inside it.

Here’s the problem I was staring at: every year, the tequila industry generates millions of tonnes of agave fiber waste, called bagazo. After the sugars are extracted from the agave piña to make tequila, what’s left is a mountain of wet, fibrous pulp. Most of it gets dumped in landfills or burned in open fields. The environmental toll is staggering. 

In landfills, decomposing bagazo releases methane, a greenhouse gas roughly eighty times more potent than CO₂ over a twenty-year period. When it’s burned, the damage is more immediate: toxic particulate matter, black carbon emissions, and contaminated soil in the surrounding agricultural communities. Across Jalisco, these aren’t hypothetical harms. They’re the daily reality for the people and ecosystems living alongside the tequila industry’s growth. Yet, almost none of this waste is treated as what it actually is: a high-quality, renewable raw material.

The realization that this waste stream was actually a feedstock became the foundation of The Sustainable Agave Company.

Seeing the Opportunity That Others Walk Past 

Over the years, I watched our distillery and dozens of others across Jalisco produce extraordinary spirits and extraordinary waste. The bagazo piled up. The environmental cost was real. And the industry’s approach to it was, at best, indifferent.

But I also noticed something else. The fiber itself was remarkable. Strong, abundant, and regenerative, agave is one of the fastest-growing plants on earth, thriving in arid conditions with minimal water. It struck me that the same plant fueling a premium spirits industry could also fuel a packaging revolution, if someone was willing to build the infrastructure to process it.

That’s the insight I want other CEOs to sit with: the biggest sustainability opportunities are often sitting in plain sight, inside industries that have already learned to look past them. Environmental friction isn’t just a cost to manage. It’s a signal that something valuable is being overlooked.

From Concept to Commercial Reality

At Sustainable Agave, we take post-distillation agave fiber and transform it into compostable food service products like straws, cutlery, and soon packaging. Our products are certified home-compostable and industrially compostable, and they’re already in distribution with some of the largest food service operators in North America.

Too many sustainable ventures fail here. They build a beautiful proof of concept, win an award, and then stall because they never designed for scale. When I started Sustainable Agave, I made a deliberate choice to think about commercial viability from day one. Not “how do we make a compostable straw?” but “how do we make a hundred million of them, cost-competitively, with a feedstock supply that scales with demand?”

Why the Supply Chain Is the Strategy

The tequila industry isn’t going to stop producing bagazo; production has only grown as global demand for tequila accelerates. That means our supply gets cheaper and more abundant over time, not scarcer and more expensive. For a packaging company competing against petroleum-based plastics, that kind of cost trajectory matters enormously.

This is a principle I think every CEO should internalize: the most defensible sustainability businesses are built on supply chains that get stronger as the underlying industry grows. If your sustainable solution depends on a constrained or expensive input, scale will eventually work against you. If it depends on a waste stream that grows with economic activity, scale becomes your tailwind.

Sustainability That Doesn’t Ask for a Sacrifice

I’ve sat in hundreds of meetings with food service operators, procurement teams, and restaurant chains. I can tell you with certainty: nobody buys a compostable product because it’s compostable. They buy it because it works. It performs. It fits their operations. And increasingly, it helps them meet compliance requirements that are tightening across North America.

The sustainability story matters, but it matters as a tiebreaker, not as the primary value proposition. If your product asks the buyer to accept worse performance, higher cost, or operational disruption in exchange for an environmental benefit, you are building on a shaky foundation. The businesses that win in this space are the ones where sustainability is baked into a product that would be competitive on its own merits.

Our agave-fiber straws don’t get soggy. Our cutlery holds up to a full meal service. These aren’t just green alternatives; they’re better products, made from a regenerative input that happens to solve a waste problem. That positioning from “sustainable alternative” to “preferred choice” is where the real market power lies.

The Future Belongs to Builders, Not Reducers

If you’re a CEO looking at an environmental challenge in your industry, my advice is simple: keep asking how to minimize it, but also ask what you could build from it. The waste stream, the regulatory pressure, and the consumer shift aren’t burdens. They’re blueprints. As worldwide consumption grows, so too will waste.

For me, it started with a pile of agave fiber behind a distillery in Jalisco. It turned into a company that’s changing how North America thinks about food service packaging. Your version of that pile is out there. Go find it.