Sarah Endline
Mastermind and Chief Rioter, Sweet Riot
A Sweetly Profitable Path to Social and Economic Justice
When you think about creating social good, candy might not come to mind as the fastest path to creating economic justice. Unless you are Sarah Endline, who’s obsession with sweets has created new wealth for thousands of people living in developing countries and turned a tidy profit for her company, sweetriot.
Endline, an advocate of the “trade not aid” approach, always knew that business and economics were the real levers to creating a better world. Raised in a town of less than 2000, Endline’s experience growing up—think tractor rides and horseshoes—was the epitome of American small town living. So how does a kid from rural Michigan get thinking about global economics and social entrepreneurship? Endline credits her parents and grandparents, who as entrepreneurs and small business owners, had a strong interest in global culture.
“My great grandfather was an immigrant that landed in a tiny town in Michigan. He was a community builder, activist, farmer, and entrepreneur. My family had a true curiosity for the world and for different cultures. We were never small in our thinking,” says Endline.
As a student at the University of Michigan, Endline began her education in international issues through participation in AIESEC, an international student organization interested in world issues, leadership and management. It was then that Endline first learned of ideas like ‘microfinancing.’ “At 21, I was fully conscious that I wanted to use business to change the world,” recounts Endline, who remembers writing about the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ while gaining her MBA at Harvard Business School.
“I started with the idea that I wanted to build the world’s greatest socially responsible candy company, but I didn’t know if it would be licorice or chocolate,” recounts Endline. “I started in Hong Kong, couch surfing with friends for a summer and visiting candy companies around the country.” But she returned to the states uninterested in the sugary, artificial stuff that dominated the shelves. “This just wasn’t the kind of principled candy I wanted to create,” she says.
Endline’s investigations into the world of candy soon turned to chocolate. “I was hooked on the natural, healthy component of chocolate, which aligned with my need to make an ethical product,” she explains. But the journey did not end there. “I went to meet with a Swiss manufacturer. All they needed was my wrapper and they could make anything. I thought to myself, this is not innovative. This is just me making the same thing as everyone else.”
Just a week later, Endline visited San Francisco, where she had a life-changing introduction to the cacao bean. “I had been researching chocolate for six months and never had held the pure bean in my hand. Now here’s opportunity I thought—it’s the side of chocolate hidden from the world.”
Endline returned home with the raw cacao bean and an unwavering belief that she had found what she was looking for. Her friends thought she was nuts—eaten unadorned, cacoa beans do not taste very good. “That’s how I came to the idea of covering the bean with chocolate and making it delicious, while still letting people experience the bean directly as the pure, real form of chocolate,” she remembers.
“When I realized that these beans come from developing countries that are plus or minus 20 degrees of the equator, I thought wouldn’t it be amazing if I could work with farmers and communities and impact their lives? The rest just unfolded,” she says.
sweetriot began working with their partners in Columbia three years ago. The product is made locally in the communities where the cacao beans are grown and processed. sweetriot products are sold in stores in all 50 states and even at 30,000 feet via Virgin American Airlines.
Endline is bullish about keeping the thousands of local farmers, producers and workers close to the value sweetriot creates. “sweetriot was never about extracting cacao beans from developing countries to give the value to some Belgian factory,” she says. “Instead it’s about delivering that value to the community in the form of economic independence.
Endline and her team are now focused on taking sweetriot global and she’s not shy about her aspirations for growth: “Changing the world means selling more product so we can have more impact.”
