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Albert Addante, co-founder and CEO of Caboo, is on a mission to make traditional paper products unnecessary.
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Asked what advice he would give others when creating a company from scratch in an industry dominated by a handful of giants, Albert Addante said he wouldn’t advise it to anyone.
“Ignorance is bliss,” Addante said, sitting in the office of Caboo, a Vancouver company that makes and sells paper towels, tissues and toilet paper made from eco-friendly bamboo pulp.
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“I’d never do it again.”
He is too humble and prone to self-effacing humour. What he, his wife Rachel, and a friend, Kevin Yu, have accomplished is a David-among-Goliaths success story, proof of which is seeing Caboo toilet paper on the shelves next to Charmin, Royale and Purex.
Created in 2012, Caboo has enjoyed double-digit growth year over year. Addante is justifiably proud of the little company that could, it’s only that, having had no experience in consumer packaged goods (CPG), he had no idea how massive and many the obstacles would be.
“I really don’t have the time to think about it, but when I do it’s been an incredible ride, a very emotional roller-coaster,” Addante said. “And we’re not there yet, but I think what we’ve done to date, for us to have brought it to this level on our own, is impressive.”
Addante and his brother Franco grew up in Burnaby Heights. Their parents, Tony and Maria, in 1972 immigrated from Apulia, the heel of Italy’s boot, and in 1974 Tony began a cleaning company from scratch, West Coast Building Maintenance.
The sons took over the business when they grew up — Franco still runs it, out of the same Boundary Road office as Caboo — and got a big boost when they won a contract to keep B.C. Place clean during the 2010 Winter Olympics.
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It was on a subsequent business trip to China seeking cleaning supplies that the idea of producing bamboo-based toilet paper sprouted after Addante and Yu stumbled across a factory that made bamboo pulp, something Addante said was unheard of outside of China at the time.
“We thought it would be worth a shot.”
Compared to using virgin wood pulp, bamboo-based toilet paper is sustainable, according to the New York-based Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), which monitors annual deforestation from toilet-paper manufacturing.
Roughly a million acres of boreal forest disappears each year for wood fibre-based toilet paper, the NRDC says, a significant share of it from trees in B.C.
Wiping out forest to wipe bums doesn’t make sense, Addante likes to say, adding that the 7,000 North American households using Caboo have saved 43,000 trees from the chainsaw.
From a two-man company at the start, Caboo now has 10 employees as well as warehouses in Vancouver, Toronto, Nevada, New York and two in California. A mission-based venture capital firm that focuses on environmental sustainability, Renewal Funds, acquired a small stake in exchange for a cash infusion a couple of years ago.
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The playful name, which might evoke both bamboo and caboose, is a portmanteau of cane and bamboo, come up with when the company in the beginning was using sugar cane pulp as well as bamboo.
“We since switched to 100 per cent bamboo, but the name definitely stuck,” Addante said.
Growing up, he always thought he’d invent something, come up with a better mousetrap, so to speak.
Caboo is it: While toilet paper wasn’t exactly what he’d envisioned, it is something everyone needs.
The bamboo farms in Sichuan that provide the fibre are not clear-cut and the harvested bamboo regenerates itself, unlike clear-cut forests that degenerate the soil and have to be replanted. The bamboo used for paper fibre is not the kind of bamboo eaten by pandas.
Caboo’s slogan is: It’s up to us to save our butts.
“Our mission is to basically make traditional paper products unnecessary,” he said. “The road has been very difficult, all kinds of things have happened, good and bad, but we’re still here.
“We think we could make a difference. Everybody wants to make a difference.”
gordmcintyre@postmedia.com
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