by Eric Barton | July 29, 2024
From Smuggling Coconuts to Crafting Rum: The Rise of Coconut Cartel
Two siblings from Miami Beach are building a rum empire off of coconuts they once smuggled in their suitcases.
Dani Zighelboim breezes into the restaurant in a white linen oversize shirt and matching pants. She’s got sunglasses propped—and possibly tangled—in her hair and a scrunchie on her arm. It’s like she just popped out of a cab in Cartagena, Colombia. She’s smiling and looking quite comfortable angling a chair in a tight spot at the bar at Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink in Miami. She’s done this before, making her way into a difficult spot.
“Daiquiri,” she tells the bartender, “with Coconut Cartel.” It arrives over ice, not straight up as she expected, and she shrugs. Hey, at least they used the right rum.
It is, after all, her rum—the company Dani and her brother, Mike, started by smuggling coconuts through customs. These days, their Miami-born rum is very much turning into a thing—quite possibly just as rum in general turns into a thing. The next whiskey, maybe, just in time for Coconut Cartel to blow up. In fact, recently her future has finally looked good enough that Dani can close her eyes at night.
“I would say I didn’t sleep for three or four years,” she says with a laugh and a tug on the straw of her drink.
We went from butkus to “oh my god”
in such a short amount of time.
-Dani Zighelboim
Dani, now 32, and her brother were born in Miami Beach, where they lived until Dani was 9 years old. Back then, they called her jefita: the little boss. They moved to El Salvador for their dad’s job in the clothing business in 2001. After her parents divorced, Dani and her mom moved to Guatemala. Hers is a family of the displaced; they saw being different and overcoming the challenge of a foreign place as a superpower. She knew she’d follow them in that regard. “It was never put on my plate like, ‘Dani, go get a job like a normal person.’”
Try Coconut Cartel’s Miami Bird cocktail recipe.
Which is why she ended up at Babson College in Massachusetts, known for its entrepreneurship program. She hadn’t even graduated yet when she started working the company with her brother. Mike had been golfing in 2012 with a friend in El Salvador when somebody sold them coconuts with straws sticking out of them.
“He called me, and he was like, ‘Dani, they’re everywhere. They’re like a natural juice box.’” He told her of his plan: he’d stuff suitcases full of them and sneak them through Miami International Airport.
“I was always bailing him out,” she says. “I was like, ‘No I’m not into it. I’m not down.’”
But he brought them back anyway, and in 2012, Dani was helping him figure out how to sell the coconuts to hotels. They sold so well, soon Dani was arranging shipping containers and cargo planes and buying 9,000 fruits at a time. They stored them at their abuela’s house in Miami.
The hydrating husks sold themselves, Dani remembers, with hotel bars buying as many as they could supply. Hotels soon started asking how they could make cocktails out of them. Dani and Mike started to think about the drink you see everywhere in South America and the Caribbean: coconut water and rum over ice.
Make the Curious George cocktail at home using Coconut Cartel’s añejo rum.
They raised $200,000 from investors who knew them from the coconut business. They went to Guatemala, picked out barrels of rum and shipped them home in December 2018. Typically, all spirits are cut with water before bottling, but Dani and Mike would use coconut water. Mike figured they could just jump into bottling, but Dani hired a food scientist to make sure it would be shelf stable. The two of them started selling Coconut Cartel to bars in 2019 with no sales representatives and no support system—just bottles clinking around in their backpacks. It was hard, and a lot of people said no. “We were so naive, because with the coconuts, it was such an easy sell.”
When the pandemic closed the bars, the business nearly died. Dani, whose nickname has grown to la jefa, decided they needed to pivot to online retail and liquor store sales. They raised another $2.3 million in funding. They now do business in 19 states and countries from Canada to Slovakia. They hired a COO last year, which means Dani can finally sleep at night. “There were so many questions and answers I needed that I would work through my sleep. I would wake up with a to-do list, in a panic.”
As we spoke, Dani’s daiquiri went watery from neglect. She headed out as the restaurant began shifting from happy hour to dinner. I was left thinking about something she said: “We went from butkus to ‘oh my god’ in such a short amount of time.” That’s something they don’t teach you in entrepreneurship school.
