From serving in the Dutch army to living on a beach in Barbados, Michiel Vos has trekked the globe finding his niche. Perhaps taking a cue from the beach where he once lived, Vos realized that coconuts were exactly what the world needed. Supply chain backlogs in California are in the news lately, but another shipping challenge posed are the 1.7 billion wooden pallets annually shipped one-way from China—where wood is scarce and valuable—and worthlessly discarded stateside. That’s 170 million trees felled per year. That’s where the coconuts come in. One day, an agricultural professor handed Vos a paper on how to make panel board from coconut husk, which looked promising. Though he was told that it would never work, and no one succeeded making it into a viable business, Vos wasn’t convinced. “That remined me of a quote from my favorite poet Rumi, ‘When setting out on a journey, …