It’s been 12 years since Tomer Bitton won Palm Beach Post Boys Soccer Player of the Year, and these days, the former Boca Raton star doesn’t have much time to kick the ball around.
He’s too busy running a business, making a difference one straw at a time as he and his two friends and business partners, Kyle Lansing and Aaron Kleinert sip the unexpected success of an idea that has helped pioneer environment-friendly dining.
They called it StrawFish.
Bitton and his two partners got to work creating a revolutionized drinking straw that could be used en masse without threatening the environment around them.
“Growing up here in South Florida, it being a coastal community, seeing trash all over the beach, by the beach, even around our school, as beautiful as our school was . . . right after the two-week period of winter break, the video with the turtle with the straw up its nose came up, and that’s how the idea really started,” Bitton said.
The short-term answer was a paper straw, which they developed in China.
Though that idea was not necessarily new, the three partners created a business model that involved clientele using the straws for free, profiting off of affiliate advertisements on the straws being used by local restaurants.
“We knew paper straws weren’t the real solution,” Bitton said. “Nobody really liked paper straws, no matter how long they lasted in a drink. You’re also cutting down trees at the end of the day to make a straw. It’s unsustainable. So we spent the next year, year and a half looking for the next material and technology.”
Even as COVID-19 hit, freezing the world for many businesses and consumers alike, Bitton, Lansing, and Kleinert paired with scientists in Mexico to develop their own technology.
Their most modern product tests as completely biodegradable in 18 months under landfill conditions, making its mark on the environment essentially silent.
The result of trial and error was a bioplastic straw product that quickly became one of the top-rated, best-sold items of its kind across the world.
After amassing 2.3 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023, StrawFish was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, a testament to the business success and environmental impact their technology has had.
“We work with Royal Caribbean, Shake Shack, every distributor in the country, and we’re just growing from there,” Bitton said, though to get to that point, he acknowledged that there was a great deal of planning amid the pandemic as he and his partners tried to figure out how the post-shutdown landscape would look.
“Without that perseverance kind of engrained in me — that ‘put your head down and just work’ mentality, which I give a lot of credit to Marcelo for that — I don’t think we’d be having this conversation right now.”
Marcelo Castillo, Boca Raton’s soccer coach that just finished his 20-year career leading the Bobcats program, has always prioritized the growth and development of his student-athletes as people, not just players.
It’s safe to say that Bitton’s embodiment of success beyond the pitch can be counted as a success rivaling that of the 25-1 state championship season for which he won The Post’s Player of the Year honors.
After all, Bitton is still part of a team — even if it’s not the one he grew up leading on the pitch.
Bitton says the company is looking to not only expend its products to cups, cutlery, and so on, the three partners are looking to globalize their production.
“It went from us three grinding and walking into restaurants ourselves trying to sell a case here and there to working with distributors and instead of moving a couple cases, it was a couple palettes, a couple trucks,” Bitton said. “We had to learn as we went along. We all relied on each other in different ways. It’s been one helluva ride, but I wouldn’t take anything back.”
Alex Peterman covers high school sports for The Palm Beach Post. He can be reached at apeterman@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Ex-Boca soccer star pioneering healthy habits with environment-friendly business
Reporting by Alexander Peterman, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
