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Who is Dr. Dan Etherington?

Dan is the co-founder and inspiration behind Kokonut Pacific Solomon Islands Ltd. He was raised on a farm in Kenya and following National Service as a pilot, studied Economics at Rhodes University in South Africa and Agricultural Economics at Cornell and Stanford Universities in the USA.

He taught at the University of Nairobi until 1972 when he moved to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. At the ANU, his studies of the coconut industries in Asia, Africa and the South Pacific convinced him of the need for a village-based technology to produce coconut oil as value-added alternative to exporting crude copra.

In 1994, he along with Greg Wright and Ewan Blair, founded Kokonut Pacific Pty Ltd as a social enterprise and retired from the ANU in 1997 to commercialize the Direct Micro Expelling (DME) technology he had invented. Dr. Dan is a respected authority on coconuts and remains passionate about the potential of the ‘tree of life’.

What is DME?

Direct Micro Expelling (DME) is a method of processing coconuts into coconut oil using a cold press.

One of the beauties of the DME method is that producers can turn coconuts into oil within just an hour of opening.

The DME solution stands for:

Direct – quick (oil can be produced in one hour of opening the nut) and efficiently expels 85% of the available oil.

Micro – it can be done in small scales on family sized farms.

Expelling – the extraction of virgin coconut oil and meal.