Honoring Cameron Healy – Longtime Investor & Partner in Pacific Biodiesel

Cameron and Susan Healy (front row center) joined the Pacific Biodiesel team, including Willie and Annie Nelson and Bob and Kelly King, for the 2008 Grand Opening the Sequential Pacific Biodiesel refinery in Salem, Oregon. Photo credit: Karen Rippey

In this next story in our Kākou series – highlighting 30 of the most inspiring and instrumental people who have supported Pacific Biodiesel over the past 30 years – we are honoring entrepreneur and philanthropist Cameron Healy, a longtime investor and partner in Pacific Biodiesel.

We caught up with Cameron recently to reflect on his memories of our company and why heʻs been a loyal biodiesel ambassador all these years. As you’ll discover, there’s a reason we’re highlighting this story today (March 14) – “National Potato Chip Day”!

Back in the early 2000’s when Cameron first heard that a university in Northern California was converting used cooking oil to biodiesel, “a light bulb went off,” he said.

At the time, Cameron was president of Kettle Foods, the company he founded in Salem, Oregon in 1978 that is best known for its Kettle brand potato chips produced and sold worldwide. His company generated copious amounts of used cooking oil that, until then, had been given away to a rendering company for disposal.

“The idea that there was a better use for this waste oil caught my attention. And in my experience, when something gets on your radar, you begin to attract other connections,” he recalled.  He began to look at the waste stream at Kettle and later met a group who had created a small biodiesel co-op in the Salem area.

“We began giving them our waste oil. Eventually they expanded into a biodiesel processing operation known as Sequential and began distributing their fuel. So I bought a 300-gallon tank and began using biodiesel in my personal vehicles. Thatʻs how I formed a relationship with the Sequential founders,” Cameron said.

“As they continued to grow, one day they showed me a business plan proforma for a new biodiesel production facility that would be designed and built by Pacific Biodiesel. That’s when I first met Bob and Kelly King. As a manufacturer, this was in my wheelhouse and I was impressed with how they planned to scale up. So I signed on as a partner and made a personal investment,” he said.

During the ribbon cutting ceremony in 2005 at this Oregon plant, which was now called Sequential Pacific Biodiesel, Cameron met the Kings’ friends, Willie and Annie Nelson, who had also signed on as investors. “Pacific Biodiesel founders Bob and Kelly King had scheduled the event around Willie’s tour schedule so he could attend. The morning of the event, his tour bus arrived early, so Kelly asked me and my wife Susan if we wanted to meet Willie. Moments later we were walking onto the bus and into a cloud of cannabis smoke – Willie was standing there and warmly welcomed us. We spent 20 minutes or so with him and Annie – they were delightful,” Cameron recalls.

“That plant was the portal for me getting directly involved with Pacific Biodiesel and getting to know Bob and Kelly better,” he said. When the time came in 2008 to build a whole new, larger and more sophisticated biodiesel plant for Sequential in Salem with Bob and Kelly and Willie and Annie, Cameron again was on board and went in even deeper as an investor.

Then in the springtime of 2011, Cameron was invited to Maui by Bob and Kelly to talk with them about investing in their next biodiesel plant in Hawaiʻi. “It was an impressive new facility on paper.  And I stepped in with a large investment,” he said.

“Supporting Pacific Biodiesel is a very personal commitment for me. It’s what my personal values are all about and how I’ve run my own companies,” he said. “What I recognized in Bob and Kelly early on was that we shared these values. It was an easy connection with them. Our shared mission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide an alternative fuel as a resource to do that – together, we proved it could be done. There is no single solution to solving our climate crisis; I believe we need a multiplicity of solutions and biodiesel is one of those solutions. To this day, I have a biodiesel tank at my home in Oregon and I fuel up my personal vehicles at my home here in Hawai’i with Pacific Biodiesel’s fuel at one of their satellite retail sites in Kona. With all the electrification of transportation, I’m sticking with biodiesel.”

That commitment is something that sticks with Bob King. “Cameron is a true believer in our community-based biodiesel. He still drives his personal car on our biodiesel. He gets it,” he said. “And he’s a very pragmatic businessman. We’ve appreciated his longtime support and value his contributions to our team as a Member and major investor.”

Here in Hawai’i, Cameron founded Kona Brewing Company in 1994, a craft beer brewing company best known for Longboard Lager and Big Wave Pale Ale that’s distributed in 35 countries.

After selling Kettle Foods in 2006 and Kona Brewing in 2019, Cameron and his wife Susan put a great focus on community support through The Healy Foundation. Today, their non-profit is engaged in relationship-based philanthropy centered on trust and transparency in support of youth, environment and community in Oregon and Hawaiʻi. Since its founding in 2000, the foundation has supported more than 145 Hawaiʻi-based youth, environmental and community non-profits through its grants, scholarships and impact investing.  The Healy Foundation last year on National Philanthropy Day was recognized with the “Outstanding Foundation Award” by Hawaiʻi’s chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the AFP Aloha Chapter.

Community – in the spirit of Kākou – has been a common theme in Cameron’s nearly 50 years as an entrepreneur and philanthropist. “You’ve got to choose where you want to make a difference. We’re all just individual people but it will take all of us to make a difference,” he said.

“What Bob and Kelly and Pacific Biodiesel have done all these years aligns with my own philosophy: making a product that’s relevant and makes sense to the world we are living in, being part of the solution for our future, being connected in community and giving back to support the community around you,” he said. “I watch what Pacific Biodiesel is continuing to do – caring about what’s important for the business and continuing to reinvest in it, having a sense of kuleana in the way they run their business. When you create a culture around this type of mission, it attracts certain people who want to participate in that. I appreciate all the good work everyone does at Pacific Biodiesel and how they are staying true to the core mission, bringing high quality biofuels to power our communities. It continues to be a relevant proposition.”

Mahalo, Cameron!