The news: Kimberly-Clark is building a pilot plant in Yuma, Arizona, to turn a desert succulent called hesperaloe into fiber for tissue and hygiene products. The company announced the program this month. The 50,000-square-foot facility carries a capital investment of more than $100 million and is due to open in 2027, according to the city and the Arizona Commerce Authority.
The company has done more than pick a site. “We’ve already acquired thousands of acres of land to grow this on,” CEO Mike Hsu said on the second-quarter earnings call. In a separate remark on the call, he said: “It’s a farm crop, so that's going to replace natural forest fiber in our production mix.”
Most sourcing levers work by buying an existing input differently, through dual-sourcing, nearshoring or hedging. Kimberly-Clark is spending to bring a new input into existence, on land it owns, growing a crop almost nobody farms commercially.
What changed: Cellulose fiber is the raw material Kimberly-Clark depends on most. It is “the primary raw material for our tissue products,” and as fluff pulp it goes into diapers, training pants, and feminine and incontinence care, according to the company’s annual report. That filing also warns that “in past years, pulp prices have experienced significant volatility.”
The company screened more than 70 fiber candidates on performance, sustainability and cost before choosing hesperaloe. It has spent roughly $250 million on that research over the past decade, per Trellis.
Hesperaloe fibers run about 3.6 millimeters long, with a length-to-width ratio near 240 to 1, according to a 1996 USDA study. Softwood sits near 100 to 1, and hardwood near 50 to 1.
A higher ratio generally means stronger paper, and Hsu said the fiber “pushes the frontiers of the softness versus strength” tradeoff.
The same USDA work puts hesperaloe at about 24 inches of water a year, against roughly 36 for wheat and 48 for cotton in Arizona.
Hesperaloe has to be transplanted rather than seeded. The USDA study reports a first harvest in year five, a second in year eight, and a third in year 10 or 11. Acreage planted now would not yield a commercial cut until the early 2030s.
By the numbers: The cost case rests on how much wood pulp prices move. The producer price index for wood pulp fell to 137.4 in March 2020, then climbed to 268.9 by January 2023, a swing of 96% in under three years. It has since fallen back and started rising again, from 199.5 in February to 213.2 in July.
Kimberly-Clark does not disclose what it spends on fiber. Cost of products sold ran $10.5 billion on $16.4 billion of net sales last fiscal year. CFO Nelson Urdaneta told analysts the company expects about $150 million in gross input cost headwinds in the second half.
More than $100 million across 50,000 square feet works out to roughly $2,000 a square foot. The two plants Kimberly-Clark committed to last year are the named pieces of a $2 billion, five-year North America program. They cost far less per foot.
The Warren, Ohio, plant cost about $800 million for 1.2 million square feet, or roughly $670. And the Beech Island, South Carolina, plant cost $200 million for 1.1 million square feet, or about $180.
The backdrop: This is the second time a tissue maker has tried to commercialize this plant.
James River Corporation, then a major US pulp and paper company, approached the University of Arizona in late 1985 about starting a domestic sisal industry. That history comes from a 1996 account by the University of Arizona researcher who ran the program. The screen covered more than 100 collections across 62 species, and hesperaloe came out on top.
In 1993, the university, James River and a Coolidge, Arizona, grower proposed the next step to a USDA commercialization agency: a demonstration farm, and pulping and papermaking at pilot scale.
James River “decided not to commit to a new major business venture at that time,” the account says. “The primary reason was the price of pulp, which hit an industry-wide low in the fourth quarter of 1993.” At that point, softwood kraft was selling for less than $500 a tonne, and major pulp makers were losing money on it.
The company patented the idea anyway. US Patent 5,320,710, “Soft high strength tissue using long-low coarseness hesperaloe fibers,” was filed in October 1993 and granted the following June.
James River became Fort James and was absorbed by Georgia-Pacific in 2000. Kimberly-Clark’s own hesperaloe patents start in 2015.
The competition: Rival hygiene makers picked easier feedstocks for the same goal.
Essity invested about 400 million Swedish kronor in 2019 to make tissue pulp from wheat straw at its Mannheim plant in Germany, and began production in 2021. The site turns about 70,000 tonnes of straw into 35,000 tonnes of pulp a year.
And the straw makes up roughly 30% of the finished product, sold as Zewa towels and toilet paper in Germany, so Essity is blending too. The difference is the feedstock: straw is a byproduct of a crop farmers already grow, which is why Essity needed two years and no new farmland.
Procter & Gamble has committed $20 million to non-wood alternatives and sold limited bamboo versions of Charmin. Georgia-Pacific uses hemp and jute bast fibers, though not in bathroom tissue, per Trellis.
The counter: In June 2025, Kimberly-Clark agreed to fold its international family care and professional business into a joint venture with Suzano, the world's largest pulp supplier.
The venture, valued at about $3.4 billion, began operating in July as Arbex, with Suzano holding 51% and Kimberly-Clark 49%. It runs 22 plants and licenses Kleenex, Scott and Viva.
That tied a large part of the tissue business to the biggest pulp supplier on earth one month before the company announced a plan to depend less on wood pulp.
The patents describe a blend rather than a replacement. Kimberly-Clark's claim tissue containing “at least about 5%, by weight” hesperaloe fiber, with the range running “from about 5 to about 50 weight percent.”
The company has not said when any of this reaches shelves. “We believe the technology could eventually be used across our hygiene products portfolio, but it’s still early, and we’re not sharing specific commercialization timelines at this point,” Chief Sustainability Officer Lisa Morden told Supply Chain Dive.
Kimberly-Clark's stated goal is to be 100% natural forest free “beyond 2030,” with no date attached. It cut natural forest fiber use 50% against a 2011 baseline last year, per Trellis.
“If Kimberly-Clark can scale up production of this fiber sustainably and without displacing other native ecosystems, this could alleviate significant pressure on the forests currently used to make tissue products,” said Shelley Vinyard, director of global nature at the Natural Resources Defense Council, per Trellis.
What’s next: The Yuma plant is scheduled to open in 2027 with about 50 full-time jobs. Kimberly-Clark says its Kenvue acquisition is on track to close by the end of this year. The first commercial harvest from newly planted acreage falls five years out, in the early 2030s.
