KOKOMO, Ind. — Three years after earning second place in the annual Indiana Soybean Alliance’s (ISA) Student Soybean Product Innovation Competition, a soy-based leather conditioner is getting a shot at the retail marketplace.

 

Supreme Soy Leather Conditioner is one of the latest in the lineup of Korkay industrial and personal cleaning products manufactured and sold by Tate Soaps & Surfactants, based in Kokomo. The scentless gel is ideal for rubbing new life into leather clothing and supplies, furniture and car seats, said company owner Troy Tate.

 

“It really is a phenomenal product,” he noted, adding Tate Soaps has been manufacturing it for about 18 months. The conditioner started in 2013 as the idea of three Purdue University students who signed up as a team to participate in the contest. Made of soy oil and beeswax, Soots – as the product was then called – was invented and developed by agricultural engineer major Sara Richert of Illinois and brothers Evan (also in ag engineering) and Sean (forestry) Anderson of Indiana.

 

They won the silver prize of $10,000 in the 2014 contest; but as it does with all inventions, ISA and Purdue retained the intellectual property and rights for commercialization of the product.

 

It wasn’t long after that that Tate and his wife took their daughter to Purdue for a campus visit, where he saw a video for activities that included the ISA contest. Tate’s attention piqued at the leather conditioner, thinking it could be a promising addition to his product line.

 

“We have a lot of customers asking for a natural alternative to the synthetic products we manufacture,” he explained, referring to the soybean-derived base of the Soots product.

 

Tate’s next step was to speak with Dr. Nathan Mosier, a Purdue professor in ag and biological engineering who also serves as ISA’s Soybean Utilization Endowed Chair at the school. Mosier spent 15 years advising individual student teams in the contest before overseeing the entire thing now. He put Tate in touch with the ISA, which negotiated to license the formula.

 

“The students had completed about 80 percent of the work to get this to market,” Tate said, referring to not only product development but also cost and market research.

 

Because of this, he said it only took about three months from licensing the formula to being able to sell his conditioner as a viable product. It was the shortest time he’s spent developing anything in his company’s 73-item product line – it is also the only product that Tate, a chemist by training, did not develop from the beginning.

 

“Starting from scratch is always a headache,” he observed, grateful for the work the students did.

 

He said all he had to do were tweaks to the formula – raising its melting point for travel and storage, for one – and market considerations the students simply wouldn’t have had the experience to know or time to test.

 

For instance, as Richert explained in an email last week, “Once we came up with our leather conditioner, we performed numerous trials to make sure that our product functioned at the highest level possible, but due to the time constraints of the competition, we were unable to properly assess the longevity of our product.

 

“This data would have helped us properly advise consumers on how often to apply the product – but we were able to estimate this data by conducting experiments that tested the reaction of our product in a variety of settings, including extreme weather conditions, water, dirt, and other intense settings.”

 

 

Mosier said on average, he gets inquiries from 1-2 companies interested in potentially marketing one or more of the products after each contest. It doesn’t always pan out, but Tate’s product is not the first to be licensed off this 23-year competition.

 

“A lot of these (inventions) are really down to timing (in society), and a lot of the students and their ideas are a little ahead of the market,” he explained. He said teams form in the fall and then hit milestones to come up with an idea by a certain date, find faculty and market advisors, do a patent search and market research, get in the lab for development and testing and more. It’s a months-long contest that culminates in March.

 

“The successful teams, more often than not, this is their second time, if not their third, through the competition,” Mosier noted. What he tells them in coming up with products is to “really think about the average consumer. Think about a product you’d see on the shelf at Walmart or Target.”

 

Ultimately, he asks: “Can you explain your product to your grandma?” “I think it’s fairly unusual and commendable that the ISA has supported this competition as long as they have,” he said, adding it helps some students decide on a career – like Richert. “When I first entered the competition, I did so because I was an agricultural engineering student and my teammate, Evan, convinced me it would look good on a résumé,” she explained last week. “After producing many of the written materials and acting as the marketing and promotional expert on our team, I discovered a new interest in the communication field, and quickly changed my major.”

 

Richert, who now works as a development coordinator with the Domestic Violence Legal Clinic in Chicago, said the biggest problem the team faced in inventing a product was making sure they didn’t recreate something that already existed – once a team decides on an idea, it is required to do a patent search to ensure the students are not infringing on existing ideas.

 

The reason they have to be so careful is the possibility of ISA/Purdue licensing the finished invention, as they did with Soots to Tate. ISA New Uses Consulting Director Julie Ohmen said they licensed the formula exclusively to Tate, but he made changes to it which enabled him to market his own product.

 

At the time, about six months elapsed between Tate contacting her and having the licensing agreement in place, but that may be quicker now thanks to the process of learning along the way. Right now, she is working with a couple of larger companies to possibly license other inventions later this year.

 

“I think this is a good example of what we would want to happen with any technology,” Ohmen said, adding ISA and Purdue are willing to work not only directly with business owners like Tate who do their own research and development, but also third parties doing R&D for a licensee. 

 

And while the student inventors aren’t paid in any licensing agreement – they agree to this when they enter the competition – they must be involved in the licensing process. Ohmen said there hasn’t been any problem with this so far, adding, “(The students) are really goodhearted about it.”

 

Impressed by his experience and the support student inventors get from ISA, Purdue and industry mentors each year, Tate said he wants to work with ISA and the state to develop a campaign to show relevant industries that this contest exists, and the benefits of manufacturing and selling its inventions.

 

That 80 percent of the development work the Soots team saved him, for instance – that’s a valuable selling point to companies looking for new products to market. And, it’s not always a winner who stands to benefit – Tate said right now he is in talks with ISA about one of the inventions in this year’s contest that didn’t win.

 

“What we’re looking at is fitting it into our current line,” he said, explaining a manufacturer’s needs aren’t always the same as the contest criteria.

 

Tate said he is also in talks with FFA and 4-H organizations to put together a fundraising program with Supreme Soy Leather Conditioner, in which students can sell it for a percentage of the profit to benefit their group – think school bands and candy bars, only in this case, ag clubs and Supreme Soy.

 

“We’re really trying to make this thing a full circle, to give back to the organizations” that foster early ag education and entrepreneurship in those who go on to become young inventors, he noted.