By ANN HINCH
Assistant Editor INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — Imagine a summer lunch dessert of ice cream followed by an afternoon of range skeet shooting, and then indoors to rest in air-conditioned comfort with a soothing sunburn-relief remedy and perhaps a cup of flavored coffee.
If a day with all of this sounds a bit made up, its soy-based products are not. The waffle-cone bowl for the ice cream, the clay pigeons, sunburn lotion, chocolate liqueur in the coffee and the electric power are all as close as Hoosier bean fields, which should be planted within the next few weeks … and as far as the products’ inventors can manage to take them.
Five teams of Purdue University students were rewarded the evening of April 15 with a showing of their products to a crowd of nearly 100 in Indianapolis, and Soybean Project Innovation Competition cash awards sponsored by the Indiana Soybean Alliance (ISA) via the state’s soybean checkoff program. Front and center as Tier 1 winners were the developers of the aforementioned waffle-cone bowl – Scoops! – and the clay pigeon, the EcoDisc.
“Hopefully, one day we’re going to see (these products) on grocery store shelves, or wherever it’s appropriate, because this is a wonderful thing,” ISA Executive Committee President Doug Morrow said of the competition’s results.
Sweet success
“There may have been a couple of other ideas we kicked around, but this is the idea we were going with from the beginning,” said Todd Case, a team member for Scoops!
The 38-year-old nontraditional senior, majoring in food science at Purdue, lent fellow senior Clay Arnett and junior Brian Hunter his knowledge about ice cream cone formulation and production, from a dozen years of food company management. He is currently employed by the Pizza Blends, Inc. frozen dough plant in Indianapolis.
It might seem convenient that his experience would be geared toward commercial recipes, but Case said his teammates were kicking around the idea of a new kind of cone before this project. He helped work out how to replace wheat with soy flour, which fulfills the point of the competition – developing new products to create markets for Indiana soybeans – and allows the Scoops! team to legally package their product as “heart healthy” by federal Food and Drug Administration guidelines.
Arnett and Hunter, who are respectively majoring in organizational leadership and economics, focused on marketing and presentation of the bowl. Arnett explained the Scoops! name is short and memorable and package colors were chosen to inspire fond thoughts of food.
The team exhibited April 15 with small cups of waffle shell, vanilla ice cream and strawberries for attendees.
“Everybody’s talking about this,” one woman told Hunter as she wended her way through the crowded room to pick up a sample.
Along with a $7,500 prize to split (the team’s advisor, Stroh Brann, received $2,000 and his Burton Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, $8,000), the team was selected by attendees at the April 15 reception as the first annual People’s Choice Award winner, which came with a $600 bonus from ISA.
ISA Technology Commercialization Director Ryan West said ISA wanted to do something new with the public exhibit and the People’s Choice voting to get others involved in appreciation for the projects, beyond the small group of official judges.
Case explained the teams are under a six-month “gag order” from Purdue and the ISA, which co-own rights to the new products. He said the team has heard interest from a couple of Indiana companies about making Scoops!, and his teammates did work up a business plan that would begin by targeting the California health food market.
Disc going platinum
Co-winning the Tier 1 spot is not the first award for the EcoDisc team. A week prior, it won the undergraduate, or Black, division of the 21st annual Burton D. Morgan Entrepreneurial Competition sponsored by Purdue – which came with a $20,000 cash prize – and according to the West Lafayette Journal & Courier, in March EcoDisc won the $1,000 top prize in the second annual Elevator Pitch Competition.
Shattering a clay pigeon on the floor, team member Adrian Boeh – a sophomore studying management – pointed out a traditional limestone disc is made with petroleum pitch that takes several centuries to biodegrade. According to team member Ben Hall, more than half a billion of these discs are shot or broken and scattered on the ground each year.
“If really makes you wonder how bad a commercial range would be” with littered remains, Boeh speculated.
Team member David Conway – who, like Hall, is a senior majoring in ag and biological engineering – explained EcoDisc is made entirely of edible ingredients: soy meal, water, vinegar, baking soda and food proteins to “glue” it all together (“It’s healthy for everything,” quipped team member John Mullen, a health science senior. “One of our team actually ate a disc”). The team observed degradation of broken shards into the ground after only two months.
“Two months – and 400 years – is quite a difference,” Conway pointed out. “Functionally, it’s exactly the same (as a traditional clay pigeon), but after it breaks is where EcoDisc really shines.”
The team said it can save the expense of groundskeepers having to clean up the waste of regular discs and since it’s made from renewable and natural products, it is less expensive to manufacture and could yield a higher profit margin. They developed the EcoDisc under the guidance of Dr. Osvaldo Campanella in Agriculture & Biological Engineering.
Dr. Bernie Tao, Indiana Soybean Board Professor in Soybean Utilization at Purdue, has overseen this competition in past years, a job mostly shifted this year to fellow professor Jennifer Nordland. He waxed fondly about past competitors who have gone on to industry and running their own businesses, but said the biggest winners are those whose checkoff dollars fund the competition.
“In the long run … the benefit is to the farmer of Indiana, and to the students here tonight,” he said.
This farm news was published in the April 23, 2008 issue of the Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
