By Cindy Green

Golden Valley, Minn. — For seven years now, AURI’s been investing in starch-based products, from packing peanuts to dog bones. Judging by at least one company — StarchTech, Inc. — it turns out the money’s been well spent.

Starch loosefill peanuts, the company’s first products, are improving in quality and dramatically gaining momentum in the loosefill packing industry. Starch vent plugs, an invention introduced by StarchTech just this year, show promise in reducing fecal contamination during poultry processing by 90 percent.

At the forefront of all this development is StarchTech CEO Ed Boehmer, who says “versatility and a sense of urgency” can keep a start-up company humming. While Boehmer’s degree is in chemical engineering, he gained marketing as well as product development expertise over the past 30 years at companies such as Pillsbury, 3M and Marathon Foods.

Starchy history

In 1991, Boehmer helped start Evergreen Solutions, Inc., one of the first companies to manufacture starch packing peanuts and an AURI client. Two years later Evergreen merged with another AURI client manufacturing starch peanuts and took its name, Clean Green Packing, Inc.

In 1996, Boehmer founded StarchTech, Inc., purchased Clean Green the same year, and has since grown the company from $800,000 in annual sales to $2 million in projected sales this year. Most loosefill is still polystyrene, but starch peanuts have taken over 30 percent of the Upper Midwest loosefill market. Starch loosefill’s chief advantages are nontoxicity and degradability in water; the packing peanuts can be rinsed down a drain or added to compost.

Except for their white or green color, starch peanuts look and feel much like cheese puffs, and are made with similar technology. In fact, in the early 1990s, retired AURI food scientist Bill Stoll linked an entrepreneur making popcorn packing material to a cereal company’s extrusion technology to make puffed-starch products.

Steadily improving

Since its market introduction seven years ago, starch loosefill’s quality has improved dramatically. Today’s peanuts are lighter, softer, stronger, dust free and cost competitive with polystyrene fill. Transportation costs are still a problem, however, because big bags of starch peanuts, which sell for $6 each, could cost as much $4 to ship cross country.

The problem inspired Boehmer to design a StarchTech exclusive — tiny starch pellets, about the size of lentils, that can be expanded into full-size peanuts after shipping. Just a small plastic extruder, costing under $100,000, is needed to “puff” the peanuts. StarchTech is marketing pellets not only to packaging companies, but firms wanting to produce loosefill for internal use. Because full-size peanuts can only be shipped economically within a 500-mile radius, StarchTech is now able to expand its market to cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles, Tampa and New York City. And it’s reaching out to Canada, Sweden and Japan.

The unmentionable

Besides packing peanuts, StarchTech manufactures starch plastic resin for products such as dog bones. But the company’s most profitable venture, potentially, is the one that makes for the least interesting dinner conversation — “vent plugs” for poultry processors.

Actually a starch paste injected into bird rectums early in the processing line, the plugs prevent fecal matter from contaminating processed poultry. Plugs can be rendered with other processing remains to make pet food. Though only tested so far in poultry plants, vent plugs could also be used for pork processing.

Brad Mitteness, former manager of AURI’s Marshall office, brought the vent plug idea to StarchTech in 1996 and the company subsequently purchased the patent. After refining the product and successfully testing it this past year, StarchTech expects the plug to become an industry standard — “the paper clip” of hog and poultry processing, Boehmer predicts. It’s a big industry — 400 million turkeys, seven billion chickens and 100 million hogs are processed annually. Meanwhile, consumer concern about food safety is increasing, and state and federal regulations over meat and poultry processing are getting stricter.

While a food safety product is a long stretch from the packing peanuts he started with, Boehmer says keeping an eye on developing markets and products and switching gears quickly are part of an entrepreneur’s survival instinct.

“A small start-up company needs to figure out ways to survive. The visionary part — that’s what I’m good at.”