Investment banker Tommy O'Shaughnessy, a 1969 graduate of Upper Arlington High School, has had his eye on hippie chicks for a long time, but recently they've given him an idea for a new business.
"Three years ago you saw ladies bringing in — smart, astute, hippies-from-the-60s ladies — bringing in cloth grocery bags to the grocery store," O'Shaughnessy said. "All of a sudden, you see more people doing that, then all of a sudden you see stores selling cloth bags. I tell people, within five years, the words 'paper or plastic' will go the way of the rotary phone. You'll never hear those words again."
That growing environmental consciousness has convinced O'Shaughnessy that there is a real business to be had in biodegradable consumer packaging, and he wants to be part of it.
"I say I'm beating Styrofoam off the planet one plate at a time," he said.
Along with two friends and fellow Upper Arlington graduates, brothers Scott and Sterling LeFevre, classes of 1969 and 1973, O'Shaughnessy has formed a distribution company to cover the United States and Canada, to distribute biodegradable, sugarcane disposable plates to substitute for paper plates.
The friends have contracted with the Chinese inventor and manufacturer, in whom they have invested, and they have established the warehouse at Rickenbacker, but what they need now is a store with customers. That's where Upper Arlington institution Tim Huffman comes in.
"I didn't realize how much people with kids use picnic items in the house," O'Shaughnessy said. "They don't use a dishwasher. I thought we'd get Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Labor Day displays, and Tim said, 'Tommy, you don't get it. People use this stuff year round'."
Huffman said he gets similar requests all the time to sell new products.
"At least five days a week somebody's coming in trying to sell something," Huffman said. "Especially barbecue sauce, taco sauce, meat rub, they think it's the best they've ever had."
Huffman usually gives it a go, first setting the price at whatever the projection is, then if the product isn't selling, marking it down to cost and trying a bit longer.
"A lot of them, maybe 50 percent, are still here a year later," Huffman said. "If we don't move a certain amount of product in a year or even six months, then we'll reduce the price to our cost and see if that helps. If it doesn't, if we're losing money on it, then we'll drop the product."
Biodegradable, green products tap into a real consumer demand, Huffman said. The sugar plates, marketed as Green Globe EcoPak, are doing okay.
"We've done fairly well with it, even though we haven't done any advertising," Huffman said.
Right now, the product won't sell in the major distributors such as Wal-Mart or Kroger, O'Shaughnessy said. But he expects that to change.
"You're going to see people who not only say they don't want paper or plastic, they're going to say, 'Hey butcher, I don't want my steak wrapped in plastic on top of Styrofoam'," he said. "Right now the butcher doesn't care, because of price. Styrofoam is cheaper than this product. But the consumer always wins.
"The Wal-Mart guys say, 'My customers don't care about that, my customers want to buy 80 Styrofoam plates in a big bag for $1.98. Until that changes, we'll look at it but we're not interested at this point in time'," O'Shaughnessy said.
"When that changes, when that consumer at Wal-Mart says I don't care about $1.98, I'll spend $2.10 to be green, when that happens, the market is ours."
The plates are made from bagasse, a waste by-product of sugar extraction from sugarcane. The bagasse is cooked into slurry that serves as the feedstock for plate manufacture. It biodegrades completely, easily and quickly, O'Shaughnessy said.
What does it take for a business to succeed in the disposable plate sector? Two percent of the market? Fifty percent? O'Shaughnessy isn't sure.
"Oh, I don't know. I'm just happy to be in Huffman's Market. Let me have that moment, please. We hope the independent grocers will follow Tim's lead, the Hills Markets of the world and the Weiland's. That's where this begins.
"Corporate guys never do anything until they're told to do something," he said. "Guys like Tim can say, 'That's a good idea, I'll do it.' Corporate guys never do that, not until the boss comes in and says, 'Hey, buy this, the consumer wants it.'"
