Idea for better soil wins CU challenge

BOULDER – A plan to sell better soil to passionate gardeners and medical-marijuana growers took the $7,000 top prize Thursday at the University of Colorado New Venture Challenge.

The competition pitted 33 teams of entrepreneurs and CU students against each other to determine who had the best business plan and pitch. The winners were picked by a jury of local business leaders.

The challenge, which was sponsored by Zayo Group and First Western Trust Bank and organized by CU programs such as Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship and the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship, distributed more than $30,000 to contestants.

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The winner was Green Truck, which pitched a plan to create premium organic soil that would be sold to gardeners frustrated with trying to grow plants in Colorado’s poor soil. The soil would be produced locally, use organic material such as earthworm castings, and it would be marketed against planting soil produced in California, Canada and Europe.

Soil that is imported to Colorado must be sterilized, depriving it of nutrients and macrobiotics.

“You can’t use sterilized soil to grow good healthy plants,´ said Suzanne Pletcher, a member of the Green Truck team.

Pletcher noted that gardening is the number one hobby in America. The target market is avid gardeners determined to use organic materials and sustainable processes.

Another potential target market is medical marijuana growers, a local industry growing so fast one Green Truck presenter referred to it as a “gold rush.”

In addition to Pletcher, who founded and published the Boulder County Business Report before selling the company in 1986, three CU MBA students and a law student were on the winning team.

CleanPlate took second place and received a $3,000 prize. The project, which was a solo effort by CU student Ian Gilliland, seeks to minimize the waste created when restaurants and grocery stores give patrons disposable containers for take-out or leftovers. CleanPlate would collect and distribute reusable containers that could be returned to grocery stores and redistributed to restaurants and stores.

L’Esperance Fruit Drying earned $2,000 for finishing third. The result of a project by engineering students with experience in the Engineering Without Borders program, the company would work with the L’Esperance Orphanage in Mugonero, Rwanda, to harvest and package organic pineapples, mangos and papayas. The fruit would be dried onsite and shipped to Europe, where it would be sold as healthy snacks to socially conscious consumers.

L’Esperance also won $3,000 as the second-best socially minded proposal from the Center for Education on Social Responsibility. BOULD LLC the $4,000-first place award from CESR for its proposal to work with affordable housing builders such as Habitat for Humanity to train their volunteers and planners in green building techniques.

ALTitude, which would create and organize concerts and music festivals around Colorado, won a $3,000 prize sponsored by the College of Music’s Entrepreneurship Center for Music.

The competition was judged by Tim Connor, a partner of Sequel Venture Partners and chief financial officer and vice president of business strategy of Boulder Wind Power Inc.; Ken desGarennes, chief financial officer of Zayo Group; Nancy Pierce, president and general manager of KELD LLC, an investment management and strategic advisement company; and Nathan Seidle, CEO of SparkFun Electronics Inc., an online-retailer of electronic components.