Eco-Products corn-fed for success: Emerging Company Growth Award winner gains market niche for disposable cutlery and food containers made from bio-plastic.

• Author: Lewis, David
• Position: Company overview

Eco-Products Inc. won the 2009 ACG Emerging Company Growth Award by emerging from its roots, then quickly rocketing toward the heights.

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The company got its start as recently as 1990 yet already seems to have collected its share of historic highs.

In 1990, Kent Savage, then chairman of the board of Boulder-based Eco-Cycle, went on a hike in Rocky Mountain National Park with his son Steve Savage, who had just graduated from the University of Kansas.

The recycling business consists of three phases, Kent Savage explained: collection, sale to manufacturers and wholesale distribution. The problem was there was no wholesale distribution. The solution was their co-founding of Eco-Products, which bought recycled-content products and distributed them mainly in the Denver-Boulder area. Kent Savage retired in 1999 and died in 2003, "so Eco-Products is a lot about fulfilling my dad's plan and his dream," Steve Savage says.

Another critical moment for Eco-Products arose in 2006 when then-CEO Steve Savage came to the company's board of directors with a daring proposal to change its business model around a new product called PLA, polylactic acid, a corn-based bio-plastic substitute.

Eco-Products had found success distributing PLA products for other manufacturers, "but we wanted to make these products," Savage says.

The board encouraged Savage, even though his notion meant turning 180 degrees, changing the company from what was then a successful retail distributor into a full-time wholesale manufacturer.

"We embarked on a 14-month journey to make cups, plates and bowls ourselves," Savage recalls.

The gamble paid off, and in two years Eco-Products' annual sales zoomed from $4 million or so to $50 million.

What was not to love about PLA products? Savage asks.

"Not only was the price comparable to traditional plastics, but the quality was good. The fact that it was from a renewable resource and is also compostable really had a strong environmental message - and this new PLA technology really is a shining light to the food service industry, a $16 billion category that traditionally is not very green," he says.

Eco-Products today uses PLA and other green materials to earn honors as a versatile manufacturer of hot cups, cold cups, cutlery, clamshells, deli containers, soup containers, straws and so on, including BioBags, a line of compostable trash liners that biodegrade in as few as 45 days.

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