Playing with Play-Doh is such huge part of American childhood. Tell me you didn’t, the first time you opened up a jar of it for your kid, inhale deeply and immediately feel five years old again.
And maybe, just like most five year olds, really curious about what the stuff actually tastes like (answer: salt and feet. Seriously, it’s gross). But for kids with wheat allergies, even playing with it can cause a reaction. Hasbro won’t say what’s in it, but the cans do carry an allergy warning for wheat.
Enter college ingenuity. Sawyer Sparks, an agricultural economics junior at Purdue, tried making gluten-free beer when a professor said she couldn’t drink it because of an allergy to gluten (a grade grubber after my own heart). He glopped a bunch of gluten-free ingredients, including soy flour, into a pot on his stove, and well, while you wouldn’t want to drink the resulting gloop, it turns out it makes a really great substitute for traditional Play-Doh.
Sparks had already started a company marketing animal feed and agricultural products made from sunflowers, so he saw the business potential in this as well. Soon schools had bought hundreds of the $2 containers of what he called Soy-Doh. The product comes in a dozen colors and as many scents, each of which smell like food. Don’t worry, though –it’s all nontoxic.
How smart is this guy anyway? When I was that age I was concerned with drinking beer, not making it, and certainly not spotting business opportunities right and left
