LITTLE ROCK — Four John Brown University students swept the undergraduate awards Wednesday at the 11th Donald W. Reynolds Governor’s Cup business plan competition.

About 1,100 people attended the event at the Statehouse Convention Center in Little Rock.

John Brown’s Agricultural Food Systems won the undergraduate division with a plan to enable meat processors to measure tenderness in raw beef carcasses. TenderID is the firm’s first product, but it hopes to have several others.

Lawson Hembree, one of the team members, said he found the idea for TenderID on the University of Arkansas technology licensing website.

“We ... were able to reach a limited-option agreement,” Hembree said. “ We’re developing plans for [Agricultural Food Systems] around that product.”

Hembree has a background in agriculture. His family has raised cattle since 1830 on an Arkansas River Valley ranch between Paris and Ozark.

The team members from the Christian college in Siloam Springs - Hembree, Kirk Dennison, Lauren Kessler and David Andrade - spent 17 to 20 hours a week working on their plan.

Agricultural Food Systemsis seeking $200,000 from an investor to get the business started. The students hope to begin operations this summer, after they have graduated.

The team also won the awards for best innovation, best agricultural idea and the “elevator pitch” competition, in which a member of each semifinal team made a 90-second presentation trying to “sell” their business to an investor. In all, the team won $33,000 of the total $108,000 awarded.

Another John Brown team, Craftistas, with a plan to sell craft kits complete with materials and instructions, finished second. Garden Craft, with a plan to offer projects to allow people to be more creative, was third.

Mike Kennelley, the faculty adviser for the John Brown teams, said he believed early on that the school had the three best business plans in the competition.

“But, of course, that doesn’t mean you always win first, second and third,” Kennelley said. “There were other very good plans [in the competition].”

Don Soderquist, former vice chairman of Wal-Mart Stores Inc., was the founder of the Soderquist Business Center at John Brown.

CycleWood Solutions LLC of the University of Arkansas won the graduate division. The business has developed a biodegradable lignin-based plastic bag that breaks down in 150 days.

The students in CycleWood Solutions - Jack Avery, Kevin Oden, Nhiem Cao, Priscila Silva and Blair Cocanower - got the idea for the business from technology developed by the University of Minnesota, Cao said.

CycleWood Solutions’ bags are more environmentally friendly and would cost 1.5 cents each, compared with 1.2 cents for polyethylene plastic bags currently used, which take years to break down, Cao said.

The company is seeking $600,000 to get CycleWood Solutions started, Cao said.

TiFiber LLC of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, which provides solutions to industrial filtration, was second in the graduate category. Peas and Cues of John Brown, which provides parents with ways to teach their children a foreign language, was third in the graduate category.

CycleWood Solutions won the graduate award for best agricultural idea and the graduate-level elevator pitch competition. Jeska Shoe Co. from Southern Arkansas University, which allows women to have interchangeable heels and accessories for shoes, won the graduate award for best innovation.

First-place teams in the undergraduate and graduate categories received $20,000 each. Second place received $10,000 and third place $5,000. Faculty advisers for each of the top three teams received $1,000.

In addition, the team with the best innovation in each category won $5,000, and each team with the best agriculture idea won $5,000.

The top two teams Wednesday in the graduate and undergraduate divisions advance to the Donald W. Reynolds Tri-State Awards competition in Las Vegas, where teams from Arkansas, Nevada and Oklahoma will compete for a total of $90,000.

Business, Pages 21 on 04/21/2011