Photos by Tom Campbell

Every day is business casual for Ryan Howard in his suburban Chicago office. Howard took a bag of beans and a dream and came up with "Temptation," a non-dairy frozen dessert.

Ryan Howard, BS '00, is one of those idea guys. They come at him all the time, buzzing around inside his head like bugs darting around a summer streetlight.

Ideas don't wear watches, and neither does Howard. So when the ideas come makes little difference. Business hours or middle of the night, there's a good chance Howard is awake anyway, trying to turn ideas into money.

"I read that Einstein only needed three hours of sleep a night and look at what that dude did," Howard jokes. "So if it was good enough for him, it's good enough for me."

Howard's big idea, the lightbulb in his brain that has illuminated the path of his career for the past six years, hit him one afternoon on I-65 while driving from the Purdue campus to his home in Indianapolis.

Howard had been down this mindless stretch of corn and beans stitched together by a thousand billboards more times than he could count.

But this time, an idea hit him smack between the eyes and lit a fire in his belly.

"Why are Indiana soybeans shipped all the way out to the West Coast to be processed into soymilk, then shipped all the way back here to be sold in retail stores? I thought about it for a long, long time," Howard says.

In the entire history of the American Interstate system, it's probably safe to say nobody ever before spent so much time contemplating the soybeans' circuitous route from Indiana bean field to California and back again as Howard did that afternoon.

Howard and soybeans have a history. As an undergraduate in Purdue Agriculture, Howard entered Innovative Uses for Soybeans, a competition where students dream up new uses (and new markets) for soybeans. Three times he entered and three times his team came away with the top prize of $5,000.

His team came up with the idea of making environmentally friendly ski wax from soybeans in 1998. In 1999, his team won the competition by making a soybean-based gelatin. In 2000, Howard's team made a foamed dessert product ("it was kind of like flan, but lighter," he says) that also took the top prize.

Howard was a much-traveled student before finding his niche in Purdue Agriculture's food engineering program.

"I went to Indiana for a year and played a lot of basketball and did a lot of skateboarding," he quips. Howard also spent a year at Florida Atlantic University, but neither school could provide Howard with a clue about what he wanted to do for a living.

"At that stage in my life, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Nothing had caught my eye. My grandfather was an engineer, so I thought I would try that."

But before he could even enroll in classes, a brochure for food engineering caught his eye.

"It had everything I wanted," Howard says, "chemistry, biology and food science all rolled up into one program. It almost brought a tear to my eye."

Howard made a beeline for the agricultural and biological engineering office.

"I felt like I had a whole new family as soon as I walked in the door. Everyone was so helpful," Howard says. "It was the perfect place for me.

"I went to Indiana to have fun. I went to Purdue to get an education."

Good grades, the contest wins and being named top senior student in the department made Howard a top job candidate. A vegan (someone who eats no meat, dairy products or eggs) since he was 15, Howard envisioned himself as a research engineer for a large vegan food manufacturer.

But in 2000, Howard found, most vegan food companies were mom-and-pop operations and not multinational corporations in need of bright, driven research engineers.

So Howard opted for grad school. He was halfway through his first semester that day in 2000 when he had one eye on the road, one eye on a bean field and his mind on the future.

"I thought that maybe I could process the soybeans locally and distribute them myself. As soon as I got back to Purdue, I got busy writing a business plan," Howard says.

That was the end of the beginning of grad school.