A small Northwest compost company is one of four finalists vying for a free 30-second Super Bowl ad.
Poop - Natural Dairy Compost is based in Nampa, Idaho and opened for business less than one year ago. Idaho Statesman reports the three partners -- Scott Den Hartog, Glenn Vander Woude and Ben Bieri -- started the business because “it was a solution to two problems: unemployment and acres of manure:”
Vander Woude had sold about 400 head of dairy cows as part of shutting down his family's Mason Creek Dairy on Ridgewood Road just east of Nampa. That left Vander Woude out of work. Bieri was also unemployed at the time. They talked with Den Hartog about selling the tons of manure left on the dairy as fertilizer. Vander Woude had sold truck and trailer loads of raw manure for years. "We figured there's probably a better way to do this," Den Hartog said. "Most people don't need that much." The partners came up with a system to age and screen the manure to make it odorless and fine, like coffee grounds. That made the manure easy for customers to spread using hand-operated compost spreaders. More importantly, the processed manure was easy to sell in 50-pound bags.
When the company heard about the Super Bowl ad contest by software company Intuit, they decided to enter. So did about 15,000 other small businesses, according to Capital Press. Intuit employees narrowed the field to four and now the public can vote for the company they think should win. Voting ends Sunday, December 1 at 11:59 p.m.
Not surprising, their campaign involves the requisite potty humor, including their video plea on the contest website. I can just imagine the early brainstorming meetings to come up with the company name.
Watch: Video report from KIVI-TV Boise, ID:
-- Toni Tabora-Roberts
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