Sawyer Sparks, a 22-year-old college student from Purdue University, walked into the Shark Tank with a bright idea: modeling dough for kids with wheat allergies.
On paper, that sounds like a pretty weak concept, but bet you didn’t know that one out of eight kids has that problem, and bet you also didn’t know that the biggest player in the dough market, Play-Doh, sells some 96 million cans a year. Divide 96 million by eight, and you have a market of 12 million cans of modeling dough a year for wheat-allergic kids. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before?
Jason Cochran at WalletPop interviewed Sparks about his dough business: