Young Millionaires

By P. Kelly Smith

In the vanilla-and-chocolate-dominated ice cream world, it's nice to know one entrepreneur is having a little fun with the likes of mango, passion fruit and guava-strawberry. But it was more out of a sense of mission than fun that Douglas Stewart started Howler Products Inc. in 1994. The company, named after the Amazon's fruit-loving Howler monkeys, manufactures exotic sorbets and gourmet gelatos with ingredients and flavors taken from rare rain-forest fruits.

Stewart, president and CEO of the San Francisco-based company, began his journey in the Amazon jungle in 1989. Then a Stanford student, Stewart traveled to the Brazilian Amazon to research a thesis that ended up as a book on deforestation. He concluded that if farmers had a market for their rain-forest fruits, they might preserve the trees and plants that produced them. His convictions were so strong, he eventually left a job as a schoolteacher to start Howler Products. Six years later, with 100 flavors and sales between $1 million and $2 million, Stewart considers himself more of a "survivor" than a millionaire. "We've survived," he says, "and I think the formula for survival, whether you're 24 or 44, is you have to be persistent."

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		Is all this food talk making you hungry? Read "Upper Crust" to and find out how you can start your own sandwich shop franchise.

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