There are apps for everything, from doing laundry to ordering water. Why can’t there be an app that helps students keep tabs on when to eat and tells them what’s available in those first months away from home when maintaining healthy eating habits can be an annoyance and a serious problem?
So, Anya Greene, a freshman chemical engineering major, and a team of classmates from the GW School of Business, Deniz Baykal, Mackenzie Scott and Dominick McGee, cooked up UFeast, an app that supports healthy eating habits for college students. It took first place at the Pitch George competition, for which they were awarded $3,000 to develop the concept.
Pitch George is held each semester and hosted by the Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence (CFEE) of GW Business, awarding $10,000 in prize money to the winning student entrepreneurs who deliver a tight 3-minute elevator spiel for promising business ideas and products. More than 200 students were part of teams that identified a problem and its target market and devised a solution for which they developed a business plan to make it happen, which was then presented to a panel of judges comprised of industry leaders and businesspeople.
Greene said after conducting a campus survey and doing a bit of research, the UFeast team discovered that 1 in 7 university students have dietary restrictions and are at a disproportion risk of developing unhealthy eating habits because of academic stress and lack of nutrition information. Not to mention, Green said, college students with dietary restrictions that have extremely limited options eating in the dining halls.
“I experienced it first-hand as a vegetarian,” Greene said. “That’s when we came up with UFeast, an app that makes it easy for students to eat healthy.”
With UFeast, users set up a profile that hooks them up with meal recommendations, recipes, available foods in the dining halls and locations of nearby restaurants, as well as a meal tracking calendar for input times and locations between classes.
CFEE Managing Director Kathy Korman Frey said Pitch George is “plugging real-life experiences directly into the classroom with the help and partnership of professors,” who are integrating entrepreneurial projects into the curricula across the business school. She noted that the program helps students develop skills that will prove useful in internships and jobs.
“The highly successful competition has doubled in size,” Korman Frey noted. “Students mention it on end-of-semester evaluations. All the way around, people are enjoying the experience.”
The pitches were scored on the presentation, the problem it addressed, the solution, target market, financials and research demonstrating a competitive advantage. Students also can continue on to compete in the spring semester GW New Venture Competition.
In second place was Chew Charm, a spray scent for the family dog’s toys to make them a more appealing and chewable object than the family couch, which came with a $2,000 prize. It was developed by a team of dog owners, Kayla DeSousa, Ada Kirkland and led by Mia Hiekin, who said DeSousa came up with the idea as a healthier alternative to repellents that can also be used to reinforce good behavior and is a more positive substitute for treats that can lead to overeating.
“I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset and always wanted to create something,” Hiekin said. “I’m happy this process got us to create something we can feel passionately about because we all have dogs and would use it at home.”
They have developed a logo for the product, are currently consulting a patent attorney and are looking for a veterinarian or animal expert to help them make the product.
In third place and winning $1,000 was Meet Your Match, an app that Shayla Price, a part-time student at GW Business and human resources manager in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences, engineered with the help of Harry Lopez in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Elliott Kelly in the GW Business.
The app would allow a consumer to use a cell phone to take a snap of their face and find a shade of makeup, foundation, lip color, eye shadow and blush colors from a variety of brands.
“The premise is to say goodbye to the hassle of ordering the wrong shade online or having to meet with a consultant in the store,” Price said.
Dermatological information could also be logged in about allergies or skin conditions to steer the consumer away from products that might irritate them.
For businesses, it could be used to access information about who returns items and what and why items are returned and sold as a subscriber list of potential customers for different brands.
Remarkably, the three top winners of Pitch George all came from Professor Cevat Tosun’s entrepreneurship class, which requires students to write up a business development idea for Pitch George at the beginning of the semester.
“[Tosun] wove student examples into class discussions from building out a target market to creating a prototype and all the varying things that go into building out your business from brainstorming to conceptualization, from the beginning to the end,” said Price.
Tosun embraces a teaching philosophy that treats university students as equals and encourages them to ask questions and challenge the answers. In addition to the coaching he provides, he directs them to mentors-in-residence and interacts with industry leaders.
The greatest challenge they faced, he said, was finding team members and communicating with each other in person because of their busy schedules, so he worked with them on coordinating with their team members and taking leadership.
“I think academic success is not directly related to real-life success,” he said. “If it is at the total cost of isolating yourself from the real world, please do not take it. Connect yourself with the real world. Enjoy daily life and be committed to industry and professional events, and invest in your health, as well.”
