Triple majors Jaden Brozynski, Chris Miklosy and Logan May and their venture Fresh Social will represent Marquette in the annual Big East Startup Challenge on Thursday, Feb. 27. The challenge, which began in 2019, is a competition featuring innovations and products from teams of student entrepreneurs representing 10 Big East institutions.
Their idea, which started as a capstone project for the AIM FinTech Program at Marquette, has evolved into a startup.
The team recalls, “Our idea was born from our personal experiences transitioning from dorm life and meal plans to living independently and facing the common challenges of meal planning, grocery shopping and deciding what to cook.”
These experiences lead to the development of Fresh, a next-generation recipe hub that automates home cooking by combining smart kitchen management with seamless grocery tracking.
The app itself offers features that include:
- Inventory management: automated tracking of food inventory through receipt scanning, barcode recognition and real-time updates.
- Order groceries: automatically generate grocery lists and or order groceries with one click.
- Personalized recipes: curated recipe suggestions based on the ingredients available in users’ pantries. You can also find tailored meal plans based on certain dietary restrictions (Mediterranean, keto, vegan, Etc.)
- Meal planning and waste reduction: tools to streamline meal planning and reduce food waste.
- Social integration: a social media feed that allows users to share favorite meals, discover new recipes and engage with a community of food enthusiasts.
- Nutrition tracking: an additional feature that helps users keep track of their nutritional intake.
Users can take a picture of their receipt, track their pantry, find recipes they can make with what they already have, meal plan their recipes for the week, automatically generate grocery lists for their week or automatically order the groceries for the week.
Users can also upload recipes of their own, scroll through short quick engaging videos of recipes on a feed page, and, if they see a recipe they want to make, see if they have the ingredients already in stock. If not, they can automatically order any missing ingredients for that recipe with one click.
Fresh worked with the Dorm Fund at the 707 Hub to secure $2,500 in seed money. The team recently was selected as a finalist for the Brewed Ideas Challenge and will attend a series of entrepreneurial bootcamps before competing for a share of $27,000 in seed money.
The Brewed Ideas Challenge is made possible through a long-standing partnership with the Brady Corporation.
More information about the Big East Startup Challenge and a link to watch the event are available on the Big East website.
