Food Startup
I recently visited a friend at the University of Pennsylvania for my fall break, and discovered something so deliciously ingenious.
Insomnia Cookies, is a unique business venture created by UPenn students several years ago, baking fresh cookies until 2 am. They started based off in their own campus, offering a local delivery service right to any UPenn student’s dorm. Now, they’ve expanded to several other campuses, including Ohio State and Penn State.
Which got me thinking. After enviously following YMFY’s business venture into the bubble tea world with The Boba Guys, and experiencing first hand Joanna Chang’s wildly successful Flour bakery in Boston, I really want to open up my own food business venture.
But with what? I’m extremely jealous of Insomnia Cookies. They’re found a niche with hungry college students, and I want to do the same. After an hour of brainstorming I came up a couple feasible ideas, as well as some not so feasible ones.
- Insomnia Cookies, but better. Starting at MIT. I’ll be their Apple to their Microsoft, their Pinkberry to their Red Mango.
- Brownie and cupcake late night shop. Moreso the brownies than the cupcakes…
- Late night ramen shop. What college kid doesn’t love ramen at midnight! Possibly offering delivery service?
- Cereal shop. Offering 50+ varieties of cereal, with milk or soymilk.
- Mariachi delivery service. Your own festive music right at your door for three whole minutes
- Late night delivery foot massages. I know people can get all sore after hours of studying, so why not offer something that’s right in between non-sexual escort services and prostitution? I foresee lawsuits ahead…
Obviously there’s a lot of thinking to do, but this is something that I could see myself putting hours of work into. Do you guys have any suggestions for me? Leave a comment and help me brainstorm some ideas!
You can see the root at the bottom of the tree. The roots are harvested by hand and require harvesters to lift up each tress and pull out the roots. (Surprisingly to me) the largest producer of Cassava is Nigeria. My understanding is that from there the process of extracting the starch comes in multiple steps; peeling, washing, then multiple rounds of sieving and washing, drying, and you’re left with starch. (If you’d like more info on that and the multiple ways to do each step I recommend checking out this page http://www.fao.org/docrep/x5032e/x5032E02.htm)
From here they are shaped, packed, and sold for you to go buy! They look like this and normally are in vacuum sealed packs
