Two UW-Madison students combined college student staples — coffee and chocolate — to create bite-sized pieces of energy for a competition, which led to the start of their entrepreneurial careers.
Rising seniors Kit Chow and Aditya Parihar, both 20, started discussing possible start-up ideas last fall to participate in the Transcend Madison Competition 2020, through Transcend UW, which they are both members of.
They got to the topic of caffeinated food and after a few blunders — including trying out caffeinated juice and fruit snacks — the two landed on caffeinated chocolate with guidance from the UW Food Science Department.
“[Professor K.J. Burrington] directed us to the realm of using chocolates, which we had previously been staying away from because we didn’t want to be too similar to our competitors,” said Chow, a biological systems engineering student. “With her guidance we decided to go along the chew route. She gave us a starting formulation and from there we started iterating on what exactly we wanted to do.”
With that starting formula, Chow and Parihar, a chemical engineering student, began making prototypes. At that point, the competition was unlikely to happen because of the coronavirus, and still, Chow and Parihar continued working on their new product.
After talking to another food science professor and developing the formula more, the two finally ended up with a product they were ready to market: Boosted Chews.
Read the full article at: https://madison365.com/uw-students-create-bite-sized-instant-energy-with-boosted-chews/