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Students develop a sustainable business concept in a grant-funded summer program.
This year’s group idea was to use shell waste from pecan and hazelnut producers to make a soil dressing for plants.
By: Meghan Kita
Tuesday, August 16, 2022 09:49 am
Eli Coopersmith 23, Gabrielle Stein 25 and Jacqueline Hernandez 23. Photos by Lizard Foley ’24
On a recent Friday, Eli Coopersmith, 23, and Jacqueline Hernandez, 23, stood outside a gardening store talking to customers about their business idea, Nuts for Plants. The concept was developed by Gabriel Stein ’25 for a company that uses shell waste from pecan and hazelnut producers to create moisture-retaining, growth-promoting, and nutrient-rich soil dressings for plants.
“We’ve had very positive feedback,” said Coopersmith, a computer science major and junior in innovation and entrepreneurship. “We actually got about five clients to put their names on the list [to receive updates]. They immediately wanted to buy it.”
He and Hernandez went to the store to learn about Nuts’ potential audience for Plantettes, a concept that’s part of The Seedbox, a six-week summer program funded in part by a three-year, $30,000 VentureWell grant. The grant focuses on integrating innovation and entrepreneurship and sustainability studies so that students can develop real-world business solutions to environmental and social problems. Venturewell The gift was awarded last year Rita Chesterton, director of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Rich Niesenbaum, professor of biology, director of sustainability studies, and the Rita and Joseph B. Scheller Chair.
Chesterton and Nisenbaum taught a new course this spring, “The Future of Feed,” which they developed with a grant. In it, student teams identified a sustainability issue related to food-systems and developed a business concept that could address the issue.
Stein’s team in the classroom developed the concept, which the Seedbox trio began working on this summer, although the original idea was to use shale waste as an exterior filler. Quickly, the Seedbox Group realized that such an idea was impossible – it was impossible to produce enough product at an affordable price using shale waste.
“It was hard to figure out everything in class in a short amount of time,” said Stein, a studio art major. “This seedbox program was 9 to 5 every day, like a regular job. Basically, we were doing research on our project all day. It was a very solid, hands-on experience with market research and figuring out what our project needed to be.
The soil dressing concept is more feasible and has some customer interest, although the team still has some work to do, Stein says. For example, you are wondering which packaging will be cost effective, durable and strong enough to hold the shells. Although there is much work to be done, the experience allowed the students to see what creativity and entrepreneurship look like in action.
“There’s no road map for this,” says Coopersmith. “In class, when you do entrepreneurship, you say, ‘You’re going to this class this week. Next week, you will do this class.’ It is offered more online. [When you develop a product], is not linear at all. If you try something and it doesn’t work, you learn something.”
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