Last month, the Pitch@Palace On Tour graced the University of the West of England’s Future Space – and brought bags of talent to the South West with it.
One Internet of Things (IoT) solution stood out from the cohort. Meet Eat Me, the answer to all of your food wastage problems. The two 14-year-old girls who came up with this innovative idea were one of three winners of this round and are off to the Picth@Palace boot camp.
Food that wants to be eaten
Their idea connects your fridge to your phone via the Eat Me app, which then alerts you when your food is about to go off.
“We wanted to focus on reducing food waste at the source and by suggesting recipes and setting reminders for the content of your fridge Eat Me does just that”
Simply log your shopping by scanning the receipt’s QR code and you can receive suggested recipes, set up meal plans and make sure you don’t waste a penny with this handy tool.
Siena and India (pictured left) started Eat Me as part of a school project. Their task was to come up with a solution to solve an environmental problem – and they turned to tech. India tells TechSPARK, “We decided on food waste because homes in the UK waste a staggering 7.3 million tonnes of food per year; this was a statistic that surprised and shocked us!”
After some research, the girls found this is an issue people are keen to help resolve, so they decided to try to help the public to do this. Siena says, “We set our minds to finding an environmentally friendly, accessible and fast way to prevent food waste in people’s homes. We wanted to focus on reducing food waste at the source and by suggesting recipes and setting reminders for the content of your fridge – Eat Me does just that.”
Connectivity at its best: What if your fridge could talk to your phone?
That perfect pitch
Pitching to a room full of angel investors, the media and even royalty is enough to make anyone’s heart race a little faster than normal, even the most experienced amongst us.
Siena tells us how it was to pitch to their biggest ever crowd: “Pitching at Pitch@Palace was very surreal and nerve-racking.” She adds, “[the audience were] all very experienced in their fields and when we came up on stage we felt slightly nervous about reactions to our age but confident that it didn’t hinder our passion, investment and reliability in our product.”
But to keep the focus India says they had one trick: “When we came up to the stage we wanted to try and communicate how much we believed in our product and how much we had invested in it.”
They are both incredibly humbled to be one of the winners of the Bristol round: “Winning pitch@palace Bristol tour is more than we could ever imagine happening. We came confident in our idea but expecting nothing. We are over the moon and keen to go to boot camp, but in the mean time, we will work even harder to improve our product and pitch!”
The future’s future
Siena and India have both worked extremely hard to make Eat Me everything they aspired it to be whilst overcoming barriers because of their age.
Siena tells us, “We have had to always assert ourselves in any situation, making sure that in the pitch or meeting we can make people look past our age and see our product for what it is. In some case, people haven’t believed in us but that just makes us want to work harder and win them around.”
The future looks very bright for the Eat Me founders, but we wanted to know if they had any plans for what’s next. India says, “I am very interested in the environment. I see my future in environmental conservation but I’m interested in tech and being an entrepreneur.”
Siena is exploring a myriad of career paths, just like most teenagers. She tells us, “I am very much undecided but I’m keenly interested in languages, politics, theatre and tech!”
We wish the best of luck to Siena and India in the next stages of Pitch@Palace. You can find out more from the Pitch@Palace website or to keep up with the latest news from Eat Me, follow its Twitter here: @EatMeApp1.
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