Savor, an imagined meal-planning subscription service, gives chefs a three-day plan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, complete with a grocery list and recipes. Photo courtesy of Savor

Apps

Student Dreams of a Meal Planning App to Avoid Waste

Diran Shahrik (CGS’21, Questrom’23) uses BU’s start-up resources to get his idea off the ground

Growing up, Diran Shahrik loved his aunt’s coconut cakes. But it really bothered him, for both environmental and economic reasons, that she tossed half the container of coconut flakes away when she was done. It’s estimated that worldwide, up to 40 percent of all food is thrown away. That’s $166 billion a year of food waste, resulting in an additional 20 percent of greenhouse gases. 

When he entered BU in January 2020, Shahrik (CGS’21, Questrom’23) had the inkling of an idea for a meal planning app that could avoid his aunt’s conundrum. It would outline the cost of each recipe ingredient and then recommend other recipes with the same ingredients, helping home chefs use up everything they purchased and leading to less waste. He named his app Savor.

“Savor takes certain things into consideration, like your dietary preferences, your family size, your weekly budget,” Shahrik says. “It then formulates everything into a grocery list, as well as a meal plan based on those preferences, so your money isn’t wasted.”

Even before he arrived at BU—shortly after he was accepted to the College of General Studies—Shahrik met with former Student Government president Oliver Pour (CGS’20, COM’22) and later with Jeff Sierra, a CGS academic advisor, to discuss his idea and to find out who at BU might be able to help. Sierra pointed him towards BUild Lab’s Innovation Pathway, a program that helps students bring their start-ups to reality. Shahrik pitched his idea, and received a $1,000 grant to get started. “The beauty of the BUild Lab is that they force you to research the problem, and you can’t skip steps,” he says. “You meet with your advisor and they have to approve your research for the problem.”

But just a month after starting work on his app—during his first semester on campus as a CGS student—the pandemic hit.

“I put a lot of work into this project, and I’m thinking, what am I going to do here? Do I throw in the towel, or do I keep going?” Shahrik says. “It sounds cliché, but the pandemic—as awful as it has been—also gave me an opportunity. This is the first time in our life history where time stopped.” He used the downtime to do more research, questioning more than 40 people about how much they spent weekly on groceries and how concerned they were about food waste.

In fall 2020, Shahrik applied, and was accepted, to the BU Spark! X-Lab program, where he met weekly with a team of engineering and computer science students to assist with his project. He also was partnered with a UX designer, who made a mock-up of what Savor could look like. Shahrik went on to win the Audience Choice award at the Fall 2020 Demo Day.

To come up with the Savor database, he had a few hurdles to overcome. First, he had to manually input more than 5,000 meals, looking for recipes that ideally were cheap and healthy, and with the option of being dietary-friendly. Since only recipes (and not ingredients) are copyrighted, Shahrik was okay to rewrite them for his use. “It’s really just like putting hours and time in,” he says. “There’d be times when my friends would be going out, and I’d be sitting in my room inputting data for hours.”

The imagined monthly subscription service gives chefs a three-day plan for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, complete with a grocery list and recipes. “The grocery list component is the best part, in my opinion,” Sharik says. “Can you imagine if your grocery list was an app that also handled your recipe and meal planning? It’s meant to be very convenient, very easy.”

Now “graduated” from Spark! Shahrik is working to pitch Savor to investors. His ultimate goal is to persuade grocery store chains like Star Market and Trader Joe’s to use the app to get customers to buy all the ingredients from their stores. He figures his target market is Gen-Xers living with children in the suburbs. He says that 91 percent of Americans shop with coupons, so there’s clearly a need for such a product. “I figured this app could shape behavior much differently,” he says. Because people have been avoiding restaurants during COVID, companies such as UberEats have been making a lot of money, “so I figured there’s definitely a need for something like this.” 

Ziba Cranmer, BU Spark! director, says Shahrik is an “incredibly persistent and committed budding entrepreneur. He’s demonstrated his commitment through his persistence on this project, he has chased down every opportunity the University provides, and we’ve enjoyed working with him.”

The son of a single mom, Shahrik says he makes every effort to show his mother how much he appreciates all she’s done for him. “BU is such an expensive school, so I didn’t want to attend and sit back,” he says, “I wanted to excel and do as much as I possibly could. I wanted to make the most of my experience here.”