The Upstart: Yum!
Celina Saffioti (BSBA’21) wants to take her healthier baked goods nationwide
Packed with sugar and butter, brownies are a decadent treat for your taste buds—and a torment for your waistline.
Celina Saffioti’s hunt for a brownie that set her palate alight without clogging her arteries sparked her big idea: a healthier dessert company. She hopes it will soon be delivering confections to Boston-area college students and could one day expand into a nationwide chain of stores.
Saffioti (BSBA’21) started baking in high school, experimenting with recipes and selling her creations—brownies, cookies, baked snack bites—in Long Island, N.Y., coffee shops and juice bars. Her brownies are made with agave powder rather than sugar, coconut oil in place of butter, and carob for a distinctively nutty taste.
Now, she’s bringing the concept to BU and has joined Questrom’s undergraduate entrepreneurship club with hopes of expanding her fledgling enterprise; four of her fellow students have already signed on to help make it happen. They’ve called their company Cee uS, she says, to reflect a commitment to ingredient transparency.
“We’ve started by just making our products and getting a lot of feedback, leaving them in dining halls with brief surveys,” says Saffioti, who recently met with Alex Aferiat (BSBA’10), an attorney who formerly worked at the FDA, for advice on product labeling and other regulations. “Our first step into moving past the dining halls is doing campus delivery.”
Pushing beyond that, she says, will require tapping into more alumni and faculty expertise. She’s joined Questrom Latino and is a member of Questrom Ascend, a cohort program for students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds—both groups are helping her connect with people on campus. But Saffioti hopes more alumni mentors will come forward, too.
“I need a lot of help. I think my next step would just be understanding how to really grow, how I would scale up and reach different markets.”
You can help Questrom students launch their big ideas by becoming an alumni mentor.
