University of Richmond students Grace Mittl, Eli Bank and Maeve McCormick will start their respective first jobs out of college this summer as the CEO, COO and CMO of Absurd Snacks, a company they created with 13 classmates this year that already has products on shelves throughout the city.
It wasn’t a route the three expected when they signed up for the yearlong Bench Top Innovations class with Joel Mier, UR’s lecturer of marketing, but now the three have turned down job offers to continue expanding their trail mix that substitutes traditional nuts with crunchy beans. The product is packaged in brightly colored bags with line-drawn anthropomorphic beans that appear smiling and bungee jumping.
The tagline of the class was “from idea to revenue in nine months,” Mittl said. In the first semester, teams of students created food products, with the nut-free trail mix — initially called Spill the Beans — winning taste buds. In the second semester, the entire class became one startup…
Read the full story from the Washington Business Journal.
