As one of the top 30 teams competing in the University of Washington’s Dempsey Startup Competition this week, Austin Hirsh was pitching The 2050 Company, his startup that makes an instant smoothie powder from rescued produce.
Because this year’s event was being held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hirsh was unable to just blend and hand his product to any of the 175 judges critiquing various businesses.
“It was a 3 1/2-hour Zoom call … a pretty crazy event to put online,” said Hirsh, who is studying in the Foster School of Business Master of Science in Entrepreneurship program. “I was sitting in my apartment and every 30 minutes on the 20s and the 50s, I would move to my kitchen and make a smoothie in front of the webcam. So by the end of it I drank seven smoothies. At least I didn’t lose my voice.”
Even though the judges couldn’t taste The 2050 Smoothie, Hirsh is moving on to the Dempsey competition’s Sweet 16. Those teams will compete May 21, and from that group, judges will select the top four to compete in the Final Round the same day.
Smoothie drinkers will be able to get their hands on Hirsh’s product today during the launch of a virtual pop-up and charitable event on 2050’s website. For each order sold, the company will donate one smoothie to doctors and nurses on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19, as a nourishing “thank you” for their efforts.
Hirsh, a Gig Harbor, Wash., native, was motivated to start his company — and focus on smoothies made from rescued produce — out of a desire to reduce food waste. (The name comes from one group’s suggestion that reducing food waste could aid in curbing global warming by 2050.) Each smoothie contains some produce that would have otherwise been wasted because of surplus amounts or cosmetic flaws.
Fruits such as strawberries, blueberries and bananas are freeze dried to extend their shelf life and then ground into a find powder to eliminate any recognition of blemishes.
“An ugly strawberry and a beautiful strawberry are identical once they’re in a powder,” he said.
In March, just before Amazon sent its Seattle workforce home to work and closed up the ubiquitous free Banana Stands around its campus, Hirsh even rescued 800 bananas which would have otherwise been composted.
“The smoothies I will be selling [Saturday] have those bananas from that Banana Stand,” Hirsh said. “They’re perfectly good bananas. That’s the state of the industry, that there’s a lot of surplus and it’s hard to predict demand. That’s what we’re trying to solve.”
Hirsh has assembled a student team to help him pitch The 2050 Company at several competitions. The team includes fellow UW students Kade Eckert, Tanner Kooistra, and Hera Ivarsdottir, and 2050 most recently took first place and a $10,000 prize at the Northwest Entrepreneur Competition.
Hirsh studied mechanical engineering at the University of San Diego and said he’s always been interested in entrepreneurship. During his undergrad, he worked on a startup making a robotic lawnmower. Competition in that space accelerated his switch to smoothies.
A smoothie-a-day kind of guy, Hirsh is admittedly obsessed with streamlining certain processes in his day. He makes and freezes his breakfast burritos two weeks out. And he grew frustrated at having to get frozen fruit out of the freezer, yogurt out of the fridge, juice, protein powder, etc., for his drinks. He envisioned the idea of everything in one packet, ready for the blender.
“This kind of speaks to where I see the company going in the future,” Hirsh said. “Right now we’re starting with just fruits and vegetables to make the most basic product.”
The 2050 Company is planning a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign sometime this summer, and the plan right now is to sell direct to consumer, perhaps with the launch of a weekly or monthly subscription service.
Check out The 2050 Company’s special online pop up, starting at 2:50 p.m. Saturday, running for 20 hours and 50 minutes, until Sunday at 10:40 a.m. Details about the initial smoothie flavor and pricing will be revealed there.
