How two college students’ foodie-centric idea became a national game changer in the tech startup arena.

by Candace Mittel

Spoon University is a food network and print magazine for college students and young adults, in which all of the content is produced by college students. From college-town restaurant reviews to your first real cooking experience that’s not easy-mac, from hangover recipes to smarter library snacking, Spoon covers all things food for those first four years away from home. Spoon believes that “eating should be informed and intentional, and everyone should care about what they eat—even college students.”

What’s more, Spoon was founded by two kick-ass women, Sarah Adler and Mackenzie Barth. In the tech startup world, a space that is notoriously male dominated, these ladies are empowered as ever to take their business to the next level. What started back in 2009 at Northwestern University as a desire to create a fun resource for themselves and friends that would approach food (eating it, cooking it, ordering it, etc) in a less daunting way, Spoon has grown into so much more than a college publication: it’s an entire food movement and culture now on over 100 campuses. Business Insider has hailed Spoon as one of NYC’s top 5 startups to look out for this year. I spoke with co-founder Sarah Adler to learn a more about Spoon and where they’re headed.

Candace Mittel: Thanks so much for speaking with us! As a magazine that celebrates women’s narratives, we love to feature female entrepreneurs. So with that, can you tell us a little bit about what Spoon University has become?

Sarah Adler: Spoon University is a food media company that’s [entirely] built by young people. We have chapters on college campuses across the country. Each chapter is anywhere from 20 to 70 students [that make up] a student publication on that campus. And we give them all of the resources, training, analytics and tools that they need to create really awesome content, not only so that they can share their stories, but also so that they can get a really awesome professional experience that they can use to get jobs and internships. And, ultimately, what we want to do is create a space where an entire generation of people that are caring more about food than they ever have before can come together to define the future of food. We are trying to just mobilize this generation and give them an outlet for that.

CM: And how has it evolved and grown since your started Spoon at Northwestern [University] four or five years ago?

SA: When we started Spoon at Northwestern, it was just a fun activity to do with our friends. We loved food, we moved off campus for the first time, we were trying to cook, [and] we didn’t know what restaurants to go to in Chicago. And that was like the one fun thing that we could do with our friends. And we just wanted to learn and share advice with each other. So we started this print magazine, so we could take pictures of food and make it look pretty. And by the end of our senior year we had over 100 people on staff, and we were funding this print magazine with local ad-sales. And it had gotten so much bigger than we had expected it to, and people started telling their friends at other schools about how awesome the experience was, so we started getting inquiries from other schools where people wanted to bring Spoon to their campus, or they wanted to start something similar at their school.

Basically, we took the summer after we graduated to build out a site that could work as a network to house all of these smaller communities and kind of give them a space to grow, and we gave them a little packet of information that was all of our combined wisdom on what we had learned in the past year. And since then, all of that has just grown into now what helps Spoon create itself and perpetuate itself.

CM: So now that “packet of wisdom” is  online training?

SA: Exactly.

CM: How long is the online training?

SA: It’s different depending on what your role is. The Editor-in-Chief role, for example, is the most intense, and so that has the most skills in it. Depending on what your position is, you get a custom set of skills that you need for that position. And it works kind of like Codecademy [an alternative education company], people can go through and learn a skill and take quizzes and make sure they’ve mastered it.  So, it’s pretty simple.

CM: I’m curious about your audience. Is it 50-50 male-female?

SA: It’s actually way more like 70-30 [female-male]. And I guess, you know, that’s to be expected. I think the contributor base is pretty heavily female. We’re trying to not be just “for girls.” I think that all people want to eat food. We want to be for an entire generation and not just women.

CM: Are there specific efforts you’re taking to change that?

SA: Yeah, in our video content, we’re trying to have a lot of male personalities. We do a “boozy brunch” series with this guy who is quite a character. And we’re trying, largely, to not have content only be female specific.

CM: What’s the most popular section overall?

SA: It kind of depends. Our most viral content that gets the most lift on Facebook is more of the lifestyle content, so stuff that’s more about food news and the way that food fits into your life, and stuff like that. We have a couple of posts that went viral, like about Chicago’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. People love those kind of things. We had a post on April Fools Day about how Nutella was being discontinued in 2015 that the International Business Times had to debunk. That was pretty funny. But our most loyal readers, the people who come back to Spoon most often, are using it for recipes. You can see a lot of people using the navigation tools to find recipes for specific circumstances.

CM: And now you have a new “video content” section, which I imagine works well for recipes.
SA: Yeah, that’s been great for us. We’re trying to figure out how to produce video for less money than video is produced for now, because it can be so expensive for content production companies. And we think that, especially with new technologies, it’s so much easier to produce really awesome video, especially stuff that’s mobile and sharable and can be viral. What we want to do is kind of like what we did with editorial and written content— empower all of these really passionate creators from across the country to make helpful and entertaining viral bite-size video content. We think that’s totally possible.

CM: In your “About” video, you talk about how college is typically the place “where good food goes to die.” I can definitely appreciate that statement. The first two years of college I definitely wasn’t feeling or looking my best, and I think there are a lot of factors at play: one, there’s just so much junk food available in college; and two, going out and drinking can stealthily add on calories, and then on top of that, a late night out typically ends with fast-food of some sorts; and three, studying late into the night for that bio exam isn’t always easy on the waist-line. But you claim that that the freshman fifteen doesn’t have to happen. How does Spoon help?

SA: We try to help people eat intelligently, which doesn’t necessarily mean making healthy decisions all the time. It just means knowing the difference between healthy decisions and unhealthy decisions and knowing how to balance them. It means knowing what you should eat before you work out and how to eat while studying to satisfy your hunger and keep you studying smarter and longer, but it also means knowing where the best pizza is when you’re drunk at 2 a.m. So it’s kind of both things. And I think that that balance is really important to our entire generation. Making smart choices, but also making dumb choices…but making them well.

CM: Informed decision-making.

SA: Yes. Exactly.

CM: I’m curious how your “Eat Out” section, for restaurant reviews, is different from, let’s say, Yelp, which I used in college to find restaurants when my mom and dad were coming to visit, (and I still use a lot today).

SA: Totally. So I think Yelp is super helpful. I use Yelp all the time. Some of the struggles I have with Yelp is that every place is on there, and if you’re looking for a place around you, it’s literally every place, and some of them are reviewed by only 11 people, and you don’t know who reviewed them, and maybe all of them are paid for… it’s definitely helpful because there are places around you that are on it, but the information is like, “What is this!? I don’t really know!”

CM: Too much information. You have to filter through.

SA: Exactly. So our map is just places that have been eaten at by people like you, and what they thought about them. It’s just people our age, eating at restaurants.

CM: And in “Eat Out,” you can search for different categories appropriate for college students? Cheap meal, fast meal, open late, and so forth?

SA: Exactly.

CM: So I read that Spoon is a part of NYC Techstars 2015 this year.

SA:  Yes, actually, it was twelve weeks. We just finished it. It was over in April. It ends in this big Demo-Day. You know, it was crazy. But it was a really great experience for us. It helped us focus a lot, and largely was just really valuable.

CM: That’s awesome. I was looking at the other companies that were in Techstars, and obviously I don’t know anything about those companies’ founders, but the startup world is notoriously dominated by men. I read a statistic in Venture Beat that only 3 percent of tech startups are formed by women. Do you feel that at play? How has it has been being two female entrepreneurs?

SA: I mean, you can look around the room and know that you’re one of the only women in the room. But it never feels weird to be the only women in the room. Which I think probably speaks really highly of the rooms we’ve been in. It’s never been an issue for us. And, you know, I feel very respected and capable and empowered and, you know… fuck the haters.

CM: Amen!

CM: On a final note, what’s your vision for the future? Five years down the road? Where will we find you guys?

SA: We’re building the most authentic, most real and relatable lifestyle brand for our generation. And we want to, right now, start with food and help an entire generation of people, [people who] are caring about food more now than they ever have before, define what the future of food looks like. And I think that that will also apply really easily to things like travel and health and wellness and culture, because food is kind of a cornerstone and outlet for all of those things. And I think that the key point is what’s currently resonating with our generation, as this whole group of consumers that’s about to be really powerful in buying power, in voting as an electorate group. And I think it’s really important to figure out exactly what’s resonating and exactly what’s engaging and mobilizing these people, and we’re creating content and spaces that help make that flourish. 

CM: Does your vision for the future expand beyond college students potentially?

SA: Definitely. College has been an excellent way for us to grow across the country and take over these communities nationally with very little money and resources. But the issues that we’re combating and the problems that we’re solving are definitely not specific to college students.

[hr style=”striped”]

Candace Mittel graduated in 2013 from Northwestern University, where she studied Mathematics, Jewish Studies and Creative Writing Nonfiction (and no, they are not connected, but she’s open to suggestions). She currently lives, teaches and writes in Chicago. Read more of her feature work for The Riveter here.