Once-homeless student wins Volusia schools' version of 'Shark Tank' with food-prep concept

Yahoo

04-04-2025

DELAND – Healthy, fresh prepped foods for SNAP recipients. Nickel-free jewelry for people with sensitive skin. Kits of items newly independent college students don't yet know they need.
Aspiring entrepreneurs from three Volusia County high schools dropped these and other ideas for businesses onto panels of judges with business backgrounds in a "Shark Tank"-like competition Thursday, with at least one – first-place winner Geo Hoffmann, a senior at Spruce Creek High School – qualifying for a similar regional event in Miami next month with the potential to move on to a national pitch competition.
Students at Spruce Creek, Mainland and DeLand high schools are in a course aligned with standards established by the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Each school had its own competition and 17 made it to the district-wide event at Stetson Baptist Church in DeLand.
"This is taught in our high schools to give that entrepreneurial mindset to students," said Vince Roeshink, the career-technical education specialist at Volusia County Schools, "so that they can try to learn how to start a business, what it takes to do that from startup to operating costs, the finance portions of it and there's a pitch deck that has to cover a variety of items."
Working through the competition gives students skills – not the least of which is public speaking and networking.
School Board member Krista Goodrich, who has started several businesses herself, attended the event and said it's "wildly important" to provide entrepreneurial skill-building in high school.
"I think if they start formulating those ideas now, and start learning about the entire process of starting a business, it will give them quite a few steps ahead of kids that aren't learning that," said Goodrich, who was 23 when she started building her first business.
"I had no background of how to get a business license, how to start a business, how to get funding. Would I take a loan? Would I do (venture capital) money? How did all of that work?" she said. "We weren't taught this when I was in school. ... I was the first entrepreneur of my friend group."
Hoffmann pitched PREP – Prepare Recipies, Expand Possibilities – a meal-prep service aimed at low-income families who rely upon government assistance programs, including SNAP, and can struggle to find fresh, healthy food both because of cost and the phenomenon of food deserts, neighborhoods without grocery stores.
A New York native, Hoffmann knows of which he speaks. He said his family has struggled the point of being homeless at times. And his idea also stems from his job at Perrine's Produce in Port Orange.
"We ship off meal-prep to families who can't really afford the super-expensive stuff," Hoffmann said. "It would be around $8.50 per meal, so super cost-affordable.
"Pretty much the main goal is making sure everybody can afford healthy, nutritious meals," he said.
Before learning he had won, Hoffmann said he was most proud of being cool while giving his presentation in front of a bigger audience than a high school classroom.
"I wasn't really worried about what anybody else was presenting. I was just worried about me, doing my own thing," he said. "And I'm happy with what I've done today."
Hoffmann intends to enroll at Daytona State College and become a certified public accountant, while minoring in firefighting.
Asked about having an entrepreneurial mind, he offered a simple response: "I like solving problems."
Hoffmann said he's learned the best way to build a business is by networking.
"The biggest lesson that you can learn is how to talk to people," he said.
Even after presenting, Payton Bonino, a Spruce Creek junior, admitted she felt "so scared, so nervous."
Regardless, judges found her concept of affordable hypoallergenic jewelry to be worthy of second place. It wasn't her first idea, she said.
She started, vaguely, with wanting to do something with jewelry. She wanted to do something to customize accessories with "detachable pendants," but a recent episode at school got her thinking differently.
"I have a severe nickel allergy. I have scars on my finger and on the back of my neck from wearing jewelry that was not nickel-free," she said. "And I literally got sent home from lunch the other day because I wore a necklace that was not nickel-free, and 15 minutes later, I had rashes forming."
So she came up with a company she called Bella.
"I started realizing there was a much bigger problem that I could address other than just customization," Bonino said. "And I could address a much more toxic point in the jewelry industry, which was the hypoallergenic, where either you have to choose between comfort and spending hundreds of dollars in jewelry."
Third-place finisher Payton Garner, a senior at Mainland High School and founder of the EssentialCube, said the transition from high school to college "can be very overwhelming and time consuming," particularly the part about moving into a dorm.
"The EssentialCube is a cost effective and family-focused tote that comes with all the essentials that you don't know you need yet," Garner said during one of her pitches. "It also allows for being a dependent upon your parents to becoming independent."
She presented the EssentialCube as a curated selection of items for students moving into dorms, including a power strip, a mini tool kit, ice tray, sponge, collapsible laundry basket and other items.
One of the judges, Brad Harris, business manager for the Volusia County Division of Economic Development, was taken with Garner's idea.
"In this case, I had a personal experience where a family member bought me kind of the essentials for college," he said. "I could relate to that."
Harris said the best pitches are a combination of research and personal testimony that solve a real problem.
"In my mind, whenever I hear a creative idea like you heard today, I start thinking of opportunities to expand and grow," he said, "and I saw potential in (Garner's pitch) to grow far beyond what I think she's envisioning right now."
This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Volusia students pitch business ideas in 'Shark Tank'-like competition