School lunch start-up gains a following
Healthy Munch owner Koshila Elengkovan dishes up school lunches from her home kitchen for Invercargill school students and early childhood centre children. PHOTO: NINA TAPU
A Southland woman's school lunch start-up is tantalising students' tastebuds in the Deep South.
When Koshila Elengkovan, 40, launched her school lunch business Healthy Munch in 2023, she was unsure how Invercargill school students would take to her kai.
Two years on, and the one-woman operation has turned many local school students and early childhood centre children into fans of her food.
Ms Elengkovan, a former Malaysian national, said working as a kitchenhand at her daughter's daycare centre and at after-school care providers motivated her to start her school lunch business.
"I introduced all kinds of Asian foods to the kids, like fried rice and noodles ... and they were really happy to try new stuff," she said.
"It was like a massive welcome for the Asian culture ... so that's where it inspired me."
The Healthy Munch owner makes and delivers more than 100 school lunches to Invercargill schools and early childhood centres every week.
Healthy Munch was born from her desire to see tamariki eating "delicious and nutritious lunches" that "fuelled their growth and wellbeing".
Feedback from parents that their children were enjoying her school lunches led to one Invercargill school principal contacting local schools about Healthy Munch.
Ms Elengkovan was grateful to former St John's School (Invercargill) principal Nathan Hughes for backing her venture.
"Once he tried the food and he got the feedback from the kids ... he sent the letter to all the schools in Invercargill.
"Then I got a call from the Otatara principal and everything just went from there."
Running the business from her home kitchen while raising her family has kept her busy but seeing "happy kids' faces" enjoying her food has made the challenging work worthwhile.
She still could not believe her passion for food and cooking was making a difference to Invercargill school communities, Ms Elengkovan said.
"I feel like I will always have a connection with the students through my food."
Ms Elengkovan, who has been a primary school teacher, came to Invercargill in 2015.
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Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Otago Daily Times
School lunch start-up gains a following
Healthy Munch owner Koshila Elengkovan dishes up school lunches from her home kitchen for Invercargill school students and early childhood centre children. PHOTO: NINA TAPU A Southland woman's school lunch start-up is tantalising students' tastebuds in the Deep South. When Koshila Elengkovan, 40, launched her school lunch business Healthy Munch in 2023, she was unsure how Invercargill school students would take to her kai. Two years on, and the one-woman operation has turned many local school students and early childhood centre children into fans of her food. Ms Elengkovan, a former Malaysian national, said working as a kitchenhand at her daughter's daycare centre and at after-school care providers motivated her to start her school lunch business. "I introduced all kinds of Asian foods to the kids, like fried rice and noodles ... and they were really happy to try new stuff," she said. "It was like a massive welcome for the Asian culture ... so that's where it inspired me." The Healthy Munch owner makes and delivers more than 100 school lunches to Invercargill schools and early childhood centres every week. Healthy Munch was born from her desire to see tamariki eating "delicious and nutritious lunches" that "fuelled their growth and wellbeing". Feedback from parents that their children were enjoying her school lunches led to one Invercargill school principal contacting local schools about Healthy Munch. Ms Elengkovan was grateful to former St John's School (Invercargill) principal Nathan Hughes for backing her venture. "Once he tried the food and he got the feedback from the kids ... he sent the letter to all the schools in Invercargill. "Then I got a call from the Otatara principal and everything just went from there." Running the business from her home kitchen while raising her family has kept her busy but seeing "happy kids' faces" enjoying her food has made the challenging work worthwhile. She still could not believe her passion for food and cooking was making a difference to Invercargill school communities, Ms Elengkovan said. "I feel like I will always have a connection with the students through my food." Ms Elengkovan, who has been a primary school teacher, came to Invercargill in 2015.
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We give objects human-like traits, attribute emotions to our pets, and name our digital assistants - it's part of who we are," Mullan said. "I didn't want another device that demanded my attention. I wanted a companion - something that helps me stay focused, in flow, and truly engaged. A companion that adapts to my personality, interests, and goals." During the demonstration, Mullan illustrated Norby's capabilities by asking it to greet the audience in various languages and accents, as well as to generate stories on demand. "Hey, Norby, can you do me a favour? Can you say hello to the journalists in the room?" Mullan asked. Norby responded with, "Hello everyone. I'd be happy to extend a greeting to the journalists present. I'm sure, Adrian, you'd like me to make a good impression, so I'll make sure to be as charismatic as possible on various projects, including sound checks and helping with your work on interactive voice companions." The device's multilingual proficiency is underpinned by a flexible architecture that allows Norby to select the best available models for different languages. Mullan explained, "We plug into a bunch of different providers for the speech recognition as well as the large language model inference, and effectively what we do is we built an architecture where we can send the responses to the best model at the time." "So an example would be OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, all the big US providers will be great when it comes to English, Latin based languages and so on, but they'll tend to struggle with Asian character sets, so Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on. In that case, we can spin it off to the DeepSeek, or to Qwen , or whoever, the best provider is," he said. The hardware is intentionally designed to be approachable and engaging, resembling a character rather than a device, and is equipped with high-performance processing, a full-colour HD touchscreen, high-quality speakers, and expressive RGB LED lighting. Norby's software supports a variety of large language models and is continually enhanced through regular updates. Norby's applications go beyond language learning. "Our problem at the moment is we have more requests from people than we can sort of deal with. I would say language and speech therapy is a really big one on the consumer side. The next area that we're moving into is much more the agentic productivity side," Mullan said. He described using Norby at home to manage daily tasks: "My Norby unit at home actually does things. I checks my email. It'll summarise my emails. I can ask Norby, okay, what's important for the day. 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Norby's adaptability is reflected in its ability to switch between personalities and modes depending on user needs. Parents, for example, can select predefined personas for their children, and the robot adapts its lessons to maintain engagement. "As the kids interact with Norby, it will course correct. So an example would be, okay, any kid that's learning a language, one of the challenges is engagement, right? Because they find it hard and boring. If it knows that, okay, there's an eight year old boy named Billy who's really into Roblox and Spider Man, it will then start to recreate those lessons in that context," Mullan said. Discussing privacy and security, Mullan stressed, "We take privacy and security seriously. Norby has been designed to be COPPA compliant. Our closed-system architecture means no access to third-party app stores or social media." Looking ahead, Mullan outlined the expansion of Norby's functionality, including the introduction of features such as singing, laughing, and emotional intelligence analysis. "There's a version that we're working on now that will sing, laugh, cry, whisper, yeah. I've had a chance to interact with that one. It's not production-ready yet, but it will happen," he said. "We're thrilled to be at this stage, and we're excited about the potential for Norby to make a difference in people's lives."
