This week’s “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Kit Chow (pictured left) and Aditya Parihar (pictured right), co-founders of Boosted Chews, a caffeinated chocolate startup.
Chow and Parihar, soon-to-be seniors at UW-Madison, are on the board of Transcend UW, a club that runs a “shark tank” for students. They developed the company in November 2019 after trial-and-error aplenty.
“We started with doing a caffeinated juice and realized that the juice that we wanted to make, nobody else wanted to buy,” Chow said. The duo worked with the Department of Food Science and gAlpha out of gener8tor before developing the chocolate chews.
After developing a product that fit their standards — and the market’s — they started selling the Boosted Chews in March, a week before the state’s Safer at Home order took effect. While this put a damper on their plans for in-person sales, Chow and Parihar adjusted to meet an online customer base, including a subscription option.
“We realized there were a bunch of people that would just buy repeatedly every month… We said well, if you’re just going to keep getting it, we can offer you a discount and you can just subscribe to it,” Parihar said.
Chow noted that e-commerce is meeting customers’ needs. The team has seen popularity among people working from home and from employers gifting the caffeinated treats to their employees.
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
wispolitics · WisBusiness: The Podcast with Kit Chow and Aditya Parihar, Boosted Chews