Davrina Rianda Wins 2024 Big Bang! Business Competition in Food & Agriculture Track
HappyFeed App a Hit with Parents in Indonesia
HappyFeed co-founders CEO Davrina Rianda, Nutritional Biology Ph.D candidate, CFO/CMO Galih Setiawan, UC Davis MBA student; and CTO Nathanael Thomas, won the $12,500 Food and Agriculture Award at the 2024 UC Davis Big Bang! Competition sponsored by the Mike and Renee Child Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.
Davrina explained, "The child feeding experience can be stressful for parents. They often feel lost and believe that no one can truly guide them at home. Together with my colleague Galih from the UC Davis MBA program, we proposed HappyFeed, a day-to-day companion app for parents that provides personalized meal planning, child feeding guidance, and growth tracking using artificial intelligence.
Participating in the Big Bang! competition provided invaluable exposure and validation for HappyFeed. It allowed us to connect with a diverse network of mentors, research and industry experts, and fellow entrepreneurs, gaining insights to refine our business model while also providing solutions for child nutrition.
The best advice we received was to consider extending our services to children older than five years old, which would increase the lifetime value of our customers. This insight opened our eyes to an untapped market and provided a clear direction for future expansion. It highlighted the potential for growing our program and features to support older children, ensuring that HappyFeed can continue to meet the evolving needs of families as their children grow.”
HappyFeed is being implemented with Mama4Planet based in Sleman, Indonesia, that provides meal planning, nutrition tracking, and guidance for parents to create a nutritious, enjoyable eating experience for parents and children.
The Big Bang! Competition annual awards ceremony on May 21st celebrated the 22 finalist teams who pitched their ventures before five judges in an eight-hour marathon judging session. Judges considered the teams’ integrated strategy, steps toward implementation and market opportunity to determine prize winners. Judges announced the winners of $100,000 in cash awards and residencies valued at $8,000 for innovations in animal health, education and educational tools, energy/ sustainability, food and agriculture, human health and social entrepreneurship.
The UC Davis Big Bang! Business Competition has been helping entrepreneurs start or grow business ventures for more than two decades through the competition, workshops, mentoring and networking opportunities teaching contestants to solve complex problems, make connections & build cross-cultural and cross-functional networks to thrive in challenging and uncertain times. The Big Bang! is open to teams with a founder or team lead affiliated with a college or university in California.