Startup Spotlight: How Campus Nutrition is tackling food insecurity at UBC

Welcome to Vancouver Tech Journal’s startup spotlight series, where we dive into companies building in Vancouver.

With the University of British Columbia (UBC) consistently ranked as one of the best universities globally, the Vancouver campus has become a “city within a city.”

Yet, for the longest time, there wasn't a single source of information for students to search food options by price, cuisine, hours, reviews, and whether or not meal plan dollars are accepted. What makes this need so critical besides convenience is that 40 per cent of UBC students are food insecure. 

To address this issue, Sepehr Kamal and fellow UBC graduates, Arman Mojtabavi and Kasra Kamal, created Campus Nutrition: a comprehensive guide of all food outlets on the UBC campus. Since its launch in 2019, over 50,000 students have engaged with the platform, and many praise it for helping them find affordable food.

Along with tackling a global issue at a local level, Campus Nutrition has also helped co-founder Kamal overcome a challenging time.

“I had personal health issues and had to take time off from school in the middle of my masters,” shared Kamal. “At one point, I thought I would have to drop out. Working on Campus Nutrition was liberating because it was something I could work on from home as opposed to being hands-on working in a research laboratory.”

Ahead of new features being released, Kamal sat down with the Vancouver Tech Journal to share his and his co-founders’ journey in building and growing Campus Nutrition — despite neither having a business or entrepreneurship background.

What’s your elevator pitch?

Campus Nutrition is a hyper-local, all-in-one platform to help UBC students find food on campus.

Students can explore places to eat based on price, cuisine, and hours of operation. They can also filter places to eat based on whether they accept residence meal plan dollars and can read reviews from their fellow students. 

The platform also includes news about the latest happenings on campus and insights to help students save money on food.

In summary, Campus Nutrition combines elements of Google Maps, The Daily Hive, and UBC’s official websites with a community focus.

When did you start your company?

We founded Campus Nutrition in 2019 and started working hard in early 2020. 

We chose the name “Campus Nutrition” to embody our mission to help university students nourish their minds and bodies. 

What was the catalyst behind starting your company?

As UBC students ourselves, we saw our fellow students struggle with food for years and wanted to do something to help. 

One day, the three of us were chatting over sushi about how much the campus had changed over the last 10 years and how most students didn’t know what was available. We then realized that we could build something to help address this problem.

We were also excited by the idea of building something new from scratch. Starting Campus Nutrition gave us an outlet to dive into product building. 

What problem is Campus Nutrition solving?

A shocking 40 per cent of UBC students are food insecure. In addition, only 55 per cent of UBC students say it’s easy to find food they enjoy on campus, and only 27 per cent of UBC students say it’s easy to find healthy food on campus.

UBC’s Vancouver campus is unique because it's geographically separated from the rest of the city. There are over 100 places to eat on campus, but most students only know about a handful.

Imagine yourself as a first-year UBC student living in residence. You’re dropped onto the campus and have to learn everything from scratch. You go to the dining halls and a couple of other places that you find out about from your friends. Beyond that, everything is new and overwhelming. 

You go online and arrive at the UBC Food Service website, but it only provides information about the 30 food outlets it operates. You then go to the AMS of UBC website, but it only provides information about the 10 food outlets in the AMS Nest. You then go to Google Maps, but it lacks key information that uniquely applies to the UBC community, such as whether a food outlet accepts UBC residence meal plan dollars. You then go to The Daily Hive to see if any new places have opened up or if there are any happy hour specials. However, it doesn’t cover most of the stories on campus as they’re not relevant to people outside the UBC community. You can see very quickly how a single platform that covers all of the above could benefit a student.

At the same time, we’re also addressing a completely unrelated problem. It’s very difficult for students to get jobs in tech after graduating. We provide our volunteers with invaluable real-world experience across various disciplines, including engineering, design, marketing, and product.

What markets are you in?

We serve the UBC Vancouver campus, which has 61,000 students.

How big is your team?

We have 17 team members.

Are you hiring?

Yes, we have several roles open, including on our marketing team. These volunteer roles suit senior students or recent graduates who want to build career experience and demonstrate their leadership skills.

Have you raised money?

As a non-profit, we don’t take equity investments and instead have funded our operations through grants. 

We’ve received several grants from the Alma Mater Society of UBC, and won $5,000 in a national startup competition run by the Student Life Network. 

To date, we’ve secured a total of $12,000.

Are you profitable?

No, but we’re also not operating at a loss either. 

We’ve intentionally built our organization to be very lean so that we can operate with low ongoing costs. To cover the tech side, we currently receive approximately $7,000 a year of in-kind software services, including from Microsoft Azure, GitHub, and Slack.

We expect to build new revenue streams through sponsorships and advertising over the next two years. We’ve had some opportunities knocking on our door and hope to capitalize on them as we go forward.

What does Campus Nutrition need right now?

We’ve found signs of product-market fit, and now, we need additional leadership to help us execute our product strategy. 

We’ve built a highly engaged Instagram audience of 4,000 followers and need someone to step in and continue to drive our marketing efforts. 

We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of interest in our open positions. Still, finding the right people who thrive in a startup setting has been challenging. 

In addition, we would also benefit from additional funding from grants or sponsorships.

Looking back on the early days of starting Campus Nutrition, what was the biggest challenge faced? How did you overcome it?

Our biggest challenge in the early days was narrowing down all our ambitious ideas into something tangible and feasible. 

The most important thing we did to overcome this challenge was research the problems our target users faced. 

We surveyed 300 UBC students, which provided us with strong quantitative data that turned out to be pivotal. The results revealed that students' biggest problems with campus food were much simpler than we thought: cost and difficulty finding places to eat. This helped us narrow down our plans.

For example, we had an idea to provide comprehensive nutritional information for all the meals offered by all the food outlets on campus. From the survey, we realized this would not solve students' core problem with food.

Where do you want Campus Nutrition to be in 3, 6, and 9 years?

In three years, we’d like Campus Nutrition to be a platform every UBC student knows and uses regularly.

Beyond that, it’s difficult to say exactly where we want to be. We know we want to transform Campus Nutrition from a startup into a self-sustaining organization that will continue to benefit students in the long term.

We also know this will require ongoing leadership beyond our founding team. We’ll launch some new features on our platform over the next six months, and our future plans will highly depend on how these new features perform. 

How can people connect with you?

People can reach out to me on LinkedIn or email me. I’m always happy to chat.

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