Selina Li has been a competitive golfer since age 7, growing up in Hong Kong.

“Golf has always been a big part of my identity, and nutrition was a big part of that,” said Li. That focus inspired her to create Gymii.ai, a new nutrition tracking app.

It’s an alternative to the big players in the nutrition tracking space, companies like My Fitness Pal, which require laborious and manual inputting of data, Li said, and are frequently designed for people with specific weight-loss goals.

“Mostly I wanted to know what I was putting in my body and trying to up my protein intake. I didn’t need 100% accuracy and was looking for convenience,” said Li, a master’s degree student of engineering in computer science at Cornell Tech. “With all these AI tools, the process of tracking doesn’t have to be that complicated.”

Li is one of many entrepreneurial – and food-obsessed – students who have created startups and fledgling business ventures that revolve around food. Many aim to reimagine the food system, by minimizing waste, maximizing nutrient density and helping us make better food choices.

Gymii.ai leverages AI so that users can snap a quick photo or record a video of their meals to automatically track their nutrition. “We have cuisine selectors so they can tag the cuisine, because it is helpful for AI to understand cultural nuance,” Li said. “AI, pretrained on internet-scale data, will analyze it, cross-match it with databases out there.”

Additionally, Li and partners Zach Zhong, also a master’s degree student in computer science at Cornell Tech, and new head of product Alexandra Taic, a master's of business administration student in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, incorporated social features that connect users with friends. New features include fun facts that appear with each meal analysis, helping users learn interesting things about their food, and a friendly leaderboard for users to compete on logging consistency. The app now has more than 1,000 users. With athlete ambassadors promoting the project, Li and Zhong aim to market Gymii.ai primarily to student and professional athletes, in part as a way to connect to others.

“People can see what their friends are eating during the day,” Li said. “My own nutrition journey was isolating because there wasn’t a platform for me to share. Without that accountability, it’s easy to fall off track.”

Kaylee Yin ’25, an applied economics and management major in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, hoped to tackle food waste with her startup, which won second place in this year’s Cornell Hospitality Pitch Deck Competition.

“My whole life, my parents emphasized not wasting food. It has been ingrained in me since I was young,” she said. “My dad is one of the largest persimmon growers in the U.S., with farms in California and Florida. With persimmons, there’s a lot of waste, with fruit that can’t be sold in the store because of cosmetic problems like scratches or sunburn.”

Her answer to the problem was starting FRUJI Foods, which upcycles exotic fresh fruits into dried fruits that are then sold in bulk to grocers or as an ingredient to restaurants, hotels and event caterers.

“Drying a fruit makes it shelf stable and gives that fruit a longer life,” Yin said, who is also experimenting with frozen persimmons. Her next endeavor is to expand FRUJI to incorporate dried longans, a fruit often sold in Asian supermarkets.

Yin has been working with grocers like GW Supermarket, an Asian-American chain, to get her products in stores. “Dried fruits are really popular now,” Yin said. “The focus is to bring more awareness to exotic fruits, which are so nutritious.”

Fruit also takes centerstage in JOUS, created by Camilo Ortiz ’25, a hospitality administration major at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. The startup specializes in low-calorie, vitamin-rich, non-carbonated, juice-based beverages infused with sophisticated South American flavors.

“It’s a landscape where you have a variety of legacy brands that dominate the space, often with unhealthy, sugar-laden options,” Ortiz said. “At the other end of the spectrum, you have premium, cold-pressed juices that have positive health benefits but are still laden with sugar and calories.

“We saw an opportunity looking at the data: the lower-sugar market is the only one that has experienced growth,” he said.

Ortiz aims for JOUS to become the first U.S. fair-trade juice brand, with flavors drawn from his childhood memories in Colombia.

“I remember one brand in Colombia called Hit, which was aimed at kids. I loved the passionfruit version, but it was 50 grams of sugar and 300 calories,” he said. In contrast, JOUS products are organic and all natural, with no additives or preservatives and with monk fruit as a sweetener to keep it lower calorie. JOUS’s first two flavors are passionfruit with a hint of cinnamon and pineapple with mint and lime.

The team participated in Cornell’s eLab, which helped them define the business model. This winter, they signed a contract with Ocean Blue Innovation. “They are excellent formulators that did Poppi and Lemon Perfect,” he said.

JOUS is in the process of designing and finalizing packaging and trademarking and will launch in convenience stores and bodegas in New York City. “JOUS is going to be a company that is for the new generation of people, prioritizing pop culture. This isn’t Tropicana or Minute Maid,” he said.

Michelle Lin ’20, a master's of business administration student at the Johnson School, turned her entrepreneurial vision toward a two-part solution to food waste. Her initial thought was to harness the ability of black soldier fly larvae to compost various types of food waste at a rapid rate. She and her team believed that these bug larvae could divert a significant amount of food waste from landfills.

But what do you do with the bugs afterward?

“Our idea was to take these insects and turn them into hydrogel to be used as a water-retention resource in agriculture, to help crops better withstand challenging weather conditions,” Lin said. “We are in the process right now of developing a hydrogel using these insects, formulating a biopolymer that functions like a sponge that can absorb water and release it into the roots of plants.”

The clear gel expands when water hits it, providing a slow release of water into the soil. She envisions it as a product for vegetable crops in New York state and beyond.

Through the eLab program, they met a few farmers who are open to participating in pilot testing, Lin said. “I grew up in the restaurant industry and saw a lot of food waste. This product is something that aligns with my values and passion.”