Cereal for Dinner Again? Weekly Eats Can Help Get You Out of Your Food Rut

Marla Shaivitz December 9, 2011 Tweet

Winners of DC’s Startup Weekend, Weekly Eats are ones to keep your eye on. Not only did they claim the top spot in the capital’s weekend competition in late November – they were the highest placing US team in the recent Global Startup Battle.

Here’s the pitch: When you have zero food in the fridge, or the food you do have is constantly going bad before you use it, sign up for Weekly Eats and indicate:

• How many meals you’re planning that week
• Your budget
• Your ability as a cook

Weekly Eats will find and suggest the best recipes based on the parameters you’ve set, creating a list so you can shop online and track your weekly food consumption.  The social aspect is built-in, in case you want to impress your friends or make your mom happy that you’re eating well, and if you miss a recipe, an email reminder is sent off.

It has the makings of a nutrition tracking app, meal planning service and recipe-discovery site all in one.

With the help the active DC Tech community, Weekly Eats placed 3 out of 46 teams at the Global Startup Battle, an event sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation’s Startup Weekend in which winners from 68 Startup Weekend events competed on a global stage. Weekly Eats was the only US team in the Top 10.

Co-founders Neil Panjwani and Vivek Pamulapati are fresh from a year-long stint at the National Institutes of Health. Panjwani is a developer from southern California with a major in Biomedical Engineering and a minor in Economics from Duke University. With a background in computer vision, he hopes to apply his technical skills to the consumer market to create tools everyone can use. He specializes in back-end development, strategic positioning, and “getting things done.” Pamulapati is a developer hailing from the state of Iowa. Though formally trained in Chemical Engineering at Princeton University and Image Processing at the National Institutes of Health, he is now interested in leveraging Internet technologies to solve every day problems.

Both Panjwani and Pamulapati came into DC’s Startup Weekend fully intending to form a company. After rounding out the team with more developers (tech and business) the group is hoping to launch in early 2012.

Initially, both thought their audience would be post-college-age guys, yet quickly found it’s bigger than that. One of the judges at the Startup Weekend (a woman in her 40’s) confided in the team – the only time she ever cooked for her husband, it made him sick. A little extreme, sure, yet even if you’re a so-so cook, it’s easy to get into a food rut, cooking the same things all the time.

Learn more about what the team has planned with the video they put together for the Global Startup Battle: