It’s not every day you get to start a company as a 22 year-old.
Well, such is the reality for 16 University of Richmond students each year who are accepted into the Bench Top Innovations program. I am one of them.
Bench Top is a year-long course split into two semesters taken by students of all different majors and minors — not just those falling under the umbrella of the business school.
I like to refer to Bench Top as UR’s “Shark Tank” course, as students are legitimately tasked with putting on their entrepreneurial hats, creating a product, pitching it to a panel of judges, and ultimately launching it to market.
Our product is called Envee. It’s a pesto Caesar salad dressing created by combining two of the most popular sauces and dressings into one.
I am on the sales team. I’m a journalism and leadership studies double major who signed up for the course because of the amazing prospect of being part of a unique program like this to finish out my academic career here at UR.
Our job during the spring semester has been to reach out to local grocery stores and restaurants in the Richmond region with the intent of getting Envee on those accounts’ shelves.
We’ve held demo events on campus, demo events off-campus at local stores like Libbie Market and Ukrop’s Market Hall, and we’ve even sold our product at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, where one of the local farmers markets is held on Saturdays.
Our sales team is just one ingredient in this student-driven start-up. There’s also the marketing team, the operations team, the finance team, and the technology team. Not to mention our executive team headed by our CEO, senior Lindsay Batten. Everyone has a role. And everyone sells.
“The exciting part about sales is not just managing the sales team, but making sure that everyone in the class is selling, and even beyond that, just making sure everyone in the class is updated on our current accounts, updated on what’s going on,” said head of sales Shefali Kamilla, ’25, a business administration major with a leadership studies minor.
At the beginning of the fall semester, we split into four groups of four. Each team was tasked with concocting some sort of iteration of a salad dressing. This part of the class is set up so that the teams compete against one another. The prize is having their product selected as the one that’s turned into a company for the rest of the year.
Having had a chance to reflect on creating a product, it’s crazy to me now just how fast everything came together.
“I like to refer to Bench Top as UR’s ‘Shark Tank’ course.”
Post-fall break, we spent a few weeks in the kitchen so we all could figure out what exactly we were going to create. It started with learning the basics of working in that space, like completing a ServSafe exam so we all could be certified to spend time in the kitchen.
Simultaneously, we also developed what our product would look like, what the story behind our product was, and how it would all be showcased onstage.
Then we entered crunch time. Within a span of 13 days or so, we essentially firmed up our recipes, developed branding and packaging through a partnership with VCU’s Brand Center, solidified our pitch for the Great Bake-Off, and pulled every other loose end together.
I remember one night in particular where it felt like the weight of the world was on our shoulders. There were less than two weeks until the Great Bake-Off, and we were just finalizing our recipe, had not yet locked down our presentation, and had yet to meet with the students at VCU.
I couldn’t have been the only one wondering how we would be able to pull this off.
On November 18, the day of the 4th Annual Great Bake-Off, however, we did just that. Every team climbed what once seemed like an insurmountable mountain, and did so in front of around 400 people both from the UR community and the Richmond community at large — a crowd filled with university leadership, faculty, friends, and local entrepreneurs.
My group pitched a tangy miso vinaigrette called Misoza. Part of our pitch included my a cappella group, the Richmond Octāves, singing a little jingle to introduce our product during our presentation.
About an hour and a half from the time our group — the first group to present — finished, the judges decided on our competitor, Envee. Within the blink of an eye, all the work we had put into what we believed to be the next best salad dressing felt like it was stripped from us and the two other teams that lost.
“It was about the experience of navigating the trials and tribulations of running a ‘real world’ business.”
What many didn’t see from the outside looking in, though, aside from all the behind-the-scenes work to perfect our products and pitches, is what happened in the moments following the judges’ announcement of the winning team.
Once the judges made their decision, it wasn’t long before our entire class made its way to Bistro 804, a restaurant just down the road from UR’s campus. Within probably 30 minutes, we went from battling against our competition to sharing a meal together as one team behind Envee, the winning product.
This is something our instructor, Joel Mier of the marketing department, emphasized to our class before we gave what many of us considered the biggest presentation of our lives — that whatever the results were, that’s what they were, and regardless of how each team felt, we were now all part of one company.
Mier assured us that by the end of the evening, we would feel our class come together as a group, ready to take on the next challenge: launching Envee.
And we did come together, which was what ultimately set the tone for the spring semester. It’s why we’ve been able to turn what started out as a concept into something you can purchase at a local Richmond grocery store.
Roller coaster doesn’t even begin to describe the past few months, but I don’t think we entrepreneurs-in-training would have had it any other way, because that’s the whole point of the course.
It was never to sell the most product or make the most money or add “company founder” to our LinkedIn pages. It was about the experience of navigating the trials and tribulations of running a “real world” business before we seniors must come to terms with entering just that after graduation: the “real world.”
Our aim was to learn about working as a team and overcoming uncertainty, which can be translated to any career field we Bench Top students enter after we walk across the Robins Center stage and receive our diplomas.
I personally never thought this would be a path I’d travel down.
Envee CEO Batten, who is a fellow Jepson School student with an entrepreneurship minor, shared a similar sentiment.
“Definitely didn’t think that I would be able to tell people in interviews that I am CEO of a salad dressing company,” she said.
But that’s the beauty of this program. One minute you’re just a college student, and the next you’re a college student running a business.
That simply does not happen everywhere. But it does at UR.
And I’m glad I had a chance to be part of it all.
