Solving Dinner: Dartbeat Sits Down with Salman Rajput
The Sustainability Solutions Café is a lecture-based program, granting sustainability proponents an opportunity to teach about sustainable problem solving solutions. Dartbeat interviewed Salman Rajput ’14, founder of the sustainable food enterprise Solving Dinner, to discuss different approaches to sustainability at Dartmouth.
Dartbeat: What motivated you to start the enterprise, Solving Dinner?
Rajput: I am interested in how to use business to do good in the world and tackle problems. It is really important to figure out how we can make it easier for people to eat better. Cooking their own meals is the best way for people to eat and reduces health and environmental problems. People may want to avoid the preparation steps for cooking such as planning, shopping, etc. Solving Dinner, created spring of 2013, is a profit sustainability revenue stream, which sells prepackaged food to individuals to help motivated others to eat healthier. Our recipes include but are not limited to curry chickpeas with brown rice and more.
D: How has Solving Dinner improved since its initiation?
R: Our model has improved. We piloted Solving Dinner in the spring and successfuly sold our product to customers. We wanted to validate that our product is something worthwhile, a product people will want to purchase. It is important to scale your success in regards to business development. You don’t want to pursue a model that is really hard to grow. At this moment, I am hoping to build a team to foster the growth of Solving Dinner. Anyone interested should feel more than welcome to reach out to me. Overall, through Solving Dinner, we have tried to magnify doing good to making beneficial impacts in people’s lives by ameliorating our business model.
As Rajput illustrates, you don’t have to pursue a sustainability minor to live sustainably, and that it is in fact easy to do so. Additionally, business is an important tool for doing good and positively impacting the lives of others.