The idea was first sparked in Barrington High School’s “Business INCubator” course, which teaches students entrepreneurship through the development of a legitimate product or service. Dylan DeLeon, 17, is one of the four students who came up with Fresh Cornucopia.
Students in the class take on the responsibilities of running a business, like managing financials, marketing and customer acquisition, and maintaining the front and back ends of the website.
Fresh Cornucopia currently operates as a for-profit model, but the group has “played with the idea of becoming a nonprofit,” DeLeon said.
“Our main purpose is really just to bring together communities,” he said.
At the beginning of the project, DeLeon said the group of students wasn’t exactly sure how they would go about achieving that purpose, but they knew they wanted to get the idea off the ground as soon as possible.
The idea for Fresh Cornucopia came about when the student group was tasked in class to identify a problem that needed solving.
“What we all saw in our community is that there’s a lot of food waste both coming from leftover vegetables or fruit or other produce as well as the fact that there’s not really a lot of communal interaction,” DeLeon said.
This led them to farmers markets, which deal with food waste and communal interaction. DeLeon said the group wanted to do more, like helping draw in more people to local farmers markets while also reducing food waste in the process.
It was important to the students to have an online presence through the Fresh Cornucopia website to connect the digital generation to farmers markets, DeLeon said.
“We thought it would be a good idea to engage the younger demographic, those who are more online, by allowing them to order their goods through a website as opposed to having to go in person and sort of finding their own way,” DeLeon said. “It’s a better means of getting them to come to these local events.”
The website also makes it easier for the vendors as they can see how many orders are coming in ahead of time and can better plan how much of their product to bring to the market the day of, said Sreehitha Nara,16, another member of the Fresh Cornucopia team.
Fresh Cornucopia now has over 20 vendors since the team began testing its product in February, and the website has generated over $500 in revenue for the vendors who use the platform. With the help of the incubator course’s summer program, the team recently registered Fresh Cornucopia as an LLC in Illinois.
Christine Rausch is the owner of Mama Bear Macs, a business she started in August 2022 during the COVID-19 pandemic where she bakes and sells French macarons. Her first goal was to start selling at a farmers market in Crystal Lake.
“I felt that was the best exposure for me for what I was selling,” Rausch said.
She was approached by the Fresh Cornucopia team in the winter and has since seen the kind of new business she can get through the service.
“It’s definitely helped me because I’ve gotten some sales from people that are a little bit out of my immediate area that probably wouldn’t have found me otherwise,” Rausch said.
The vendors post their products on the website with descriptions, pricing, pictures and more, Nara said. Customers can peruse the products on the website and filter by location using their ZIP code. Once a customer fills out an order form on the website for the product they want, the order will either be delivered or available for pickup from the given farmers market, depending on the vendor.
Nara said Fresh Cornucopia is free to use, meaning vendors don’t have to pay to post on the website and customers don’t have to pay to look around.
“For the new generation like mine, which shops online a lot of the time, this is another tool,” Nara said. “I hope we can all learn not to always shop from larger brands but to also online shop to support small businesses and shift to shopping more locally and more cleanly.”
The student group takes a 15 percent commission on all orders through its website, but it doesn’t pocket the money. DeLeon said all of the money they make “goes back into the business,” but they’d like to be able to pay themselves in the future as Fresh Cornucopia grows.
“I think what we’re doing for the community will have a really big impact,” he said. “We really need a way to modernize farmers markets. There’s a disconnect from what I’ve seen, and I think Fresh Cornucopia acts as that bridge.”
Hagop Soulakian, who has been teaching entrepreneurship at Barrington High School for over a decade, said the incubator course offers students dual credit for both high school and college. The class takes students through the process of starting a business from scratch, he said.
“Fresh Cornucopia’s a very committed bunch,” he said. “They’re committed to the process, and my hope is that when all is said and done, in their eyes, they’ll be successful.”
As a teacher, Soulakian said, his mission is to prepare his students for the next chapters in their lives.
Fresh Cornucopia started with not just a focus on Barrington, but surrounding suburbs like Palatine, Crystal Lake, Schaumburg and Buffalo Grove. Since the beginning of summer break, the group has been scaling to even more communities.
Younger shoppers are just one target demographic for the business, DeLeon said. The team hopes to bring in all kinds of customers and especially wants to showcase vendors from farmers markets that some people may not have seen otherwise because they stick to their own communities.
While Fresh Cornucopia highlights produce and perishable food mostly, DeLeon said the group “would love to expand” into more categories like textiles and other farmers market goods.
A newer faction of Fresh Cornucopia is connecting high school students with farmers market vendors to help run the vendors’ stands. Fresh Cornucopia has already placed five students with vendors for part-time work and has several more students who have applied for the program and are waiting for an opening.
As a rising senior at Barrington High School, DeLeon said he “100 percent” could see himself continuing work on Fresh Cornucopia after high school.
“We, as a team, are really connected, and we’re really in sync with each other,” he said. “I think we all know what we plan to do as a whole on this business, and I think that maybe even going off to college in different places could be more beneficial for us as we can expand and help not only our local communities but other communities as well.”
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