Shazia Choudri is the founder of Beetbox, a turn-key STEM and nutrition education solution for schools. A monthly box contains lesson plans, fresh ingredients, and materials for teachers; they remove the barriers to teaching by sending everything a teacher needs to deliver the lesson. Each month’s box revolves around a different seed-to-table food theme. The first box focuses on apples, including scientific questions related to food (e.g., what happens to water when we put an apple in it?). Students also get to grow apples from seeds and monitor what happens to the seeds over time as they put them in soil. Cooking, growing, food anatomy, recycling, art, and science are themes covered in every box. Choudri came up with the idea for the company after learning about food deserts in the U.S. and committed to a mission of connecting young children to healthy food. Beetbox is currently in many Head Start, New York State’s Universal Prekindergarten Program (UPK), and early education schools in NYC and across the U.S.
