21 Famous & Inspirational Quotes By "Kavita Shukla" That Will Make Your Day & Achieve Big in Life

Kavita Shukla is the founder and CEO of The FRESHGLOW and inventor of FreshPaper. What started as a high school science project, inspired by an Indian home remedy, has quickly become a world-changing innovation that takes on the massive challenge of global food waste. FreshPaper Paper, made with organic spices, is a disposable, recyclable, and biodegradable paper that naturally keeps producing fresher for longer, reducing food spoilage. Used today by farmers and families around the world, FRESHGLOW has partnered with some of the world's largest retailers. The young entrepreneur holds four patents (and several international awards) for her innovation and was the youngest woman to receive the INDEX Design to Better Life Award. The award, the world's largest design award, presented by the Danish Crown.

Shukla's story of simple beginnings, beliefs, and empowerment has inspired millions of people around the world, even becoming the subject of a short film by Hollywood actress and director Bryce Dallas Howard. Shukla has spoken about the power of simple ideas at the White House, the United Nations, SXSW, the Global Entrepreneurship Conference, TEDxManhattan, Harvard University, MIT, and Johns Hopkins University. She was also a featured speaker at the World Women's Summit, along with Hillary Clinton, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, and Oprah Winfrey. Shukla was honored at Variety's annual "Power of Women" gala alongside March for Our Lives by Emma González, Emmy Award winner Tiffany Haddish and Academy Award-winning actress Natalie Portman. Recently, she was invited to testify before the United States Congress about how her simple innovation has become universal.

CNN, Bloomberg, The New York Times, Fortune, The Washington Post, The Economist, Oprah Magazine, Glamor, and The Today Show have showcased Shukla's innovations and quest to tackle food waste globally. It was listed in the National Young Inventors Fair of America and was the first-place winner at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. He holds a BA from Harvard University.

She holds four patents and is the youngest woman to receive the INDEX Design Award to Improve Lives, the largest design award in the world. Today, FRESHPAPER is used by farmers and families around the world, and FRESHGLOW has partnered with some of the world's largest retailers, from Whole Foods to Walmart.

Kavita has been named one of The Fast Company's "Seven Entrepreneurs Changing the World". She has also been named in Forbes' "30 Under 30" list and in Time magazine's "5 Most Creative Women in Food" list. Kavita holds a BA from Harvard University. 

1. I never thought that I would be spending my life devoted to, and totally fascinated by, this challenge of global food waste. 

2. The enormity of food waste is really staggering.

3. Sometimes even now—I've been doing this now for years— it can seem overwhelming.

4. The way I came upon it was quite serendipitous.

5. I had been visiting my grandmother in India when I was 12 years old. I had been warned by many people to be very careful and not drink tap water.

6. On my first day there at my Grandmother's, I was brushing my teeth and I drank almost an entire cup.

7. My grandmother gave me this mixture of spices, like spice tea, which she said was a home remedy that had been used in my family for generations.

8. Although I was quite skeptical, I didn't really have any other option. So I drank it and I ended up not getting sick. That was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with spices.

9. As a young girl, I was always interested in creating things. I am a first-generation immigrant, so I didn't always have a lot of resources growing up.

10. Creating things and doing hands-on activities was a way for me to really feel that I was able to create something meaningful, even in an environment where I didn't always fit in.

11. I spent a lot of time learning from my grandmother about the different spices that she used. Most of them are spices that are commonly used in cooking across the globe.

12. I started a middle-school science project. At first, I was just adding spices to jars of dirty pond water and trying to understand what happened.

13. Then I started to experiment with moldy strawberries and fruits and vegetables to see if applying the spices in different formats could help keep that produce fresh for longer.

 

14. Throughout middle school and high school I was like that odd kid storing rotting fruits and vegetables in my garage.

15. I ended up learning was that some spices were very effective in inhibiting bacterial and fungal growth.

16. I was so astounded that something as simple as these spices could be effective in keeping food fresh for longer. It really opened my eyes to the problem of food spoilage.

17. Eventually, tinkering with different spices and formats led to FreshPaper, which is a really simple and very intuitive way to keep food fresh for longer.

18. I think timing is certainly a big factor in this. I was 17 when I really started to work on FreshPaper as a technology.

19. I was in my senior year of high school when I found out that I'd be getting a patent for it. It was so far beyond anything I ever could have imagined, especially coming from my background.

20.  I took FreshPaper to my farmers' market in 2011. My idea was to create a very low-cost version of FreshPaper. At first, I was making it at home and giving it to the farmers to see if they could keep their produce fresh for longer at the market.

21. It's really important for us to prove that you can create a very successful for-profit enterprise where you design technologies that can be used by anyone anywhere in the world. Too often designers and consumer brands ignore most of the world: the people who are living on very little.

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