Abrams 3rd place
Meet the 2022 Abrams Sustainable Business Challenge 3rd Place Winner
Story by Mars Reilly
The Abrams Sustainable Business Challenge engages Loyola students in planning and launching green ventures. As the 2023 challenge gets underway, we checked in with last year’s third-place winner Jonathan Ostroff to learn more about his sustainable food enterprise, Fusion Foods.
Third Place Winner: Fusion Foods
Jonathan Ostroff founded Fusion Foods to encourage meat lovers to cut back on beef consumption.
Jonathan Ostroff created Fusion Foods to develop and promote his invention of a burger that combines real meat and plant-based meat to provide “an option to encourage consumers to be more flex-vegetarians.” The recent Loyola graduate explained that the idea developed from his personal eating habits and an entrepreneurship class he took while completing his master’s degree in marketing at Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business.
Ostroff didn’t particularly like the taste of Impossible or Beyond burgers’ meat substitutes. Still, he wanted to find ways to reduce his meat consumption due to its environmental and health impacts. To rectify this problem, Ostroff started experimenting in his home kitchen to create a hybrid burger made of ground beef and plant-based meat. When he heard about the Abrams Sustainable Business Challenge, he knew he wanted to seize the opportunity to get his venture off the ground by entering the competition. He had already laid the groundwork for Fusion Foods and tested the product, so Ostroff felt up to the challenge. Likewise, he knew that beef consumption has an incredibly high environmental impact and negative health implications for meat eaters. Ostroff aimed to contribute to the growing market of alternative foods that would reduce meat consumption and its destruction of ecosystems.
The judges of the Abrams Challenge particularly want to see a measurable impact of the proposed products, and Ostroff’s cuts meat consumption—and therefore carbon emissions—in half per meal. He was attracted to the challenge both for the opportunity to start a business and to work with people like Wendy Abrams and the other judges involved with the competition, many of whom are well-known in the Chicago business sphere for their highly successful careers in entrepreneurship and environmental activism.
One thing he appreciated about the challenge, Ostroff says, is that the judges were not only focused on finding already-perfect ideas for sustainable business ventures or products. Instead, they could look at his core concept and see past any temporary flaws to understand its potential to progress with future work. This attitude was encouraging and inspiring to Ostroff as he moved through the challenge and eventually won third place in the contest. Fusion Foods is currently working on incorporating ground beef with mycelium--the root-like structure of mushrooms. This plant-based ingredient has a low flavor profile with a meaty texture that Ostroff found makes sense to incorporate into a hybrid burger.
The challenge has “completely changed the trajectory of [his] life” as he was recently able to leave his previous job and begin working on his venture full-time. Though his professional expertise is in marketing, he is excited to work in the food industry. “Don’t be afraid to learn new skills in unexpected backgrounds when developing your venture,” he said. While he credits his membership at 1871 this past summer with aiding him immensely and providing invaluable resources, he has now moved on to a program at the Hatchery Chicago to work more closely with professionals in food-focused entrepreneurial ventures.
His advice to potential Abrams Challenge participants is to do your research: “the sooner you can validate that there’s an opportunity [for a solution to a problem], the sooner and better you can start refining it.” Likewise, starting a business is difficult, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. Ostroff found his entrepreneurship professors at Loyola extremely valuable resources in this regard, as they were consistently available to help refine his idea and look at it in new ways that helped him develop it into what it is today.
Learn more
Challenge Hosts
- School of Environmental Sustainability
- Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility
- Quinlan School of Business
About the Abrams Challenge
Meet the 2022 Abrams Sustainable Business Challenge 3rd Place Winner
Story by Mars Reilly
The Abrams Sustainable Business Challenge engages Loyola students in planning and launching green ventures. As the 2023 challenge gets underway, we checked in with last year’s third-place winner Jonathan Ostroff to learn more about his sustainable food enterprise, Fusion Foods.
Third Place Winner: Fusion Foods
Jonathan Ostroff created Fusion Foods to develop and promote his invention of a burger that combines real meat and plant-based meat to provide “an option to encourage consumers to be more flex-vegetarians.” The recent Loyola graduate explained that the idea developed from his personal eating habits and an entrepreneurship class he took while completing his master’s degree in marketing at Loyola’s Quinlan School of Business.
Ostroff didn’t particularly like the taste of Impossible or Beyond burgers’ meat substitutes. Still, he wanted to find ways to reduce his meat consumption due to its environmental and health impacts. To rectify this problem, Ostroff started experimenting in his home kitchen to create a hybrid burger made of ground beef and plant-based meat. When he heard about the Abrams Sustainable Business Challenge, he knew he wanted to seize the opportunity to get his venture off the ground by entering the competition. He had already laid the groundwork for Fusion Foods and tested the product, so Ostroff felt up to the challenge. Likewise, he knew that beef consumption has an incredibly high environmental impact and negative health implications for meat eaters. Ostroff aimed to contribute to the growing market of alternative foods that would reduce meat consumption and its destruction of ecosystems.
The judges of the Abrams Challenge particularly want to see a measurable impact of the proposed products, and Ostroff’s cuts meat consumption—and therefore carbon emissions—in half per meal. He was attracted to the challenge both for the opportunity to start a business and to work with people like Wendy Abrams and the other judges involved with the competition, many of whom are well-known in the Chicago business sphere for their highly successful careers in entrepreneurship and environmental activism.
One thing he appreciated about the challenge, Ostroff says, is that the judges were not only focused on finding already-perfect ideas for sustainable business ventures or products. Instead, they could look at his core concept and see past any temporary flaws to understand its potential to progress with future work. This attitude was encouraging and inspiring to Ostroff as he moved through the challenge and eventually won third place in the contest. Fusion Foods is currently working on incorporating ground beef with mycelium--the root-like structure of mushrooms. This plant-based ingredient has a low flavor profile with a meaty texture that Ostroff found makes sense to incorporate into a hybrid burger.
The challenge has “completely changed the trajectory of [his] life” as he was recently able to leave his previous job and begin working on his venture full-time. Though his professional expertise is in marketing, he is excited to work in the food industry. “Don’t be afraid to learn new skills in unexpected backgrounds when developing your venture,” he said. While he credits his membership at 1871 this past summer with aiding him immensely and providing invaluable resources, he has now moved on to a program at the Hatchery Chicago to work more closely with professionals in food-focused entrepreneurial ventures.
His advice to potential Abrams Challenge participants is to do your research: “the sooner you can validate that there’s an opportunity [for a solution to a problem], the sooner and better you can start refining it.” Likewise, starting a business is difficult, so don’t be afraid to ask for help. Ostroff found his entrepreneurship professors at Loyola extremely valuable resources in this regard, as they were consistently available to help refine his idea and look at it in new ways that helped him develop it into what it is today.
Learn more
Challenge Hosts
- School of Environmental Sustainability
- Baumhart Center for Social Enterprise and Responsibility
- Quinlan School of Business
About the Abrams Challenge