We began Inno Madness, our friendly bracket-style competition for the startup ecosystem, on March 13 with 64 Boston-area startups in contention. With six rounds of voting complete, we now have our 2024 Inno Madness champion.
Rooted Living is our Inno Madness champion, with 420 votes. Emerald Innovations finished the last round with an admirable 335 votes.
Let’s meet Rachel Domb, founder of Rooted Living.
In the final days of the competition, Domb said she was approaching strangers on the street to gain votes for the competition. Domb, a current student at Northeastern University, was 19 when she started Rooted Living. The brand, which makes gourmet plant-based granola in biomaterial packaging, eliminating reliance on single use plastic, combines Domb’s passions for health and environmentalism. She officially launched the company in October 2020.
Her goal is to build the brand’s profile in Boston, motivation for participation and dedication to progressing through the Inno Madness competition.
“We are focused on owning our home here in Boston,” she said.
Domb had always been interested in healthy food and fueling herself with ingredients she recognized, she said, and in high school would make homemade granola to share with friends on her sports teams. She says she never pictured herself as a businessperson, but soon into her time at Northeastern got connected with a student group called Women's Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship that made her recognize she could turn her interests into something.
“This is a place where women can take things they're passionate about and build them,” Domb said.
Rooted Living is first and foremost a snack brand, Domb said, but what the food is packaged in is just as important to her as the contents. There’s a lot of noise in the health and wellness space about ingredients and fads, but something that gets left out of that conversation is the health of the planet.
“What they come wrapped in isn't part of the conversation,” Domb said.
Rooted Living’s packaging is made of a non-toxic, biodegradable material called PBAT. Rooted Living partners with Source Green packaging on manufacturing of its packaging, and the granola is made at Boxford Bakehouse in Plymouth.
Currently Rooted Living’s direct-to-consumer sales are mostly through e-commerce, though it’s available in a few local markets including Wollaston’s near Northeastern’s campus and Deluca’s Market. The majority of the company’s business comes from food service orders, including Northeastern dining and B.GOOD.
Domb said Rooted Living produces 600 to 700 pounds of granola a month for food-service orders, and about 6,000 bags of granola every four-to-six months.
Domb has a couples of semesters to go before she graduates from Northeastern, and is waiting until then to scale some of the operations. When the time comes, she wants to partner with more local universities and eateries before expanding out of the Boston area.
“After that, [the goal] is really having Rooted Living be a leader in the fight against single use plastic in a very wasteful industry,” she said.
Emerald Innovations, the 2024 Inno Madness runner-up, is a health analytics company based out of Kendall Square in Cambridge. The company uses a touches sensor and machine learning to inform analytics, and allows for in-home trials of potential therapeutics. It was founded by MIT faculty and researchers.
Final round of voting, explained
As you may have seen when the final matchup closed last week, it appeared Emerald Innovations had won with 53% of votes. However, as we have done in the past several rounds, we took a look at the votes on the back end to eliminate duplicate votes from single IP addresses, which is against the official rules.
While a couple of votes from one address isn’t a red flag, dozens all at once from a single IP address raises concerns, and after we analyzed the voting data, we were able to eliminate the duplicates and crown a winner.
