Armita Jamshidi, a junior at Cornell University with a double main in girls’s well being and laptop science, has a couple of issues on her thoughts.

“I actually have an exam on Tuesday,” she stated.

But for Jamshidi, in contrast to her friends, the examination could be one of many much less hectic issues occurring in her life. That’s as a result of the 20-year-old just lately launched a full-fledged enterprise, a undertaking that emerged whereas collaborating in a girls’s entrepreneurship program at Cornell.

Armita Jamshidi

/

Armita Jamshidi

“I completely accidentally stumbled upon it, and I didn’t really know what it was,” she stated. “But I applied, and so I did the program, and I got more and more interested — especially as we started doing a lot of customer discovery and figuring out what a really big problem is that we want to try to solve.”

As Jamshidi delved deeper into this system, her educational curiosity started to intersect with a longstanding private battle that had reached a essential turning level.

“At the beginning of sophomore year, my period cramps got so bad that I fell out of consciousness, and I went to the emergency room,” she stated.

This scary well being ordeal propelled Jamshidi to create Aunt Flo’s Kitchen, a enterprise providing snacks infused with components that she says deal with menstrual ache, drawing upon Iranian conventional medication. Melding her well being struggles along with her cultural roots, Jamshidi’s enterprise takes a recent strategy to historic Iranian therapeutic traditions.

Armita Jamshidi

/

Armita Jamshidi

“Cornell’s been really, really helpful. Their Entrepreneurship Center is growing really fast. It’s great to be in that environment,” she stated.

Inspired by her Iranian grandmother’s recipes, Jamshidi’s snacks, known as Cramp Bites, are crafted from what she says are therapeutic components, corresponding to dates, walnuts, and tahini, together with spices like saffron and cinnamon.

“I do believe that menstrual care should be accessible to everyone,” she stated. “There’s a lot of barriers, so I’m really trying my best to grow and also tackle those barriers.”

But Aunt Flo’s Kitchen is greater than only a enterprise enterprise; it is also a platform for social change. Jamshidi envisions that someday, it may be a method to supply employment alternatives for refugees from the Middle East.

“Ultimately, I want to sponsor people from the Middle East to come to the U.S. if they want to and provide well-paying jobs for them to help make the product — and also work on the business side,” she stated.

Currently accessible in six retailers in Ithaca and on-line, Jamshidi’s subsequent purpose is to have Aunt Flo’s Kitchen merchandise carried at bigger chains like Wegmans, thereby growing accessibility to what she says is pure menstrual ache reduction.

She’s additionally dedicated to creating a social impression, providing free packs of her merchandise by the Gender Equity Resource Center at Cornell, furthering her mission to reinforce accessibility to menstrual care and promote discussions on menstrual well being.

Armita Jamshidi

/

Armita Jamshidi

As she navigates the complexities of entrepreneurship and academia, Jamshidi stays pushed by a imaginative and prescient that extends past enterprise success.

“You hear a lot about traditional Chinese medicine … but not a lot about Iranian traditional medicine,” she stated.

Jamshidi hopes that Aunt Flo’s Kitchen combines custom with innovation to supply reduction to her prospects and spotlight the function of entrepreneurship in driving optimistic change.

But earlier than she finds a solution to clear up a stigmatized well being drawback, Jamshidi must discover a solution to research for her upcoming examination.