Nina Hooper and Alice Han

Meet Nina Hooper and Alice Han, Harvard undergraduates and co-founders of The Holistic, a Harvard-based food start up. These two campus celebs have invented their very own guiltless glutenless vegan cake recipe. Yep. Cake.

The cakes, which they have named “Feel Good” cakes contain healthy ingredients such as avocado, agave nectar, and chickpeas in place of traditional ingredients such as butter and refined sugar.

We sat down the other day with Nina and Alice to give you the details on their cake and the future of their company.

HC: Why did you start the Holistic?

Nina: We’re both Australians and we realized that in general, people here aren’t as health-conscious as people in the communities we grew up in… In the past year, we’ve noticed that the snack food industry is this huge and growing industry that is dominated by a few companies that have pretty crappy products nutritionally, that are cheap and appealing and that people really like. Cakes and cookies. So we thought, instead of trying to tell people to eat differently, why don’t we compete and have a better product?  

HC: So what does the product actually contain?

Alice: They’re called “Feel Good Cakes”, the idea being that people can feel good about eating something that they know is going to contribute to their day, nutritionally. It doesn’t have empty calories or a lot of the bad trans fats or refined sugars that you normally find in cakes or even in bars. So instead of using flour and butter and sugar, we use ground up Garbanzo beans, chickpeas, almond flour, almond milk, agave nectar, avocadoes, as well as grape seed oil, which is very low in saturated fat and high in omega-3 and omega-6. So we were conscious as we were testing at least thirty or forty batches in our kitchens in our dorm rooms about trying to create a product that maximizes nutrition but tastes just as good as a cake.

HC: What’s next for The Holistic?

Alice: We’re launching a kickstarter on March 17 to coincide with the start of Spring Break and the idea is we want to raise enough funds to go into the second tier of our market program… At the moment we’re really only selling in the Harvard Square region, but the second tier would be to go to Whole Foods and expand nationally.

Nina: Up until now, over the last six months… we’ve been catering events, a lot of study breaks, a lot of health advocacy project events, Women in Business has often gotten us to do large batches… Now we’re shifting to retail, so we’ve been talking to the HUDS managers and we’re going to be doing samples in Lamont [cafe] and the school of Public Health shortly, and if they like them and they sell well, then we’ll be expanding–hopefully–to all the HUDS cafes. We’re also talking to the product scouts at Whole Foods and are going to try to line up a plan for starting with them in six months, given that our sales are successful here.   

Check out The Holistic’s blog or this article in Boston Magazine for more information!