Takeout and delivery of prepared meals have been used more than ever over the past year, which also means many more instances of food being DOA as soon as it gets delivered or after you’ve grabbed it from your favorite eatery.
Let’s be honest—there are fewer culinary disappointments that sting more than limp, soggy french fries. But a new stick-and-peel solution that promises to keep takeaway fresh during transport shows enough promise to catch the attention and open the wallet of Shark Tank investor and Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban.
Aerospace engineer Bill Birgen was already tinkering with a solution to keeping packed up food fresh before COVID, using his 30 years of experience working on temperature, humidity, and icing-related solutions for planes and space vehicles. For Bill, it was scratch for his own itch, as he was tired of his lunch being soggy. His SAVRpak is a small envelope that draws condensation from food using relative humidity. Perhaps counterintuitively, but totally within the laws of thermodynamics, SAVRpaks contain ice—since it requires more energy to pull water vapor in than it does to melt ice, the pouches reduce humidity by 45% while only lowering the temperature inside the package by 5%. SAVRpaks stick onto common prepped and cooked food packages such as clamshells, pizza boxes, and bags.
SAVRpak’s founder hooked shark Cuban by casting a cold email, finding the investor’s email (it’s not that hard to do), and sending a message about his invention. Thinking it was a long shot, Birgen was surprised to find Mark Cuban interested in talking about it more. Founders Bergin, Greg Maselli, and Grant Stafford teamed up with Cuban and have recently closed on $3.5 million in funding, with the celebrity entrepreneur contributing $1 million himself, lending some certifiable heft to the new food-saving technology.
Mark Cuban is also a big fan of Dogecoin, just FYI.
