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highlighting NEU student ventures: rooted living with rachel domb
WRITTEN BY SANJANA DAVE // ILLUSTRATED BY VICTORIA CRABB
Northeastern University is driven by the entrepreneurial spirit of its students. The first business we’re highlighting is Rooted Living by Rachel Domb, a second year Psychology major and environmental studies minor. Rooted Living is a mission-driven, ecofriendly snack company that addresses the lack of availability of environmentally friendly and healthy snacks.
As a competitive runner in high school, Rachel always needed fuel for her active lifestyle, but she cared deeply about what she put in her body. Many of the existing snack options were branded as healthy, but they were still packed with refined sugars and wrapped in single-use plastic. This inspired Rachel to tap into her love for cooking and begin making her own snacks, which she would bring to track meets in compostable bags. Her teammates fell in love with Rachel’s snacks, and from there Rooted Living’s initial product line was born. Rooted Living’s mission is to provide healthy, sustainable snacks that improve the health of the planet and the consumer. Rooted Living snacks do not contain unhealthy and impossible to pronounce ingredients or refined sugars. Notably, the company does not use single-use plastic packaging for any of their products.
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For Rachel, establishing Rooted Living has been an empowering journey. Starting her business helped Rachel realize that if she put her mind to it, she already possessed all of the tools she needed to make her vision a reality. Rachel believes that getting started is the hardest part. She credits Northeastern University’s Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship (WISE) organization as “life-changing.” Through WeBuild, a WISE thought incubator program for members’ passion projects, Rachel found an invaluable community and the support she needed to begin molding Rooted Living into a real company. The most challenging aspect was knowing where to start—there is no single guidebook that works for all businesses. However, after many hours spent researching how to start a business and guidance from WISE’s WeBuild program, Rachel launched Rooted Living. Rachel is also
