Armita Jamshidi ’25 and a friend were moving a fridge into Jamshidi’s dorm room her sophomore year when she suddenly felt a wave of sharp pain and could barely move or speak. Seven hours later, after losing consciousness in the hospital, she was released from the emergency room and told to take some ibuprofen — for an extreme case of menstrual cramps.

That experience led Jamshidi, a computer science and women’s health major, to launch a new business that offers an alternative to relieving period pain: Cramp Bites, sweet date snacks adapted from her Iranian grandmother’s recipe, which soothed her monthly cramps while she was growing up in North Carolina.

Cramp Bites moved a step closer to commercial production when Jamshidi’s startup, Aunt Flo’s Kitchen, won the $25,000 first-place prize at the 2025 Hospitality Business Plan Competition, hosted on April 26 in Statler Auditorium by the Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration. 

Read more about the Hospitality Business Plan Competition on the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business website.