Bulky, Unsustainable Sports Supplements Weighing You Down? Chloe Welch and Hanna Zainab Elzaridi Built a Way to SOAR, Instead.

Chloe Welch and Hanna Zainab Elzaridi have a vending machine in the living room of their Boston apartment. 

It’s not a vending machine that came with the building—on moving day, they had to recruit several unwitting delivery people in the area to help them hoist the machine into their first-floor apartment—and it’s not even the kind of vending machine you can really find anywhere else. 

No, this machine is something else. Custom built to dispense protein powder and other nutritional fitness supplements, it represents everything the Northeastern University students have built over the last several years. 

“It’s also quite the conversation starter,” Welch says dryly. 

The machine is the physical manifestation of Welch and Elzaridi’s joint venture, SOAR, a company that creates automated sports supplement kiosks that can dispense customizable pre- and post-workout shakes in a matter of seconds. Think: touch-screen Coca-Cola soda fountain, but for the gym. 

Like many great businesses, SOAR was born out of necessity. 

Elzaridi, who is a fifth-year business administration student at Northeastern, and Welch, who graduated in May, met as first-year roommates, and became fast friends. They studied together, worked out together, and say that they were constantly bouncing business ideas off one another, waiting to find one that might stick. 

Welch and Elzaridi knew quickly that they wanted to start a business together—”we found our co-founders first, then had to figure out the business,” says Elzaridi—so they started paying attention to points of friction in their lives; problems they could tackle with an entrepreneurial mindset.

It turns out that their shared love of fitness was the key. The pair found that they didn’t have much extra space in their dorm for a huge, multi-serving tub of protein powder—nor did they want to commit to a single flavor for the weeks it would have taken to work through the bulk purchase one scoop at a time. And buying single premixed protein shakes or smoothies just wasn’t financially feasible (at $3 to $5 a pop, the daily shakes added up), not to mention they were environmentally unfriendly.

“That kind of just led us into brainstorming about ways that we could make the whole sports supplement experience more sustainable, more accessible, and more affordable,” Welch says. 

The idea for SOAR came quickly after that. More challenging was the process of building a working vending machine (during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pair were halfway around the world from each other—Welch was in San Francisco while Elzaridi traveled back home to Kuwait). 

“Our friendship really existed over Zoom at that point,” Elzaridi says. When they returned to campus, they hit the ground running.

“Neither of us are engineers, so we had to rely on the whole community at Northeastern for help at that point,” Elzaridi says. 

The pair worked with the Women’s Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship (WISE) to hone their venture and with the university’s student-led venture accelerator, IDEA, to move it forward. They won funding from the IDEA GAP Fund and the IDEA prototype grant, along with acclaim from the Husky Startup Challenge and MassChallenge. They each took part in the Sherman Center co-op, during which time they dedicated six months to SOAR. They teamed up with engineering capstone students to build a prototype, and eventually bought a defunct vending machine (that originally dispensed jelly beans) from a company in Italy to customize with their specifications. 

Welch and Elzaridi learned right along with those engineering students about the finicky nature of protein powder. “It’s not like sand,” Welch says, “it’s more like flour.” And fine-tuning the exact vibration that would dispense just enough of the often clumpy powder, proved to be a mighty challenge. But together, they figured it out. “We joke that we should’ve gotten honorary engineering degrees,” Welch says.

Finally, in early 2022, Welch and Elzaridi organized a soft-launch of their vending machine in Northeastern’s Marino Recreation Center. Their machine offered five different vegan and whey protein powder flavors, and had 250 customers in the first six hours. 

“We ran out of powder,” Welch says. “We completely sold out.” 

They took their idea to the judges at this year’s Women Who Empower Innovator Awards, where they found similar success. Hosted by the Office of University Advancement at Northeastern, the annual competition honors women who are creating, running, and iterating on ventures across myriad disciplines and business sectors.

This year, organizers recognized 28 innovators with financial and entrepreneurial support. The winners received a portion of the organization’s largest total prize ever—$500,000—as well as companionship with a global network of like-minded entrepreneurs. To date, Women Who Empower has recognized 69 entrepreneurs with Innovator Awards over the course of three years, and has dispersed more than $820,000 to three cohorts of incisive, creative entrepreneurs.

Julietta Dexter, co-founder and chief growth and purpose officer at the creative and strategic agency ScienceMagic, was one of the judges this year. For her, Welch and Elzaridi’s chemistry as partners and as individuals was as impressive as their venture. 

“What I find remarkable about these winners is the sense of partnership, because entrepreneurship is very lonely at times,” Dexter says. “I think that there is a fallacy of an entrepreneur that you’ve kind of got a whole stack of cards, or that you think you have to have all the answers. And that is one of the biggest mistakes of entrepreneurs, particularly if the business does grow: you’ve got nobody to hold a mirror up. It’s lonely. 

“So I love the collaborative, more holistic way of building a business with two brains rather than one,” she says. “And I think that the energy that is created by sparking ideas of one another, or challenging one another, or, you know, sometimes we use the word ‘sparring’ against each other, can be quite generative. It’s OK to disagree—if you’re always agreeing, the outcome is very vanilla.” 

Confident in the customer’s need for their product after their early success in Northeastern’s fitness center, Welch and Elzaridi got back to work building out a more sophisticated vending machine—one with a touch-screen and 12 different types of sports supplements, ranging from protein powder to electrolytes, as well as a choice of three different liquids in which to mix them: milk, water, and plant-based milk. (The prototype that had its brief moment in the sun at Marino, meanwhile, is the one in their living room.)

The young founders had just about finished the improved version of their vending machines when they both went abroad, again. Welch and Elzaridi were part of a program at Northeastern called the Global Experience Program, in which students travel and study in a different country each year. Their final year is in Boston. 

So, they hit pause on SOAR, studied in Denmark for a year, and, having recently returned to campus, are taking a moment to consider the future of their business. 

“We’re thinking of ways to take our core values, especially sustainability, a step further,” Elzaridi says. “We’re trying to focus on a bigger vision and mission rather than just solving this particular issue.”

Whatever comes next, Elzaridi and Welch will face it together, soaring to new heights.