Edison Student Creates Sustainable Coffee Pod Startup that Wins a $25,000 National Prize

EDISON, NJ — Aditya Herekar, a rising senior at John P. Stevens High School, has won a $25,000 grand prize in the Mott Million Dollar Challenge, a national youth entrepreneurship competition, for his startup Naturista, a biodegradable, plastic-free alternative to single-use coffee pods and instant pods. Naturista, which he cofounded in 2024, is designed to eliminate the plastic waste generated by traditional pod coffee makers by using a fully dissolvable, sustainable biopolymer in place of conventional plastic capsules.

Naturista took the top spot in the competition's 9-12 Social Challenge division, one of six grand-prize categories in a nationwide contest that drew more than 5,300 K-12 students from all 50 states. The Mott Million Dollar Challenge, funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation as part of its centennial celebration, distributed a total prize pool of $1 million. Naturista's pitch was selected from an initial pool of more than 3,700 video submissions, advancing through several rounds of judging before the finals, held in Flint, Michigan, on June 15 and 16.

Naturista emerged from Herekar's independent research into biopolymers, which he initiated in 2024 after noticing the significant amount of plastic waste generated by single-use coffee pods. He has since filed a U.S. provisional patent for the technology and partnered with a food science lab at Rutgers University to continue researching sustainable food packaging.

Beyond Naturista, Herekar is a highly outspoken activist and an ardent supporter of Ukraine. Through the financial literacy non-profit Invest2Empower, which he co-founded in 2023, he teaches Ukrainians about personal finance. His free financial literacy training videos, available in both Ukrainian and English, have collectively reached over 10,000 views on YouTube. Donate to his efforts to help Ukraine.

With a perfect SAT score in his pocket, Herekar plans to major in business in college.