Think of your kitchen. Of those juicy blackberries and fresh luscious red apples your mom bought at the store yesterday. Of those peaches and lemons that are waiting for you to get home. Now think of what would happen if they sat outside for 3, 4, even 5 weeks. And that pretty picture is just swept clean away. So now you think, what am I going to do with this rotten fruit? A simple answer to this complicated story: Fenugreen’s FreshPaper.

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Fenugreen, Kavita M. Shukla, a Centennial alumna, and her team arrived at Centennial High School on Monday, September 24, 2012 to share this information with middle school students. According to their website, fenugreen.com, they “will launch these products to the Mid-Atlantic region, but really hope to reach the villages in India”.

“We have people using this across the country, and we have people using these across the globe,” Shukla said.

The most interesting point about Shukla is actually not that her invention of FreshPaper is quickly becoming the must-have product all over the world. It’s that Shukla, who is of Indian descent and was born in Germany, herself graduated from Centennial High School in 2002. “I actually got the patent when I was a senior at High School”, Shukla said. “It was for FreshPaper”. The classes that influenced her most in life were Independent Research with Michelle Bagley, and Chemistry with Ed Rodey, (a former CHS science teacher). She was grateful for Centennial and the support she received from so many teachers, as it had changed her life in such a positive way.

A safe, “fresh for all” paper manufactured by hand in Cambridge, Massachusetts, FreshPaper contains organically grown spices and a distinct maple-like scent. The paper is used to reduce food spoilage, and does so in a very simple manner: by applying basic knowledge of inhibitors that slow down reactions, which in this case, refers to bacteria in spoiled food. According to the Fenugreen team, “FreshPaper is infused with organic ingredients that inhibit bacterial and fungal growth, as well as enzymes that cause over-ripening. FreshPaper is a safe, remarkably effective, organic solution to spoilage”.

She founded her company after graduating from Harvard Business School, and hopes that their partnership, the Fresh For All, will impact the entire community. Her advice for all the middle school students was to “never give up, give it your all in school- you never know when it might change your life and those of others”.

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