Hi, I'm Serena!
I'm a :
🐕 dog foster parent,
⚽ soccer player,
🏒 hockey player,
🚴♀️ cyclist,
🏃 (one time) marathon runner,
👩💻 data scientist and machine learning researcher,
and the developer of Foodshake.
I've been vegan for 10 years. I've been vegan as a student, as a working professional, and in multiple countries.
And in my opinion, me being vegan is the most uninteresting part about me!
So why build Foodshake?
Foodshake started because of my Dad. When I first went vegan, my Dad said to me: "Well, you're cooking for yourself now. None of my recipes can be made vegan." He wanted to cook vegan food for me, but just wasn't sure how!
Over the past 10 years, my Dad and I slowly veganized his recipes together. Through this experience, I realized that I had developed what I call "vegan intuition". I can look a product in the grocery store and know if it's vegan. And I can look at a non-vegan recipe and know what substitutes will work best.
I realized that it's like I have a dictionary in my head that I can reference to quickly map a non-vegan product to the perfect vegan substitute, given the context in which the ingredient is used in a recipe. So I thought to myself: If I can do this conversion in my head, there must be a way to automate it.
It took me years to build this "vegan intuition". As a new vegan, you might find yourself spending hours learning how to perfectly replace the egg in a cookie recipe. And sometimes recipes fail even for experienced vegans!
Instead of spending searching the internet for the perfect vegan substitute, you can get your answer instantly with Foodshake. With Foodshake you can eat the same foods you grew up eating, but the plant based version.
The goal of Foodshake is to automate that vegan intutiion, and make going vegan and staying vegan easier!
I became a vegetarian when I was in high school in 2008, and went vegan shortly after.
I kept my veganism a secret initially - only my family knew! I didn't want to seem weird or bring attention to myself.
In university I decided to actually tell people I was vegan. The social pressure was difficult - I became known as "the girl who only eats vegetables" by the dining hall staff (there weren't many vegan options).
Eventually, the social pressure became too much, so I decided to resume eating dairy and egg products when offered to me. I continued to eat plant based at home.
In 2015 I went vegan for the second time when I realized that every meal is an opportunity to make an impact for the animals - to me, that's worth pushing past any social pressure (externally or internally placed).
I believe being vegan, and eating plant based, should be 3 things:
1. Affordable: the substitutes recommended by Foodshake favour whole foods over processed foods.
2. Easy: being vegan doesn't mean you need to revamp your whole diet. You can still eat how you used to eat before you were vegan!
3. NOT Limiting: because you can make any recipe vegan!
Please feel free to email me at foodshakeapp@gmail.com. I'm always looking for feedback on how I can make Foodshake better for you! You can also follow me on social media (the links are in the toolbar at the bottom of the page). Finally, thanks for stopping by!