Recent graduates of Michigan State University founded Safety Straw Inc., a product to prevent drink spiking. Their goal is to make the bars in East Lansing safer for students, with the hopes to expand to other college towns.
The idea for the Safety Straw, which changes color from yellow to red when it comes into contact with date-rape drugs, was born from co-founder Jack Rushlow's personal experience with this issue.
"Unfortunately, my roommate had his drink spiked and he was drugged," Rushlow said. "The person he was with as well. After that night, we talked about potential ways to prevent this problem from happening and an extra layer of security."
Rushlow, a recent graduate of MSU, was working on a group project where they had to develop a pitch assigned to them. The group didn’t like the pitch they were assigned and after discussing possible strategies, some of the team members went to the bar where the spiking took place.
"That’s how we got to the idea of Safety Straw," Rushlow said. "From there, we won the pitch competition."
He said the original team didn’t continue with the idea, but he knew one of his childhood friends with a similar entrepreneurial interest, Zachary Ziemba, would be the perfect partner.
Co-founder Ziemba, also a recent graduate, was in supply chain management but he took his courses through the college of engineering. This allowed him to take 300/400 level courses in chemistry, thermodynamics, physics and more areas that would assist the team’s goal.
"When I started college, I didn’t really know that it would help me out as much as it did, but that allowed us the technical expertise and knowledge to make this straw work," Ziemba said. "From there we found a way to outsource the initial chemical synthesis."
The Safety Straw is currently patent pending. The team has not yet sold anything because they are still in their testing stage, but they have letters of intent to buy from various bar owners in East Lansing.
"Right now we have the chemical compound in a powdered form," Ziemba said. "We are signing an extrusion deal with a laboratory at MSU to extrude our first prototypes. Once we have all the material in the East Lansing area, we’ll have our first prototype here by the end of the month."
Throughout their process so far, MSU has provided several of the opportunities Safety Straw has needed to get off the ground. Through Rushlow’s entrepreneurship minor, the team has received support from the Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation Discovery and Launch Program. The team credits some of their success so far to their advisors from the program: Paul Jaques, Ken Szymusiak, Lori Fischer and Todd Dunn.
"Those four people have been a huge, huge help," Ziemba said. "Their mentorship has been invaluable as we’ve progressed over these last 12, 13 months."
The team had another breakthrough in their support when Rushlow’s previous football coach, Nico Acosta, agreed to invest in their startup. It just so happened that Acosta had already dabbled in start-ups and was successful enough himself to meet the monetary requirements of the Safety Straw company.
"He helped us raise funds to run these first few months of research and development and really get us off the ground," Rushlow said.
The group has begun marketing for the product and their main demographic is people between the ages of 18 to 24. This group is some of the most vulnerable to drink spiking. The team’s chief marketing officer, communications senior Marcy Creevy, said bringing awareness to the issue of drink spiking among college-age students is important to them.
"On our social media, we’re really promoting the facts and statistics behind drink spiking," Creevy said. "Once we get the product, we’re going to promote as much as we can and just try to get this product to as many bars as we can."
She was added to the team after Rushlow and Ziemba reached out to her on LinkedIn. Creevy has experience from several different companies in the past and her own personal social media following.
"It’s been a really good experience, especially when we’re tackling such a big problem," Creevy said.
Currently, the team is finishing up their official website. They intend to market their product to bars and universities, two of the main places where the issue occurs. A study done by the American Psychological Association among 6,000 students at three different universities showed more than one in 13 students have had their drink spiked. Four out of five of those students reported negative outcomes from their drugging.
Ziemba said they hope universities will want to include their product in welcome packets to increase awareness of the issue to incoming students and prevent non-consensual drugging.
Rushlow and Ziemba said while their business is looking to be on the right track, they have gone through countless instances of doubt throughout the process.
"We are inventing something new, this doesn’t exist," Rushlow said. "The science behind it didn't really exist and we had to pay a third party research and development company to make this even possible and it was really just a theory. There was like a whole year and a half process of us contemplating: is this even feasible?"
Through their doubts, the research has shown them their idea is tangible. The team is now full steam ahead to make their product available for the large population that could benefit from it.
"One in every three college-age women are victims of illegal drug tampering," Ziemba said. "Decreasing that number to zero is our overall mission."