Armita Jamshidi ’25 and a friend were moving a fridge into Jamshidi’s dorm room her sophomore year when she suddenly felt a wave of sharp pain and could barely move or speak. Seven hours later, after losing consciousness in the hospital, she was released from the emergency room and told to take some ibuprofen — for an extreme case of menstrual cramps.
That experience led Jamshidi, a computer science and women’s health major, to launch a new business that offers an alternative to relieving period pain: Cramp Bites, sweet date snacks adapted from her Iranian grandmother’s recipe, which soothed her monthly cramps while she was growing up in North Carolina.
Cramp Bites moved a step closer to commercial production when Jamshidi’s startup, Aunt Flo’s Kitchen, won the $25,000 first-place prize at the 2025 Hospitality Business Plan Competition, hosted on April 26 in Statler Auditorium by the Leland C. and Mary M. Pillsbury Institute for Hospitality Entrepreneurship at the Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration.
Jamshidi’s award will allow her to start manufacturing the snacks containing analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties, which until now have been produced by her parents in a commercial kitchen in her hometown.
“I think a lot of women just kind of resent taking medicine constantly,” Jamshidi said after the awards were announced. “And so when women tell me that this has helped with their pain, I realize that all the work is worth it.”
While 84 percent of women suffer from menstrual cramps, 60 percent avoid medication because of their perceptions about its unnatural, synthetic nature, said Jamshidi, a Harrison College Scholar in Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences. A small pilot study she conducted at Cornell showed that 76 percent of the women who sampled Cramp Bites felt a decrease in their menstrual cramps. Jamshidi has also lined up a clinical trial of the product at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital to test its effectiveness in reducing menstrual pain.
Aunt Flo’s Kitchen received an Epperson Entrepreneurial Grant from W.E. Cornell in 2022 and was selected as a participant in Entrepreneurship at Cornell’s 2023-24 eLab, a student-business accelerator. Afterwards, Cramp Bites launched online and in several retail stores in Ithaca, including GreenStar Cooperative Market and Gimme! Coffee and has earned $30,000 in revenue, Jamshidi said. Post-graduation, she plans to work on the business full time along with her teammate, Monica Lee ’26, a junior in the Nolan School. Once the snacks go into production at a facility in the Poughkeepsie area later this year, Jamshidi plans to introduce them at Columbia University, Wegmans grocery stores, and several boutique hotels in upstate New York.
Sherrie Negrea is a freelance writer for the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business.