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Lynbrook High School grad launches business

Web-based My Happy Plates helps people streamline, plan and shop for meals

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When he attended Lynbrook North Middle School about 15 years ago, Ryan Perlowin started selling candy with one of his friends in between classes to his fellow students. “It was literally me buying candy bars and selling them to my friends for more than I bought them for,” he said with a laugh.

Perlowin, 28, said he’s always had an entrepreneurial spirit. After graduating Lynbrook High School in 2005, he went on to attend University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and majored in entrepreneurship. A few months ago he launched his first technology website, My Happy Plates with Nick Bodnar, 25, a developer. The idea is to streamline the tedious process of meal planning and grocery shopping to keep costs down, foster healthy eating, and to show people how simple it is to cook a decent meal.

“This is kind of a perfect storm of everything I love,” he said, adding that he’s managed a barbeque restaurant called Blue Smoke in Manhattan, worked for a technology company in Chapel Hill, and also completed an internship at the Hatsune Restaurant Group in Bejing and Shanghai.

My Happy Plates is a subscription-based web platform that curates recipes based on the number of people you’re cooking for, price range, tastes, likes and dislikes. Perlowin said he and his fiancée, Britney Minnick, were struggling to plan ahead to feed themselves for their work week.

“We would get home from work, it would be late and we’d look at each other and say ‘what’s for dinner?’” Perlowin said. “We were spending too much money on food because we didn’t plan ahead. We figured, hey, there’s got to be a better way.”

Once they started planning out meals, their monthly grocery bill nearly halved. Perlowin said this was the impetus for providing a service that would curate customized meal plans for people based on their tastes — bypassing the chore of scouring the Internet for great recipes. The service then translates this recipe list into a grocery list to facilitate the process.

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