PardEats connects your fitness needs with Lafayette dining options so students and athletes can eat with more confidence.
PardEats began in November 2025 as a class project of A I Protik '29 in INDS 124, Introduction to Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. He did not walk into it thinking it would become a startup. He researched the problem because the assignment asked him to, and kept finding gaps nobody was covering. He started talking to athletes and students, and everyone described the same difficulty: they have to decide what to eat every day, and nothing on campus helps them do it. Professor Tobias Rossmann backed the idea early. A I kept going after the course ended.
A I Protik built a prototype and put it in front of real users. Early in 2026 he formed a team, Owen Peel first, then Tauhid Islam Jami and Mohammad Rasim Omer. That summer PardEats was selected for the Bergh Summer Accelerator at Lafayette, run through the Dyer Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and pardeats.com went live with a waitlist for the beta.
The engineering has been his alone. A React Native app that builds for both iOS and Android from one codebase, a Python API, a Postgres database, and this website. He learned most of it while building it. JavaScript changes go out over the air, so a fix reaches every tester in minutes without waiting on an app store review.
Most of A I Protik's time went on the part behind the screens. The calorie and macro targets are computed rather than looked up: the student's own body, how active their day is outside training, and the energy cost of the session they actually logged. Log a two hour practice and the number moves before dinner. The engines are pure functions with no database access, so each one can be tested on its own, and automated tests run against every change before it ships.
The database was built for more than one campus from the first migration. Every row already knows which school it belongs to, which is the difference between something that works at Lafayette and something that can be taken somewhere else.
Dining hall menus come straight from what the college publishes each morning, with ingredients and nutrition attached to each dish. On top of that sit voice logging, barcode and label scanning, and an assistant that answers from the student's own numbers and the real menu.
It reached Google Play closed testing in August 2026 and Apple TestFlight in September. Testers have been sending back numbered problems ever since, and most of them have been right.
It is still in closed alpha. The beta opens on 1 November 2026.