Hannah Pucci had just a few minutes to explain her invention and business concept in the CTNext Entrepreneur Innovation Awards in June. The 16-year-old student at Danbury High School was presenting before a panel of entrepreneurial experts for the chance to win a $10,000 grant to advance her invention, Egghead Ice Cream.
Hannah’s thoroughly outside-the-carton notion is an ice cream-packing method where egg-shaped, pre-packaged scoops are offered in an egg carton-like package. This method avoids the hassle of scooping ice cream, offers multiple flavor varieties in 1 carton and gives portion control.
By the time of this CTNext demonstration, she had already spent four years pushing this concept forward, and as a regular actress and singer in school plays, she’d experience talking about the idea before people. But this presentation was different.
Kim Pucci, Hannah’s mother, says, “Hannah’s very comfortable representing [Egghead] and she speaks to all sorts of audiences.” But Kim, director of external relations for the charity Action Against Hunger, adds the Shark Tank-style pitch of the presentation could be intimidating to anyone, regardless of age. “She was ready, but they ask three minutes’ worth of questions.”
Unlike the eggs which inspired her creation, Hannah did not crack.
Instead she aced the demonstration and got the $10,000 grant. It’s the most recent in a long line of successes for Hannah. This summer UConn Dairy Bar started a trial run — that will last until October — of Egghead Ice Cream. She has been invited to meet with executives at both Baskin-Robbins and Dippin’ Dots, and she has received guidance and assistance in The Connecticut Small Business Development Center. The center connected her with the UConn School of Engineering, which helped her with the proof of concept and high-volume manufacturing plan for this product. The center encouraged her to pursue a patent for the invention, which was awarded in 2016.
A sixth-grader at the time, she was in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) program at Rogers Park Middle School in Danbury. The class required her to think of an invention and pitch it in the Connecticut Invention Convention, held annually in UConn’s Gampel Pavilion. Her teacher encouraged the pupils to think of a issue, then think of an invention that could act as a solution to that problem. Hannah struggled with the assignment in the beginning. “For weeks I had been stuck thinking of the worst problems and solutions,” she says. “They had no market potential”
Then, she saw her mother struggling to scoop ice cream into a cone and believed it would be simpler to simply pull out a preformed part of ice cream and pop it into a cone.
Denise Whitford, a business adviser with the Connecticut Small Business Development Center who has mentored Hannah, says this type of inspiration is what younger people can provide as entrepreneurs. “The unique thing about working with folks like Hannah or other minors is that they look at things differently,” Whitford says. “We as adults tend to cast a lot of experience to what we do and don’t do, and sometimes that is a barrier for us to do things differently.”
In addition to the exceptional nature of her idea, Whitford says Hannah’s success has been helped by her being “extraordinarily articulate.” Whitford adds, “She’s very creative and highly motivated.”
“She has a double life,” says Hannah’s mother. “I feel bad sometimes; she stays up late at night doing homework, she gets up, goes to school all day, she gets home and I’m like ‘OK, you have a business call. ”’
Hannah chimes in, “But it’s all worth it. It’s going to pay off one day.
“When Hannah, who has two younger sisters, Haley, 13, and Laurel, 7, finishes high school and goes to college, she’d like to study engineering like her father Michael Pucci, who is a civil engineer.
Regardless of what she does, she’s determined to keep pushing forward with Egghead. “I’ve always pictured it in grocery stores all over America and that’s where I am determined to deliver it,” she says.