Alex Gervais ’28
Exec. Opinion and Design Editor
Each day Trinity students ask themselves the same, make-or-break question: “what’s at Mather?”
When Ethan Ambrossi ’27 and Joud Bitar ’28 started the Traypal App, they set out to answer that very question. Ambrossi, a computer science major from Queens, and Bitar, a computer science major and music minor from Lebanon and marketing intern for Chartwells, envisioned a better, more informed vision for dining at Trinity.
“I think originally we just wanted to kind of have a better menu, and that’s what Traypal was called originally, Better Menu,” said Ambrossi. Traypal scrapes data from Chartwells’ dineoncampus website and repackages it in a more digestible, gamified form. Each day, the site is updated with dining offerings from each of the stations at Mather and the Bistro. Students can create accounts on the website to check the menu, earn rewards, track calories and so much more.
Ambrossi and Bitar’s vision is driven by a simple goal: community connection. During his time as a marketing intern for Chartwells, Bitar has had an inside look into dining operations at Trinity and he “noticed that these hard-working chefs upstairs really care about us, and we care about them.” He also noted the sometimes difficult relationship between the student body and Chartwells management in terms of receiving student feedback: “we still can be more connected to the management, although they’re sometimes villanized in the student body’s eyes, we can be doing more to tell them. And it’s obviously not our fault, it’s just the fact that there’s no mechanism to do it. We were like, we built something where we can connect these things.”
In building the app, Ambrossi and Bitar took a strategy of “pure vibes, and constantly iterating.” The duo took “so much inspiration from just these big companies that are successful. The buttons look like Duolingo to me. Like, I love that. I love those buttons,” said Ambrossi. “But the best part about building was being able to launch, and then when people were using it, being able to talk to the different types of users that were signed up,” he continued. The duo “interviewed countless numbers of student-athletes who love tracking their macros, regular students who just love weightlifting and want to get their protein goal and people with dietary restrictions who only really have one option at Mather” in an effort to make a product that works for everyone in the campus community.
The duo is looking to expand their app, but also keeping Trinity at the forefront as they look towards the future. “If it doesn’t work at Trinity, it won’t work anywhere else, right?” Ambrossi ventured. “This is something that, like, I think every campus is suffering from, like, in this day and age. So it does have a spot for everything. And that’s our goal, obviously, is to be in every school.” As of now, the duo has no plans to monetize their product, “for students, we want to keep it free,” but did venture licensing to Chartwells in the future.
“We like to think of ourselves as founders,” said Ambrossi. Entrepreneurship and creation is all about “wearing different hats. You learn so much about the whole process of, like ‘we actually have to market this instead of just building it, right?’ And there’s just so many different aspects to it that we didn’t even think of. When a challenge comes up, we’re like, oh crap, we need to have a chat about it and innovate.”
“You have the problem and you have to design the solution to it, but nobody knows what the solution is,” said Bitar. “Creating a solution from scratch is, I think, really cool.”
Ultimately, the founders think their app has brought the Trinity community together and helped them discover more about dining on campus. “There’s people that wait for Wednesday to come so they can have their biscuits and grits. There’s a cult that I just discovered. I’d never heard of that before” said Bitar.
To access the Traypal App visit traypal.app on any device.
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