It started from a single Starbucks peach refresher and a cute caption in freshman year. Now, as a senior, Anika Ravishankar has a growing Instagram business called Hungriehoney with a current following of 4,153 and growing. 

“Hungriehoney is mainly a food account,” Ravishankar said. “I post food adventures that I have in Houston or places that I traveled to. It is an all-vegetarian page because I am vegetarian, and I’ll just share with my follower’s places I think are worth it. I’ll give reviews and recommendations. If places are not that great I’ll also put that in there because I want to be completely honest with people, and it’s just basically a hobby and like a fun pastime for me. I started it back in 2017 when I was in ninth grade. I don’t remember exactly how I started but ever since childhood I was always a foodie, so I loved eating. I love taking photos, it’s always been a passion of mine.”

Ravishankar is going to the University of Texas at Dallas with a full ride to major in Business Marketing and minor in Finance.

“I initially was running it by myself for ninth and 10th grade,” Ravishankar said. “But around the end of 2019, my sister was going to school at UT Dallas, but I was still in Houston, and she was going to food places on her own over there and trying a bunch of new places. I was like ‘why don’t I add you to the account and we can be co-owners of this account and you can post your Dallas adventures. That way we can engage a bigger group of people because we can get people in Dallas and we can give recommendations,’ and that way we have more content as well because you know sometimes it’s hard to get content when you’re just in one place and constantly looking for new places.”

Anika Ravishankar’s sister, Rithika Ravishankar is currently a junior at UT Dallas. She is majoring in biomedical engineering and plans on becoming an orthodontist with her practice in the future.

“Starting initially we purchased right out of our pocket,” Ravishankar said. “Over time we started getting more exposure and more attention from actual food places and companies. Companies started reaching out to us saying, ‘hey, we’d like to send you our products in exchange for a post or story.’ There’s a few different types of payment so there’s the free promotion where they’ll send us something for free and we would post about it. But more recently as we’re getting more followers now around 4k. Some companies are like ‘can you post this photo on your story or come here and try this for food and post on your story, and we will pay you based on your engagement’ we’ll get paid, based on my rate or there’s also sponsored posts where we post something and they’ll give a flat fee.” 

Ravishankar was in Future Business Leaders of America for all 4 years of high school. FBLA is a student-led business organization. 

“My sister and I have been vegetarian since birth,” said Ravishankar. “We have never tried meat because that’s just how we were raised. Our parents did eat meat Growing up, but they made the decision When giving birth to us that they wanted us to be vegetarian and they gave us the option if we wanted to eat meat, but both of us did not choose that option. we wanted to stick with being vegetarian, so that was just more of a personal choice. With the food account, since we only eat vegetarian food, we decided that we should cater this account to people who are vegetarian like us or are interested in seeing what possible things that people around us can buy that are vegetarian. some people would think that it would narrow our audience but in fact, it’s broadened our audience because we do have people who want vegetarian recommendations.”

Ravishankar had also applied to the University of Texas at Austin. She got accepted into McCombs School of Business which is ranked No. 18 in Business Schools but ultimately rejects the acceptance. 

“Through Hungriehoney, there’s marketing every day,” Ravishankar said. “I’m constantly communicating with businesses reaching out promoting our account creating flyers, you know, responding to comments reaching out to people working with various organizations like all around. So that’s what helped me realize my interest in marketing because I realized I enjoy this and I feel like I’m good at it. So, this is something I want to do in my future.”

The University of Texas at Dallas Jindal School of Management is placed No. 17 in U.S. public university programs Category. The Jindal School of Management is also the largest school in The University of Texas at Dallas.

“The number one thing that sold me for UT Dallas is that I genuinely enjoy the environment there,” Ravishankar said. “When deciding your college I think that’s the number one thing that’s important because that you could go to the best school ever but if you can’t find yourself comfortable there, and you don’t see yourself there then you’re going to have a problem and you’re going to quickly realize that place isn’t for you.”