the thesis ↓
Stop the burn.
Save the meal.
Sooz is a single-serve drink mix that lets you tell the burn when to stop. Risus Zhao and I started it at Rice in fall 2025, and it’s now in the Plug and Play × SHOPLINE accelerator.
eat spicy. sip sooz.
The gap
You love spicy food. It doesn’t love you back.
Anyone who orders the hot sauce knows the routine: milk helps for the first few seconds, and after that you’re on your own for the rest of the meal.
Risus and I thought spicy food deserved a sidekick for the whole meal, so we made one you can carry in a pocket.
Where it stands
Pre-launch, with the pieces lining up.
as of fall 2026 ↓
format
Powder, not a bottle
We started with a bottled drink and pivoted to a soluble powder in a single-serve stick pack, mixed into cold water at the table.
channel
Restaurants first
I led the pivot from direct-to-consumer to a restaurant-first model, with restaurants as the way new customers find us.
accelerator
Plug and Play × SHOPLINE
We’re in the 2026 Future of Commerce cohort, which included a week of programming in Los Angeles in fall 2026.
prize
$1,000 at the Rice Launch Challenge
Sooz won the Interdisciplinary Innovation Prize at the Napier Rice Launch Challenge.
sales
About $1,000 in pop-ups
That’s campus pop-up sales, made face to face before our first production run.
next
First production run
We’re working with packaging suppliers and a co-manufacturer in Utah ahead of it. The current flavor is mango.
04 · The product
One stick. One spicy meal.
Each Sooz is a single-serve stick pack that travels flat in a pocket and tears open from the top. You mix it into cold water and sip it with the meal. Mango is the current flavor.
pictured: an early strawberry sample ↓
05 · Story
It started with a bad plate of tofu.
2025
In summer 2025, Risus Zhao ate some very spicy tofu on a trip to China and spent the next three days paying for it. He came back with a thesis: spicy food shouldn’t be a battle.
Risus and I had met earlier that summer, and we ended up in the same class back at Rice: New Enterprises, which requires every student to join a startup by week two. I was planning to launch something of my own. When Risus pitched Sooz to the room, I thought about my family’s trips to Nigeria and The Gambia, where the food is a lot spicier than most American food, and I joined on the spot.
We mapped a spicy meal stage by stage and went looking for a formula that could keep up with it. By early 2026 we had a product that worked, and we’ve been building the company around it since.
Risus leads product. I handle the business side: demand, partners, and the pitch.
06 · Receipts
What’s real, today.
07 · Where it lives
Join the waitlist at drinksooz.com, or keep going to Backfile.
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