Conversation With Ex-Teammate Leads Alumna to Launch MealOps
By Rybeccah Jahraus
Akayla Hackson has always had a knack for finding solutions to problems.
So when Kelsey Forrester told Hackson about the most challenging part of her job at UC Santa Barbara, Hackson took action.
Hackson and Forrester have been close friends since their days as teammates on the Cal State San Marcos women’s basketball team from 2018-22. Forrester, now an assistant coach and director of basketball operation for the UCSB women, told Hackson how the hardest part of her job is coordinating meals for players when the team is on road trips.
“Honestly, everything is perfect besides the meal part – and the meal part isn’t hard, it’s just the organizational part,” Forrester said. “And so Akayla is like, ‘OK, well let me fix this.’ ”
It turned out to be a life-changing solution for Hackson. In coming up with an alternative for Forrester, Hackson launched MealOps, a business that aims to modernize team meal logistics by helping athletic programs efficiently coordinate, organize and execute large group orders.
“I like to help and I like to build things,” Hackson said. “I told Kelsey I'd help her out and maybe build a product for her to keep it more organized and just help the workflow in general. Then I had a couple more friends come to me about similar issues. So I took a step back and I realized this could be something bigger.”
Hackson, who graduated from CSUSM in 2022 with a bachelor's degree in computer science, comes from a family of engineers. She has been interested in the discipline for as long as she can remember, and she always aspired to start her own company. After graduating from CSUSM, Hackson earned a master’s in machine learning and artificial intelligence from Stanford. She worked as a software engineer at G2 Software Systems, a U.S. Department of Defense contracting company, for three years before deciding last fall to focus completely on MealOps.
“It was scary,” she said. “It's hard when you have that cushion and job security, the constant income coming in to pretty much no income for a bit. I was just trying to believe in myself and believe in the product that I was building.”
MealOps is a one-stop shop to help teams with the logistics of feeding their athletes. It recently evolved into two connected products:
- CoachImHungry is a platform built for athletic programs to manage team meal logistics and ordering workflows.
- Phantom is an AI agent that connects with restaurant point-of-sale (POS) systems like Toast or Square and enables restaurants to accept orders securely from AI agents.
Hackson said CoachImHungry now operates on top of Phantom’s restaurant ordering infrastructure.
Hackson’s college basketball experience and athletics connections have been big assets as she gets the business off the ground.
“College athletics is super interconnected,” Hackson said. “I've been able to go to friends and to show them prototypes and ask, ‘How does this look? How does the workflow look?’ ”
So far, MealOps is exploring deals with UC San Diego, the University of San Diego and UCSB, which is coached by Renee Jimenez, Hackson’s coach at CSUSM.
“It has the potential to be really special,” Forrester said. “When I talk to people who take care of the operational stuff, this is one of the hardest parts for all teams.
“When Akayla puts her mind to something, she's ready to go and she's fully in. And you can see how much progress she's made on this already in such a short a period of time.”
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