Two skylines dominate Cincinnati. The first is more of a 10-second glimpse of spectacularly aligned buildings that drivers see after coming up and over Interstate 71.
The second is their Skyline Chili. Scattered over and around the city, this specially made chili is decorated onto spaghetti, hot dogs and sandwiches. This chili is unique to Cincinnati, but it gave life to an idea Jake Rheude had.
A junior in management, Rheude is no stranger to starting up his own business.
Before he came to UT, he ran an exotic car detailing business in Cincinnati where he would go to client's houses and detail their show cars or exotic cars.
Now he's cooking up a buffalo chicken dip.
SummerSett Foods is the company that Rheude and Cedric Brown, junior in accounting and finance at UT, have started, and have just received $10,000 from the Boyd Venture Fund to start investing in their company.
The recipe for the dip is simple enough that a high-schooler could make it, yet no business has found any sort of cornerstone on the market for this snack pal.
"A product that my friends and I always used to make from scratch in high school was a buffalo chicken dip," he said. "It's similar in the fact that it's a cream cheese base, but it's usually got chicken and some sort of buffalo sauce and cheese."
Thinking this was something unique to Cincinnati, Rheude came to Knoxville only to be pleasantly surprised to find everyone on football Saturdays making his or her own buffalo chicken dip.
Rheude ventured to Kroger one weekday afternoon to find a couple packs of frozen dip that he could stick in his dorm room refrigerator.
They didn't have any, nor were there really any in existence after Rheude researched it. And so the idea was formed.