A 13-year-old girl invents hiccup-curing lollipops

A 13-year-old girl has not only supposedly cured the hiccups, but she has become a CEO in the process. Mallory Kievman is CEO and founder of Hiccupops, a company that might just have cured one of the world's oldest and most annoying conditions. Kievman is preparing to launch her product, the Hiccupop, a hiccup-stopping lollipop of her own invention, with a patent pending, financial backers, and a team of business consultants.

Kievman says that she got the idea after trying to tame a stubborn bout of hiccups two years ago by using any home remedy she came upon: Drinking saltwater, sipping water out of an upside-down cup, eating spoonfuls of sugar, slurping pickle juice. She had developed the product in her family’s Manchester, Conn., kitchen, amalgamating her three favorite cures — lollipops, apple cider vinegar and sugar — into a single confection.

"I'm still "tweaking the taste," she says. But the combination of ingredients "triggers a set of nerves in your throat and mouth that are responsible for the hiccup reflex arc... It basically over-stimulates those nerves and cancels out the message to hiccup."

Speculation as to whether Hiccupops is a profitable company has provoked some people to come out and advocate for the 13-year-old CEO. "It's very rare, when you're evaluating businesses, that you can envision a company or product being around 100 years from now," Danny Briere, a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Startup Connecticut, which nurtures new companies, including Hiccupops, and is a regional affiliate of the Startup America Partnership, said. "Hiccupops is one of those things. It solves a very simple, basic need," he added.