Food tech students serve up a treat

Fourth-year food technology students have presented their innovative food products to staff for tasting, capping off a year of planning, market research and development.

The student groups were tasked with developing a food product at the beginning of the year and worked together to produce something suitable for a certain market or consumer.

Senior lecturer in dairy technology Rod Bennett says the projects cover the full range of product development.

“In the first semester they go through finding out what consumers want and the characteristics of a particular product,” he says. “At the end of that semester they have a concept of what they want to take forward and they will have done some market research on that.”

In the second semester, they need to actually make the product to a commercial standard. “They actually have to convert those ideas into a real product that can be made on both a small production scale and could also be scaled up to a commercial operation.

“A lot of the products are technologically challenging – the product briefs they are given are set up deliberately to provide some challenges in terms of preserving products, different moisture contents, and storage. But I think they’ve all done exceptionally well.”

Simon Cushing’s group was tasked with making a high-quality beef snack for the Middle Eastern market that would last six months at room temperature. “We had to find a way to keep the meat from going off, so we went for a product somewhere in between salami and jerky, which we thought was appropriate for that market.

Vivvek Gargi and his team developed a healthy, single-serve dairy snack. “We had three ideas to start with and we took them to a focus group and they helped us narrow it down to the product that we called Pro-Bites. There were a number of challenges, especially getting the chocolate coating right. We also developed the packaging from scratch so that was fairly difficult too.”

Elena Norris helped produce a gluten-free spring roll. The frozen product can be baked or deep fried, she says. “We went through a number of concepts, including experimenting with a number of batters and coatings before settling on the rice wrap. It’s great to now see the end product.”