Nottingham Trent University places second in innovation awards

Food science students from Nottingham Trent University have taken the silver prize and £1,000 at this year’s Ecotrophelia Food Innovation Student Awards

In this exclusive video interview, filmed at the Campden BRI open day, Caruffle team member Sarah Kelly discussed the challenges involved with pulling their product together – a truffle made from carob and hazelnut, with a mixed fruit jelly centre and rolled in popped and ground quinoa.

“I think key thing for us [the Caruffle team] is we all work full-time as well as doing our studies,” she explained. “We go to university one day a week and we work five days a week – so trying to pull the whole product together, the challenges you face with the product and then [members of the team] living in different areas and trying to find the time to fit it all in I think is a big achievement altogether.”

Valuable lessons

Commenting on the competition, Kelly said she and her team had learned valuable lessons from their experiences with the Judges,

“When your faced with all these people [the judges] at once, it teaches you how to hold yourself, talk and come across as a team present yourself well,” she added.

Now in its seventh year, Ecotrophelia UK is a Dragons’ Den-style competition that challenges teams of UK students to develop an innovative, eco-friendly food and drink product.

Dragons

From idea generation through to the final packaged product, the teams get a hands-on experience of what it takes to bring an eco-friendly food or drink product to market. The finalists pitched their products on 11 ​June to 11 judges – or dragons. For the full list of dragons, click here​.

Venergy – a team from the University of Reading took the gold prize at this year’s competition with its novel lemon and lime flavoured energy sweet, announced on 12 ​June at Campden BRI’s annual open day at the organisation’s headquarters at Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire. The award was presented by one of the dragons, Lindsay Dobson, senior research and development manager at prize sponsor PepsiCo.