Up to 40 Year 7 and 8 gastronomes will mix and mingle and get a slice of the food business at The Food Factory school holiday programme this week.
The programme ran for the first time in April last year and served up a smorgasbord of positive reviews from parents.
The Food Factory general manager Olivia Martyn says the programme was designed to tickle students’ taste buds for a foodie career, and the main ingredient for its second course was ‘Scrummy Slices’.
“The children will be split into four small groups, they’ll have a person to help them, and they’ll be given a recipe that has no name whatsoever,” she says.
“They then need to follow the recipe, make the product, and as they’re working through that process, they will see what kind of ingredients and they’ll start to figure out very quickly what the product is.
“They need to think about what they would name the product if they wanted to take it to market.”
Olivia says each group is also assigned a local brand to incorporate into their slice name, which includes New World Stoke, NBS, Pic’s Peanut Butter and The Food Factory.
“They then get designing with a whole lot of paper and pens to bring that name and that brand to life visually, and they also need to decide what the serving size is.”
She says the course teaches a range of skills.
“Each group will also be provided with the cost of the ingredients and figure out how much money it needs to make to cover the labour and the power, to put back into the business to make it sustainable.
“Then they have to come up with unique selling points [USP] so they could think about the marketing aspect of it, before cutting their slices and present them to a panel of four judges who are representing the brands.”
Olivia says all participants will leave the kitchen with a bundle of donated food items, the slices they made, and the recipe for their new product will be emailed to their parents to make at home.
