A University of Wisconsin-River Falls (UWRF) team took first place in the Dairy Management Inc. (DMI) New Product Competition with an innovation that contains 89 percent dairy ingredients and offers a calming aspect.
The students created RootCurd, which resembles a soft pudding with a smooth and velvety texture. It also has and a slightly spicy flavor thanks to its inclusion of ginger. RootCurd was inspired by a traditional Chinese recipe and features lavender to help reduce stress levels. The product provides 20 grams of dairy protein per serving.
Students Kate Petersen, Yihong Deng, Rafael Larosiliere, Anna Eurele and Ashley Gruman of the UWRF earned the first-place prize of $8,000. They were recognized Monday at the Institute of Food Technologists’ FIRST conference in Chicago.
The dairy checkoff has hosted this event since 2012 to inspire the next generation of food scientists and innovators. It also gives students an opportunity to experience a real-life scenario of working for a food company. The contest has a different theme each year that is based on consumer trends and aligns with checkoff-led strategies. Calming is a quality that Gen Z consumers are seeking from their food choices.
Eurele led the team’s effort into identifying flavors that offered calming benefits. By doing so she discovered her Gen Z peers are seeking international-inspired options. This led to choosing ginger as the key ingredient followed by lavender, a known calming agent.
“To a lot of people, the pairing of ginger and lavender was a little off-putting initially. But once they tried it, it actually marries together really well,” Eurele said. “RootCurd plays to a lot of interesting different notes.”
Student award winners said they’re proud of their accomplishment and the fact they were able to come up with a high-quality food with calming properties that can benefit people. Devising RootCurd to comply with competition rules provided multiple challenges, they said, and overcoming them is gratifying. The students are interested in seeing if they can move forward with commercializing RootCurd.
The competition was open to undergraduate and graduate students from across the U.S., making UWRF students’ accomplishment especially impressive, said Grace Lewis, assistant professor of animal and food science at UWRF who led the student team. Many other teams were comprised of graduate students; UWRF’s team was undergrads.
Lewis joined the Mid-West Farm Report to talk more about this award winning dairy combination.
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