The names were impressive: Cornell, Michigan State, Purdue, Rutgers, State University of New Mexico, Texas A and M.
But where it mattered, in front of the judges at the AACC International annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, name-power evaporated and personality won the day.
“I think we brought a lot of emotion,” said Alex Anton, leader of the University of Manitoba’s team of graduate agriculture students who won the product development competition held Oct. 8 by AACC International, formerly known as the American Association of Cereal Chemists.
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“The others were a lot more traditional.”
Anton and his colleagues are vivacious, humorous and relaxed and not one of them was wearing a white laboratory coat on a recent Friday afternoon.
Eleven students formed the group that won the competition with their bean flour-based snack food Globix, which is short for Global Sticks.
The yearly competition has previously allowed only cereal flour based food, but this year was expanded to allow bean flour. That was fortunate for Anton and his team because they felt comfortable jumping on the pulse product and exploiting its possibilities as a snack food ingredient.
“We use a lot of beans and peas,” said Chinese student Lini Qiao.
“People here think they’re mostly for animals.”
The University of Manitoba team was overwhelmingly international, with only one of its 11 members North America-born, and it exploited this aspect to give it a marketing edge.
“It’s very important in these products, the multicultural thing,” said Fernando Luciano, who like Anton is Brazilian.
“We are in a multicultural food product environment. We had the idea of doing something that was global, that represented parts of the world, like our group does.”
The team was started after Caroline Rosa, another Brazilian student in the program, saw the 2006 competition and thought her university should put together a team.
U of M food science grad students began talking and e-mailing each other, and soon a self-selected group was having frequent meetings and spending hours working on developing a unique product for the competition.
Globix wasn’t an easy product to create. By using bean flour rather than wheat flour, the students had to compensate for low gluten and starch levels and find a way to extrude the flour so that it would form a pleasing texture for eating.
They also had to make sure it didn’t taste like Beanix.
“We had to make sure to get rid of that bean flavour,” said Heather Maskus, the lone Canadian on the team.
“That’s the flavour a lot of people don’t like in soy products.”
The team finally produced crunchy sticks that come in jalapeno, creamy dill, mild curry and wasabi flavours, each designed to capitalize on the global nature of the snack food.
The students worked on the project voluntarily, on the side of their official class work and research obligations. They didn’t have project funding, but received various forms of support, including funding for navy bean flour development from the Agri-Food Research and Development Initiative, and flavour development and formulation support from food manufacturers.
The competing products from the well-heeled American universities were also innovative and well-designed, Maskus said, but the presentation panache of the Manitoba team is what he thinks won the day.
“We made sure that our presentation would wake up the judges,” she said with a laugh.
“We sold our product.”
