Food and Consumer Management students are recipe pioneers

Students have been demonstrating their food innovation skills to industry professionals as part of their recipe development module.

First year Food and Consumer Management students were asked to design new meat-based products for one of the UK’s leading food producers, Cranswick Country Foods, who provided a selection of their own quality meat cuts for the students to work with. The students’ products had to be suitable for placement in retail outlets.

A selection of new food products were created by the students based on their product brief: rice and bacon bonbons (similar to scotch eggs), Earl Grey-infused bacon joints, gammon wellington and even a sticky toffee pudding with a bacon twist.

A member of Cranswick’s New Product Development team, Adam Asghar, and Hugh Taylor, a senior member of the Marketing and Insights team, visited UCB to see what innovative and creative recipes the students had developed and give them feedback on their ideas. Adam is a graduate of UCB’s Food and Consumer Management course himself, and now works in Cranswick’s gourmet bacon division in Leeds and helps supply much of the gammon and “Best Of” bacon ranges on sale in the UK.

Cranswick also invited the students to Leeds for a guided tour of their state-of-the-art production plants to show them the manufacturing processes and how they keep on the cutting edge of production to maintain the highest possible food standards.

Hugh praised the students’ efforts, saying, “It was clear that a lot of effort and creativity had gone into developing the products. It has given us a lot of inspiration and ideas which we would not have arrived at ourselves.”

As a result of this collaboration, the students have been given the opportunity to apply for an industrial placement position with Cranswick to further develop their product development skills.