Magic Mud Pots win a top award for Food Science students at Chicago food expo
McGill earned its second consecutive victory in the Smart Snacks for Kids category
By Stephanie Wereley for the McGill Reporter
McGill Food Science students won first prize in the Smart Snacks for Kids category at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) annual expo in Chicago for their interactive pudding snack, Magic Mud Pots.
It was McGill’s second consecutive victory in that category.
“It was a gratifying moment,” said team member Emily Legault, who graduated last spring from the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences with a degree in food science. “It was a good seven months in the making, and it really validated all our hard work and creativity.”
Magic Mud Pots are cups of chocolate black bean pudding that come with chocolate quinoa crumble and vegetable-shaped gummies. Kids are encouraged to channel their inner farmer by “tilling the soil” (mixing the pudding and quinoa) and “harvesting their veggies” (adding the gummies), introducing them to common agricultural practices.
Legault developed the snack with her teammates Chanie Corbeil-Stroombergen, Marguerite Drolet and Siqi Li.
“It really is a culmination of all our learning throughout our degrees,” said Legault. Team members did everything from food processing and sensory testing to quality assurance and marketing.
“Hands-on training in our Food Product Development course provides our students with the practical skills and competencies important for the food industry,” said Salwa Karboune, Professor in Food Science and Agricultural Chemistry and Associate Dean (Research) at the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
“The IFT competitions serve as the perfect opportunity for team members to put these integrated competencies into action, reinforcing the real-world applicability of their classroom learning. I am proud of our teams’ achievements,” Karboune said.
Kid-tested, parent-approved
For the Magic Mud Pots team, the road to Chicago and their US $3,000 prize was paved with trial and error.
“Developing a kids’ product is double the difficulty, because you’re marketing to kids, but your customers are actually the parents,” said Legault. “So, you have to try to find a middle ground.”
Their initial product was a vegetable gummy that could be peeled like string cheese, but they discovered that its sugar content was too high to meet the competition’s requirements.
They went back to the drawing board: Drolet introduced the farming concept, Li developed the chocolate quinoa crumble, and the team repeatedly tested different formulations of the product.
“We were trying to get a sweetness level that kids would accept but trying to integrate minimal sugar, because that’s a concern for parents,” said Legault.
By the end, they had a product that was not only gluten-free, nut-free and a source of fibre and protein, but kid-approved.
“There were lots of big smiley faces circled in our sensory analysis forms.”
An invaluable experience
After placing in the top three in their Food Product Development class at McGill and providing IFT with numerous reports, the inventors of Magic Mud Pots were named finalists by the IFT Student Association and invited to attend the annual competition and expo in July alongside two other McGill teams.
“The IFT is a big and well-known event – especially in the food science world – and for those of us who are interested in food and product innovation and really want to work in R&D, it’s really exciting and exhilarating,” said Legault.
Despite their success, the team decided not to pursue the commercialization of their product. Instead, the team members are tackling different challenges: Corbeil-Stroombergen and Drolet are working in food science, Legault is pursuing a master’s degree in food innovation and development and Li has one year left in the Food Science & Nutritional Science program.
“We’ve learned so much and we’re really excited to apply all the skills and knowledge we’ve gained from this project into future endeavours,” said Legault.