GENEVA, NY - Coffee lovers should perk up to what the Cornell University Product Development Team from the Institute of Food Science (CIFS) created for this year's competition. The team is one of six finalists in the prestigious Institute of Food Technologists' (IFT) Student Association 1996 Product Development Competition, held in New Orleans at the end of June. Team members are from both Cornell's Ithaca and Geneva campuses.
In a collaborative effort, the team has developed a prototype they call "Stir-Ins," a melt-in-your-coffee, not-in-your-hands food product. The pencil-shaped, lightly sweetened, vanilla biscuits have a chocolate coating and a flavored layer, available in Hazelnut, Irish Creme, or French Vanilla. The flavor quickly blends into the freshly brewed coffee, leaving the biscuit enveloped in warmed, milk chocolate.
"The biscuit does not get soggy because the chocolate we used has a high melting point," explained Kathryn Deibler, a graduate student who works with Terry Acree in the Department of Food Science & Technology at Cornell University's Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY. Deibler and Jane Friedrich, a graduate student who works with Cy Lee, developed the flavors and how they would be delivered. "It involved a lot of trial and error," said Friedrich. "We started out with a liquid flavor, than an icing method, and finally settled on a spray-dried solid flavor."
The idea for Stir-Ins took six weeks of brainstorming, noted Ellen Chamberlain, another team member, who works with Any Rao. She designed the process flow diagram as well as the process description for the product. "In our research and feasibility studies,we discovered that flavored coffee was a big up-and-coming trend for this year," she said.
The three women are MS/PhD candidates in Food Science and are all now working on the final presentations. Other members of the team were Susan P. Connell, Sheila Sidhu, Alison Edwards, Sarah Douglas, Dawn Norton, Rachel Adleman, Matthew Sade, and Mariano Tosso.
"Stir-Ins" were created with borrowed chef equipment, pastry bags and a plastic ruler in three graduate student kitchens. Now the team is using the Pilot Plant in Stocking Hall in Ithaca to extrude "perfect" biscuits for the final competition in New Orleans. The competition at the IFT Annual Meeting consists of an oral presentation, a poster display, a product sampling (for the judges only) and a defense.
"This competition shows that the students have mastered all the components of new product development process in food science," said Joe Regenstein, Cornell professor of food science and team adviser. "This has become one of the most competitive events at IFT and it is really a place where students can showcase their talent. With some 18,000 people at the IFT Convention, it's an unbelievable amount of good exposure."
Last year, Cornell unseated the six-year reigning champion, The University of Minnesota, with the high-tech, tasty and toaster-ready pizza pop-ups. The pizza pop-ups development required team efforts to investigate fields including marketability, safety, usage, production, packaging, and formulation. Last year's team, which included two current Geneva graduate students - Michael King and Ellen Chamberlain - is presently pursuing a patent on the product. Imitiations of the product have already hit the market.
The IFT Student Association names six universities each year to compete in the finals of the Product Development Competiion sponsored by Mars, Inc. This year, Cornell's "Stir-In" will be competing with the Bagelrito (University of California at Davis), Biscuit Bakes (Kansas State University), Skoochos (Iowa State University), Jungle Pals (Michigan State University), and Fruit Puffs (University of Minnesota).
Contact: Linda McCandless
315-787-2417
e-mail: llm3@cornell.edu
Communications Services, Geneva, NY
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