Meet the Harper students behind this year’s Young Enterprise success

Three Harper Adams University teams impressed judges and scored several awards at the Young Enterprise Regional Final  hosted at the Harper Adams University campus.

Following their success, which you can read more about in the official news release, we caught up with the winners to hear what they had to say about their experience.

Final year Food Technology and Product Development student, Hannah Plush told us more about their product, which saw them take home the Overall Regional Winner Award, Best Financial Planning Award and Sustainability Award with Riff Snacks, their sustainable snack bar brand. 

“Our product is a high fibre high protein snack bar and the key thing that make us different is that we’re using ingredients that are coming through the community fridge which otherwise just vanish.  

“So, we’re repurposing those ingredients and making them into something delicious. We freeze dried bananas and then blended them into a powder and then we’ve made this snack bar using that high fibre powder.” 

The Community Fridge is a shared space on campus where students and staff can donate and receive surplus food, with the aim to reduce food waste. 

When we asked Hannah how it felt to win the awards, she said: “It felt surreal to actually win the competition, I think we were kind of doing it as ‘yeah this is a good idea we’ll see how it goes’ and then to win it we were like ‘oh, we have to keep going okay, how does this progress?’ and realising at that point that it’s actually quite a valid business idea and we’re really excited to see where it goes from here.” 

We caught up with Riff Snacks to see what they're up to in preparation for the International Final next week:

 

 

 

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 Our first year business student Alfie Lee also saw success, winning awards for Best Presentation and Best Brand with his innovative events company, OakShaw Events.

First year Food Business Management student, Kieran Chouhan and first year Agribusiness Management student, Jerry O’Sullivan, also won the regional award for Creativity and Innovation with their concept Locked In, a rehabilitation-driven clothing company that provides individuals in the prison system with a career, aiming to help with ex-convict reoffending. 

Kieran said: “Young Enterprise was a great experience for myself. It was very fulfilling to come up with a product with my mates and present the ideas to an array of people. 

“It was amazing to be backed and mentored by lecturers with first-hand experience of running a business and really gave me a feel of what it was like. I encourage everyone to take part in it as it has helped me develop my presenting skills as well as further developing initiative and professionalism.”