Young Food Innovators Scoop Ecotrophelia Awards

21 Oct 2016 --- A Dragon’s Den-style European food ingredients competition has awarded young innovators for creating pioneering eco-friendly applications that stand a good chance of coming to market.

This year’s winner of the Ecotrophelia European competition was a French team who designed an alternative simple culinary aid that cuts out salt, monosodium glutamate and other ingredients. Similar to a stock cube, but instead the tablet is composed of just vegetables and cocoa butter and can be retained for up to six months at room temperature. 

CarréLéon is made of vegetable powers (62 percent - 65 percent) and comes in three recipes; leek, celery, cumin, pepper, tomato, basil and beet, carrot and garlic. 

The winners are from French engineering school ENSAIA, the National School of Agronomy and Food Industries. 

Scooping the silver prize was Belgian team for their healthy oats and whey crackers, developed by a young team from the Thomas More Kempen University college in Geel.

“We have made a healthy cracker out of oats and cheese whey and it comes in five flavors, is great as a breakfast, or together with cheese. It has no added sugar and is high in fiber,” say one of the students in the team. 

In third place was the UK team from Nottingham Trent University for their sustainable and indulgent non-dairy alternative to traditional ice cream, which is made using algal protein. The team was presented with an award and €2,000 prize at SIAL in Paris earlier this week. 

Their winning product - Från Början - was the brainchild of Ryan Clifford and Dominic Urban, who both graduated this year from the University with a BSc Food Science and Technology. 

Fifteen countries took part in Ecotrophelia Europe 2016: Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia Spain and the United Kingdom. The university teams competed to present their most visionary food creation, designed in an industrial process and adapted to European distribution channels. 

They had to pitch their innovations to a panel of 20 judges led by head of academic alliances, Nestlé Research Center, Ariane Andres. The goal of the competition is the creation of an eco-innovative food product, with a high market potential.