After a drum roll, the Queally Center for Admissions assembly room erupted into applause and four University of Richmond seniors ran up to the stage to take a bow after the team’s product, Korra, was announced the winner of the annual Bench Top Innovation Great Bake Off.
The teams this year were given the theme of canned coffee or tea.
Korra, a protein coffee with natural electrolytes, aims to provide sustainable energy through 100 milligrams of caffeine and 20 grams of protein in one 8.4 fluid once can.
The coffee has a salted vanilla flavor that includes coconut water, protein powder and sea salt. Now, it will be commercialized with funding from the Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship Initiative.
Bench Top Innovation is a year-long course through the Robins School of Business where seniors from all disciplines come together in teams to create a food product from start to finish. The teams pitch their product at the Great Bake Off and a panel of judges determines which team’s product will be further developed with the help of the provided funding.
They had 56 days to come up with the finished product presented at the Great Bake-Off. Each team worked with Tyler Bethold, the Interim Executive Director of Dining Services, to create their product in the kitchen over the span of 27 days. The teams also worked with students from Virginia Commonwealth University Brand Center to design their product image.
“Just getting to work with my team, and not just my team, but all the other teams as well [has been a highlight],” said Korra co-founder senior Sequoia Kunkel. “I think because this has been such an intense process, we've definitely had a lot of team bonding going on across teams even, yeah, and we're all just really excited.”
Kunkel co-founded Korra with seniors Ayah Karar, Matthew Lynch, and Emerson Linden.
“The next step is a lot of learning on how to launch a brand. Now we have the rest of this semester and all of the next semester to find out how to get it on shelves,” Kunkel said.
The other three teams competing were Afty, a horchata inspired oat milk latte, Immort, a vanilla latte based with added adaptogenic mushrooms, and Chai’d and True, a turmeric chai.
Students, faculty, alumni and community members attending the Great-Bake Off had the opportunity to try each of the different products.
This was the first time attending the Bake Off for junior Amani Jamil.
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“To be able to see it in person is really cool because I remember a friend telling me for the Chai’d and True ‘oh I’m going to try and do a chai product and see if that works out’ and now seeing that it did work I was like ‘yay good for her’,” Jamil said.
Everyone at the event had the chance to drink the different beverages from each team, but the panel of judges determined the winner.
The panel consisted of David Blanchard, the founder of Blanchard’s Coffee Roasting Company, Tyler Betzhold, executive chef at University of Richmond, Ari Sorken, former CFO of BAI Water, and Susan Brown, vice president of gourmet foods for TJMaxx Companies. It was the first time in the five years of the program that the panel consisted entirely of people with connections to University of Richmond.
The idea to create a class focused on the process of entrepreneurship was brought to Miguel Quiñones, Dean of the Robins School of Business, by Shane Emmett, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, and Joel Mier, professor Lecturer of Marketing and professor for the Bench Top Innovation course.
“They came into my office about five years ago and said, you know, we’re going to have a class where students make food and stuff that we are going to sell, and people are going to eat it,” Quiñones said. “It reflects the vision of our university community, which continues to invest in hands-on interdisciplinary learning that prepares students, not just for jobs but lives of purpose and impact, which is what we’re about.”
For the rest of the academic year, the 16 students will collaborate with a manufacturer in Chicago to finalize the product and launch Korra as a revenue-generating business.
Contact lifestyle writer Lena Lantz-Trissel at lena.lantztrissel@richmond.edu
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