The Global Enterprise Challenge, organised by the Young Enterprise Trust and sponsored and hosted by the Massey University, had 80 year-12 and 13 secondary pupils from across New Zealand take part.
The challenge was to create a product or service that would reduce food waste in New Zealand and stop people going hungry in one of the world’s poorest countries.
A team of seven students led by joint managing directors Ashleigh Bennett, of Diocesan School for Girls, Auckland, and Aimee Groom, of Taradale High School, Napier, came up with an idea for a device that uses food leftovers to help feed livestock in Mozambique, and won the national final of the Challenge.
The team named their company Envirolink, and their device was called ‘The Granulator’. The food processor, a household based machine, takes waste food, mulches and pasteurises it, then dehydrates it into a fine grain that can be used to feed chickens and pigs.
The other members of the team, who took part in the event at Massey University’s Albany campus, were: Bethany Balmer of Tawa College, Wellington; Xinran Chen, St Cuthbert’s College; Edvince Hermanoche, Westlake Boys’ High School; Carissa Heunes, Long Bay College and Christina Mills, of Massey High School (all Auckland).
“There is nothing you cannot put in The Granulator,” Ms Groom said. “It reduces waste in New Zealand because less goes to landfill and what was once waste now has a purpose.”
The team selected Mozambique as a suitable country to receive the product because of political stability. They spoke to World Vision and Foodstuffs, which would retail the item at $200, about their idea. Ms Bennett said their business plan included a marketing campaign outlining the key social goal of caring for the global environment.
Corporate mentor Paul Bolte, from Albany-based firm Bartercard, said he never doubted the team would win.
“The whole concept that the students came up with is fantastic. An extra drive is required from the business community to get behind such concepts and make them happen. At Bartercard we will use all our contacts to support this,” Paul told Northern Focus. “The team had two strong co-leaders, which made them very powerful because they were able to delegate and lead in separate areas; it is very rare to see young people have the maturity to be able to deal with that,” he said.
Regional chief executive of the Albany campus, Professor John Raine, described the energy of the students taking part in this challenge as amazing. He told them, “If you can bring the same application and ideas to your own businesses I am sure the country is in good hands.”
John thinks that subjectively, success at school and university does translate into career success, and the Ministry of Education collates data which show that graduates on average, so many years out from high school, earn significantly more than non-graduates.
“My own experience is that some of the most creative and business capable engineers I taught at the University of Canterbury were not by any means the top academic performers, but were people who were not afraid to challenge ideas and test the boundaries,” he told Northern Focus.
“I believe engagement by business to support programmes such as the Young Enterprise Trust schemes for school students, provision of business and other internships for students, provision of scholarships for university students with good ideas at undergraduate level to take them on to a postgraduate degree with a product development focus, and engineering final year team projects solving industry based problems, all help build a business and entrepreneurship focus in our young people,” he added.
The winning team’s proposal then competed against 20 others in a global online contest. The overall winner was Indonesia, which also came up with a way to turn food waste into animal feed.
