Enterprising students have been putting their skills to the test in an ice cream selling competition.
As part of the Oxford Entrepreneurs’ “OxPrentice” series, competitors in the G&D’s Challenge were asked to come up with a flavour of ice cream and pitch it to a panel of experts. At the end of 6th week, the best two flavours were made, and the ice cream that sold the most was declared the winner.
The two teams went head to head with flavours “Jaffaholic”, made of jaffa cake chunks soaked in cointreau, and a festive ice cream which contained chunks of gingerbread and white chocolate.
Thirteen tubs of each ice cream were produced and distributed to the three G&D’s shops around Oxford. The ice cream went on sale at noon on Friday of 6th, and the winner was the flavour which sold out first, or which had sold the most by midnight on Monday. Both teams were given a budget of £200 for ingredients and £100 for marketing.
The winning flavour was Jaffaholic, which triumphed by a margin of just half a tub.
Ushma Soneji, Hertford College, from the Jaffaholic team said, “We came up with the idea because we wanted something that hadn’t been done before, but would work well with the other flavours available at G&D’s so it could realistically become a long term regular flavour.”
Suzanne Winder, a Hertford graduate, and also on the winning team said, “We had the brainstorming on Wednesday when the idea was chosen, the ice cream was made on Thursday while we got our strategy together (fitted around work), it went on sale Friday lunchtime and I spent most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday entirely focussed on telling everyone about my flavour and letting them taste it. We weren’t really warned about how quick the challenge would be, we just had to get on with it.”
Tom Corcoran, manager of the St. Aldate’s G&D’s, said, “One of the things we were looking for in the competition was that they had to be able to source local ingredients. It was partly because that’s what we prefer to do wherever possible, but also it ensures for us that if the competition was running on Wednesday, as it was, we could guarantee that we could have the ice cream on sale on Friday.
“We could literally go to the same places that they’d sourced the products giving us the prices, everything we needed to know, so it made it very straightforward for us to then go out and make their flavour as they wanted it to appear.”
Hayato Maedo, OxPrentice director, commented, “I’m delighted with the event. We managed to hold a really cool event, the companies were pleased with the outcome, the feedback from the participants was (I think) the best we’ve ever had (averaging in the region of 9 out of 10) and what’s more, one of the winning teams managed to get onto BBC Oxford radio to talk about their flavour.”
Corcoran added, “We were very impressed with the quality of the flavour ideas they came up with and they were quite diverse. Both of the two finalists flavours were fantastic and we promised that we would repeat the winning flavour throughout the course of the year anyway but in actual fact I would be very keen to produce both of the flavours and they will probably be a flavour on and off throughout the year and probably for a few years to come as well.”
Other entrants included Super G, an energy ice cream which was targeted at sports teams and gym enthusiasts, and Banoffee Crunch and Nostalgic Nana, an ice cream based on the banana flavoured sweets from the 1980s.
The panel of experts was made up of managers from G&D’s, the marketing firm Purple Frog, and a marketing representative from Nestle.
Jordan Poulton, President of the Oxford Entrepreneurs, explained the motivation behind
the competition, “We want to help people learn business skills by testing themselves in a risk-free environment. They don’t have to invest any money, only some time, and they get the chance to prove their abilities in real life entrepreneurial scenarios. We have a number of events lined up for the year, and we also have an iPhone App under development at the moment from the previous OxPrentice challenge.”
