The second edition of DuPont Nutrition and Health’s DuPont NutriScholars Awards (DNA), which concluded recently, focussed on bringing innovative ideas in five seleced baked food challenges using DuPont’s Danisco range of ingredients, including breads, cakes, muffins, cupcakes, biscuits and baked snacks.

It is a pan-India food science programme aimed at fuelling innovation and ideation in food industry, by bridging the gap between industry and academia. It delivers hands-on product development experience for students across food science, food technology and relevant interdisciplinary fields from Indian academia.

It’s What’s Inside: The Bakery Challenge
The programme attracted proposals with solutions to provide innovative taste and texture in baked products. This year’s programme presented awards under distinctive categories, including the vegetarian cake treat, innovation in muffins and cupcakes, healthy breads, gluten-free and healthy cookies and out-of-the-box bakery innovations. The first season of the programme awarded ingenious products in the local and ethnic food categories.

Roadshows
The current edition of the programme received overwhelming support and reach among food science and technology students across India. DuPont Nutrition and Health and its execution partner, F1rst, reached out to over 250 academic institutes all over the country, connecting with over 10,000 students for the contest.

DuPont Nutrition and Health took the initiative to meet students and sensitise them about current challenges in the bakery industry through their roadshows. This season witnessed roadshows in 11 different cities from eight Indian states.

The platform provided students a practical perspective of the food industry and the need for ingredient solutions in creation of the packaged food products. Students were presented the programme guidelines, technical and ingredient-based solutions for overcoming hurdles during the product development and improvement in the bakery segment.

These direct interactions during roadshows paved the way for facilitating knowledge transfer between technological innovators from food ingredient industry and students.

Proposals
The programme had participation from over 75 institutes across the country and received 215 applications in total. Most of the proposals were detailed and aimed to achieve common goals, such as improving nutrition levels, enriching micronutrients, creating appealing baked goods with millets. Of these 215, 50 excellent ideas were scrutinised and shortlisted to proceed to product development in Phase 2.

These proposals were evaluated by the technical expert team from DuPont, based on innovativeness, industrial feasibility and commercial viability.

Response
The 50 finalist teams were seleced and supported with technical expertise and experimental fund to optimise their product proposal to their award category criteria. All teams were technically mentored and supervised by their faculty member and DuPont Nutrition and Health experts to fine tune their product formulations and outcomes.

Logistics
The prepared bakery products were collected from the 50 finalist teams from 29 different cities from 11 states with the specialised logistical support, which involved transporting baked goods in refrigerated and cold storage conditions.

“Each product was prioritised and stored in specialised storage facility in the DuPont Innovation Application Centre. These bakery products were prepared according to the serving instructions to conduct sensory evaluation,” said Sunil K Nair, group manager, multiple food applications and open innovation lead, DuPont Nutrition and Health, South Asia.

evaluation
The jury panel comprised 20 expert members from academia and food industry, including technical experts from DuPont. All the jury panel members were given brief introduction on the technical and sensory scoring criteria of the project reports and products, to ensure fair and equitable adjudication of the innovative solutions.

Product evaluation was conducted in the DuPont Nutrition and Health office in Gurgaon. Each of the bakery products evaluated had different innovative approach, taste, texture, design and packaging technology.

All five product categories had their own challenges and the students nailed those challenges and delivered novel as well as good-tasting products. Cakes, rusk, nutritional bar, and baked chips were the highlight products in the out-of-the-box bakery innovation category.

One award-winning idea in each category was selected to win the cash award of Rs 50,000. Each member of the winning teams receives a certificate, and one representative of each winning team, nominated by the team leader, was provided with an opportunity to attend the DuPont NutriScholars Awards ceremony.

DuPont created the NutriScholars Awards as a promising approach to bring technical solutions for challenges in improving the nutrition and health values of baked food products. The programme aims to bring up the innovative minds and shape up the future career of the students in the growing food applications sector.

Molding the future innovation
DuPont Nutrition and Health has resolved to continue its outreach to Indian scientific and technological academicians in the upcoming years. This programme is an evidence to the fact that industry-academia collaborations for research and innovation can bring immense exposure to the students and channelise their minds to derive useful and innovative developments.