Australia's best new foods

UNSW Food Science students have dominated a national competition for new food products, taking first and second place with some healthy twists on traditional favourites.

Karen Chan, Tanid Nganthavee and Noradilah Hamid from UNSW's School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering took first place and a $2000 prize at the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology's Student Product Development Competition with their creation, Ve Bread - bread rich in vegetable content and targeted at fussy young eaters.

The motivation behind the product, which incorporates dehydrated carrot, sweet potato, pumpkin and corn, was to give parents an easy way to increase children's vegetable intake.

"Statistics have shown that an estimated 10 percent of adults and 38 percent of children are meeting the dietary guidelines for recommended daily intake of vegetables," Karen said.

"In the brainstorming process we came up with other ways to deliver vegetables such as vegetable donuts - but donuts are unhealthy products - and baked vegetable muffin bars, but according to statistics 90 percent of Australians consume bread on a daily basis so bread was the logical choice."

The second UNSW Engineering team of Janet Liu, Hongxue Zhao, Xin Sun and Grace Liang, were highly commended at the Melbourne-based awards for their product, Bubble R-ice Cream - a low-sugar ice-cream sandwich confectionery using rice bubbles as the biscuit base.

The team submitted coffee and rose-flavoured samples for judging and won the sensory evaluation category of the national awards along with some encouraging feedback from the judges.

"They said this project really had a possibility to get into the market and that it was a good idea, so maybe we need to talk to some ice cream factories," Janet said.

Watch the video on UNSW TV

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