The George Washington Carver Food Research Institute (GWCFRI) launched its inaugural Explore Ag STEAM Camp in Charlotte, NC, July 15-26, 2024, with the theme, “Giving Ag Swag.” Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) members and GWCFRI founders Angela Cauley and Ian Blount (shown below, left) welcomed 16 local high school students to the no-cost 10-day camp, designed to introduce underrepresented youth to careers in the science, technology, engineering, arts, and math (STEAM) disciplines within the food and agriculture space.

George Washington Carver Food Research Institute founders Angela Cauley (right) and Ian Blount

inaugural Explore Ag STEAM Camp students

The camp, supported by partners and sponsors Urban League of Central Carolinas, Deep Roots Farm, Kalsec, and Ally Financial, immersed the participating 15- to 18-year-olds in hands-on activities to explore the various facets of agriculture and food production from farm-to-fork. By interacting with food scientists, entrepreneurs, and industry professionals while touring an organic farm, a commercial kitchen, post-harvest research labs, and a pilot processing plant throughout the experience, campers came away with a new appreciation of how food is produced and what career pathways available to them in food and agriculture, according to Cauley, executive director, GWCFRI.

“We invited 16 urban high school students who knew very little about the food industry to participate in our program,” Cauley explains. “The Explore Ag STEAM Camp was a real adventure. We taught them about the industry, the science and the business, and we took them out into the world so that they could actually see how food is grown, developed, and made so they could experience it for themselves.”

inaugural Explore Ag STEAM Camp

inaugural Explore Ag STEAM Camp

The students’ adventure at Explore Ag STEAM Camp began with a journey of self-discovery to identify their talents and career interests in a classroom setting. They also received a comprehensive overview of the food industry, from how food is grown and produced to product ideation and development to processing and post-harvest activities, and the types of STEAM careers that would align well in those industry stages.

On Day 2, campers were split into teams, or micro-businesses, and introduced to the camp’s “client,” Chef Claude Booker, founder and CEO of Ohio-based Booker’s Soul Food Starters (shown on computer screen, above left). The teams were tasked with developing a new branded item for Booker’s company, which makes pantry-ready soul food seasoning kits as starters for Southern-style macaroni and cheese, collard greens, candied yams, and peach cobbler. As part of a camp competition, the chef challenged the student teams to come up with a cornbread product as a line extension to the company’s current offerings. Each team was assigned a different goal, either to develop a product with an enhanced nutritional benefit, a unique flavor profile, or an item completely transformed into a more value-added item. The teams all targeted the same consumer group: women over age 50.

“The idea was, how do we tap into these urban Gen Z teams to create that next product that's going to align with Chef Booker’s brand and actually meet the needs of his target consumer?” Cauley explained. “How do you make this item targeted to a woman in this demographic that would make her bypass all these other products and actually lock into yours?”

Cauley says that campers studied the fundamentals of product ideation and development to come up with competition products that would meet the chef’s brief. They learned how to research and identify the target consumer’s preferences, such as health challenges and nutrition benefits, flavor profiles, shopping patterns, price points, and so on. The teens also learned how to conduct a market assessment to determine competitive items already available, what consumers were paying, and whether they were buying online or in-store.

“We did a mini IFT-style Food Innovation Lab, where students were introduced to different functional ingredients that had the nutritional benefits Chef Booker was looking for and formulation concepts,” says Cauley, “as well as teaching them about the four P’s—price, placement, promotion, and product. We covered a lot to give them a grounding in developing products that would make sense as the next line extension to this brand.”

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students visited the Deep Roots CPS Farm

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students visited the Deep Roots CPS Farm

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students visited the Deep Roots CPS Farm, a 7-acre urban organic farm business located on a family homestead in northwest Charlotte, NC. The farm grows a variety of organic vegetables, herbs, and fruits, maintains a colony of bees, and raises goats, hens, and broiler chickens. Deep Roots farmhands shared best practices in sustainable living with the campers, including urban agriculture, regenerative farming, beekeeping, canning and preserving foods.

“Most of our students had never visited a working farm before and the joy on their faces was the most telling sign of how much they loved it,” Cauley says. “The tour included a chef who took product grown on the farm and prepared a meal for them, farm to table, just so that they could actually see how food is prepared. You harvest it, you clean it, you chop it, you cook it, you eat it.”

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students enjoyed expert-guided tours of the NC Food Innovation Lab

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students enjoyed expert-guided tours of the NC Food Innovation Lab

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students enjoyed expert-guided tours of the NC Food Innovation Lab, which operates 16,000 sq ft of cutting-edge R&D space and is the nation’s only facility with cGMP capabilities dedicated to supporting plant-based food innovators. The lab, located at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, NC, provided the teen campers with practical insights into the fundamental phases of product development and access to its culinary kitchen and pilot plant.

Earlier in camp, the teens had completed ServSafe training for food safety and worked with a baker who helped them understand recipe development and formulation steps, along with basic math skills necessary to perform ingredient cost calculations. In the culinary kitchen, the campers used this knowledge and scientific methods to explore different variables of flavor and functionality while designing their final competition products. The teams incorporated into their prototypes a variety of ingredients generously supplied by Kalsec, Bell Flavors & Fragrances, and Accurate Ingredients.

“In the first few days of camp, we had a session on food as medicine, where students learned about foods and functional ingredients like hemp protein, plum powder, and ashwagandha that offer health benefits like stress reduction, brain and cardiovascular health, and bone loss prevention,” adds Cauley. “They learned about mindful eating and how different foods and natural ingredients such as ginger, turmeric, and cayenne pepper that we typically use to flavor food have medicinal benefits, too. This information definitely informed the final product formulations for the competition products.”

The campers were highly engaged during their visit to the NC Food Innovation Lab, all the way through the pilot plant because they were able to see each integral step before a product makes it to the retail shelf, Cauley says. “You can do everything in this plant, from extractions to retorting and canning, to blending, homogenizing and pasteurizing,” she says. “All of these urban kids have seen a KitchenAid blender, but not a large-scale mixer in an industrial setting, much less retort machines or a wall of scraped surface kettles. So, that step between the kitchen level to the pilot plant, where they could envision commercially producing food in a large-scale facility, was eye-opening and exciting for them.”

Explore Ag STEAM students were also able to tour North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s (NC A&T) Center for Excellence in Post-Harvest Technologies

Explore Ag STEAM students were also able to tour North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s (NC A&T) Center for Excellence in Post-Harvest Technologies

Explore Ag STEAM students were also able to tour North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s (NC A&T) Center for Excellence in Post-Harvest Technologies (CEPHT), also located at the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis, NC. With 12,000 sq ft of research space, NC A&T fosters interdisciplinary research in post-harvest technologies and operates several research facilities to aid producers, processors, distributors and retailers with all aspects of post-harvest processing, including packaging, consumer research, analysis of food components, and development of new food products.

Cauley says that students had the opportunity to learn and get an in-depth understanding of the mechanics of post-harvest processing programs and systems, including improving processes to extend shelf life and control foodborne pathogens, developing new, value-added products from agricultural commodities, evaluating and modeling consumer acceptance of food products, and optimizing parameters for process engineering and packaging.

“At the NC A&T research facilities, our students were exposed to all things science-based post-harvest,” Cauley notes. “They were looking at food microbiology and food chemistry, at food processing, packaging, and food engineering steps. By visiting each different pilot plant and research lab, these young people had the opportunity to get a real-world view of the types of STEAM careers that exist and that they might want to pursue in the future.”

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students

Explore Ag STEAM Camp students

At the NC A&T CEPHT, Explore Ag STEAM Camp students also gained insight into the post-harvest processes and practices that would impact the success of their competition products, says Cauley. At this point in the camp, she notes, the three teams had completed prototypes for the Booker’s Soul Food Starters line extension cornbread product, which were designed with a target audience of women 50-plus in mind:

  • Team 1, challenged to improve the nutritional quality of the cornbread, incorporated into their design hemp protein, ashwagandha, and omega fatty acid ingredients into the seasoning mix to promote brain health and reduce stress and anxiety.
  • Team 2, challenged to develop a unique flavor profile for the soul food starter seasoning mix line, created the “stuffin’ muffin,” a cornbread product seasoned with natural flavors commonly found in a Thanksgiving stuffing and stuffed with fresh herbs, onions, garlic, and bell peppers.
  • Team 3, challenged with completely transforming a traditional cornbread product into a more value-added item, created a cornbread waffle (a spin on chicken and waffles) infused with potlikker, also known as pot liquor, a flavorful nutrient-rich broth left over after cooking greens and meat in Southern cuisine.
team pitches for the Booker’s Soul Food Starters product development competition

team pitches for the Booker’s Soul Food Starters product development competition

Near the end of the 10-day camp, Explore Ag STEAM Camp students put into practice the business and entrepreneurial skills they’d learned along the way to prepare their team pitches for the Booker’s Soul Food Starters product development competition. They drew on their newfound knowledge about Lean Six Sigma manufacturing principles, formulation recordkeeping, ingredient and food traceability protocols, landed costs, and market assessments to create the pitches. As part of the pitch, the teams filmed, edited, and produced their own commercials and prepared professional presentation slide decks for judging. Students also had a class in dressing for success and public speaking.

Cauley says that one of the most important parts of preparing campers for their product pitches was teaching them about the different costs that are associated with each food production step. Learning Lean Six Sigma methodologies to improve performance, reduce waste, and eliminate defects and keying in on landed costs (i.e., the total cost of a product on its journey from the factory floor to the buyer's door) helped students home in on the potential for successful distribution of their products in the real world.

“We had multiple spreadsheets feeding into a master spreadsheet, where students input all the steps and the costs of those steps,” Cauley explains. “They fed in ingredients used, testing, packaging materials, direct and indirect labor, and so on, as well as the landed costs, which showed not only the cost of producing the item but how much it cost to actually get product distributed to a brick-and-mortar Walmart or an Amazon warehouse or direct-to-consumer through your own company website.

“So, they could now see all of the costs, including how much money they’d make through the different distribution channels,” Cauley adds. “The students were able to take that in-depth understanding of the unit cost and marry it with their learnings about Lean Six Sigma methods to then discover how to drive redundancies out of their operations. It really upped their games in terms of providing high-level product pitches to the camp’s client.”

Team 3’s potlikker-infused chicken and waffle cornbread product earned the top spot in the Explore Ag STEAM Camp product development competition
Team 3’s potlikker-infused chicken and waffle cornbread product earned the top spot in the Explore Ag STEAM Camp product development competition

Team 3’s potlikker-infused chicken and waffle cornbread product earned the top spot in the Explore Ag STEAM Camp product development competition. Members of the first-place winning team each received $300 in prize money.

Cauley says she did not need to wait until the end of camp to know that the 16 Explore Ag STEAM Camp participants are all winners. “This is just one example, and there are many others, but there was one student who had never been to a lab before. At the beginning of camp, he thought he wanted a career in supply chain management,” Cauley explains, “but when he got into a lab and he saw all this cool food science equipment, his eyes got large with excitement. It was definitely a “wow” moment for him.

“So, to be able to see the wonder in the eyes of these young people when they have that aha moment, when that light bulb goes off, when they learn something that they've never seen before, or when they can see themselves in a STEAM career that they could not have imagined before coming to our camp,” she says, trailing off thoughtfully, “well, there is nothing like it.”

Cauley notes that GWCFRI plans to expand that opportunity for wonder to three Explore Ag STEAM Camps nationwide in 2025.ft

About the Author

Julie Bricher
Julie Larson Bricher is Science and Technology editor of Food Technology magazine ([email protected]).