OC business students savour fruits of their labour
What do you do with your leftover fruit waste?
For a group of Okanagan College business students, repurposing apples that otherwise would have gone to waste into healthy snacks was the logical solution.
The resulting project, FruitSnaps, earned them a top project award at a Western Canadian college business event in Calgary last month.
The college fielded teams in four categories, with FruitSnaps taking top spot in the Scotiabank Climate Change Challenge. Teams from OC also finished as runners-up in the Youth Empowerment and Entrepreneurship Challenges.
Started in the fall of 2018, FruitSnaps is a Vernon- and Penticton-based project that sees students partnering with the North Okanagan Valley Gleaners Society facility, where unused apples from local orchards are dehydrated into snacks for local schools.
“Kids absolutely love FruitSnaps, and some schools have been going through more than 50 pounds every two weeks,” second-year Vernon student Karsten Ensz said.
“The goal right now is to get FruitSnaps into more schools and finding ways to make the project self-sustainable.”
Ensz, Abigail Underwood, Sheryl
MacIntosh and Marin Carruthers are now focusing their efforts on expanding the project.
“We focused on how scalable FruitSnaps is and the impact it has on our community,” he said. “A lot of people don’t realize that food insecurity is occurring in our community, and that a lot of kids go to school without a breakfast.”
Okanagan College School of Business professor Andrew Klingel served as the FruitSnaps team coach, overseeing the project and offering guidance and support.
“Despite the demands of work, school and life, this team still finds the time to contribute to their community. In less than two years the project has grown from an idea to being available now to more than 4,000 kids in our community.”
Students Emily Pilon, Isaac Hossmann, Rachel Wehrmann and Maya Samaddar came in second place in the TD Entrepreneurship Challenge with their project, GreenScreen.
Run in partnership with Kelowna
Cell Repair and Evangel Church, GreenScreen is a technology drive, offering local residents a chance to recycle or repair their tech.
In the first year alone, the initiative kept over 150 pieces of technology out of the landfill.
The Accelerate Youth project, involving students Zack Plaxton, Nicole Sapieha, Zach Paton and Stephen Kucher, also finished as runner-up in the Scotiabank Youth Empowerment Challenge.
The project helps at-risk youth learn valuable life lessons, from budgeting and financial literacy to goal setting.
Danielle Walker, Deziree Day, Christian Santos and Mitchell Kucher gave an enthusiastic presentation, but did not make the podium. The national college business competition is scheduled for May 19-21 in Toronto.
Winners of each competition may represent Canada at the Enactus World Cup in Utrecht, Netherlands, in September.