The Family Consumer Science students at Pavilion Senior High School and Middle School have been recognized for the creativity and hard work in coming up with a beef-based food product.
The competition was sponsored by the NY Beef Council and New York Agriculture in the Classroom.
The middle school students competed with students from eight other middle schools and took first place and the two, just two, seniors in the class, came in second in a competition among 21 high schools.
The $350 total in prize money was used to purchase a new Weber grill from Crocker's Ace Hardware in Le Roy.
The middle school students came up with a product they called Grabbables. It consisted of a meatball, Hawaiian roll, and mozzarella.
"It was really fun," said eighth-grader Alexa Wolcott, who was in charge of quality control for the middle school students.
"Well," added the group's CEO, Adeline Milligan, "you get food in the end."
The two classes were served a catered lunch yesterday of BBQ beef, baked beans, potato salad, and salad, courtesy the Beef Council.
The competition required the students to develop a recipe, determine a target market, come up with a marketing campaign and cost out their expenses and anticipated revenue.
"There's a lot to manage," Milligan said. "You learn what actually goes into running a business."
The competition is meant to be demanding, said Cindy Phillips, director of nutritional education for the Beef Council.
"This is a project that really challenges them to apply all of their classroom learning, from math to critical thinking, social studies, into an experiential project," she said.
Catherine Johnston, AKA "Miss J," is Pavilion's Consumer Family Science teacher. She said it was important to her to get her students involved in the competition because of the lessons they would learn.
"I really want to promote the fact that Family Consumer Science is the next step from ag," Miss J said. "We are the processors. We freeze things. We dry things. We can things. We learn all about food science in my class.
"I'm hoping students want to go into the new factories that are around here and become lab techs. There are a lot of job opportunities that go into this besides being a chef."
