The Tilda Challenge is back for 2024! This year we are focussing on sustainability in the food and drink sector. As part of developing a delicious dish based on a Tilda rice product, we want student to consider aspects such as by-products, green skills, packaging, kitchen waste, and using local produce.
What is it?
Sustainability and the reduction of food waste is a hot topic at the moment. The UK wastes almost 10 million tonnes of food every year. Almost 2 tonnes of this comes from the food industry and less than 1% is recycled for human consumption.
Tilda Foodservice, working together with Food and Drink Federation (FDF) Scotland, is delighted to launch the Tilda Sustainability Challenge 2024.
Designed to develop an understanding of sustainability, employability skills and the skills required to work in food and drink this activity supports healthy eating and social responsibility, the Tilda Food Waste Challenge is open to all S1 – 3 and pupils across Scotland.
We are challenging pupils to design a new rice-based food product alongside any by product or that utilises ‘food waste’ and uses local produce.
How about taking a traditional product or a food linked to a festival and giving it a twist that can help to reduce food waste – think about resealable packaging, or portion control packaging so if you don’t eat it all in one go you can save some for later, can you use food products that might otherwise go into landfill?? Think about environmentally friendly cooking processes, utensils and packaging and how would they reduce food waste during production.
Challenge criteria
Pupils should:
- Work on their own or in small teams of no more than 4 to take inspiration from food trends, festivals and other sources influencing the dishes we eat. Think innovative snack foods, what’s available locally, different foods for different lifestyles… sporty, healthy, plant based. Pupils may wish to make links with their catering staff, local food producers and farms as part of this process.
- Conduct their own research to investigate what food waste can be repurposed.
- Use their imagination and creativity to come up with a product that has the ‘wow ’factor is unique and memorable using any one Tilda’s ambient dry rice’s (* see list) as the base ingredient.
- Cost their product accurately and provide a recommended retail price.
- Design a marketing campaign to promote their product. We would also ask that as part of this process, pupils investigate where rice comes from, how it is processed, its economic importance to local economies and its health benefits.
- Think about how their dish could be made sustainably and identify ways in which the product can reduce environmental impact and provide details as to how this could be achieved.
- Entrants should also include nutritional information about their product and potential allergens, see Natashas Law
- You might want to investigate Love Food Hate Waste for inspiration.
SOURCES OF SUPPORT
To help schools entering the Tilda Food Sustainability Challenge 2024 we have compiled a list of websites and some additional materials that might be helpful.
The Tilda Food Service site hosts a couple of videos that demonstrate Tilda working in an education setting during a Street Food Takeover at Huddersfield University. In this film the head chef talks about how Tilda lends itself to creating different dishes, the yield and quality of rice, which showcase the versatility of Tilda products.
There are also recipes on this site which teachers and students can look through for inspiration.
There is also a link to The Rice Association website which has some useful information about Rice in the UK, types of rice and the rice milling process.
A Tilda B Corp poster and a presentation about how Tilda supports Marys Meals is also available.
Other websites that may be useful and that support Food Education and sustainability Zero Waste Scotland are included.
View this presentation developed by Victoria Kemp, which outlines separate tasks within the challenge. Victoria has given her permission for this to be used by all entrants.