February has been such a busy month for the team as we have been reaching an important point in this stage of the MilaCel project – the tasting! Successful tasting trials in the community will help the continuation of the project. What we, as a consortium, are aiming to achieve is so important. Not just for us, but for the community as a whole and we don’t want to lose that momentum and passion. It has been amazing how much help and support we have been offered from the amazing local producers around us. We have been very lucky to be working on this project in the middle of a Golden Age in Welsh Food Produce. There are so many strong Welsh businesses in the food and drinks sector and they have so much community pride and spirit.
The amount of community support and praise which we have had this month has been overwhelming. Our first official tasting session was at Ganolfan Nefyn on the 28th February 2019 and the turn out was incredible. It was all made possible due to the wonderful people in the community around Nefyn Primary School who spread the word and turned up on the day to support us and I would like to thank each of them for making this event a success.
The 2 hour session, which ran from 10am, saw 40 children, parents, grandparents and carers show up to try the prepared samples of reduced-fat and reduced-sugar cakes, sausages and yoghurt, which were all manufactured using our functional apple fibre produced in North Wales. The event had such a personal touch and it was lovely to see so many parents and carers interested in what we have managed to achieve and, more importantly, how it could benefit their children. The children enjoyed trying the different foods and loved the tasting sheets which we designed to be fun to colour in. One carer in particular praised us for the creative method we have used to gather the information on their preferences and it warmed my heart to go through the pages later and see all of the coloured shaped and wonderful artwork drawn on the back.
We have had such a positive response from the community as a whole and will be taking that forward to arrange more tasting events in the months to come. Thank You all!