Students won a combined total of $7,000 in scholarships at the North American Meat Institute’s Collegiate SausageFest Competition during the association’s annual Meat Industry Summit this week in Carlsbad, California. The inaugural competition was held concurrently with the Meat Institute’s popular SausageFest event, during which association members prepared their best sausage or other ready-to-eat product for a chance to claim the coveted “Hold the Mustard” Award.
In this year’s collegiate competition, teams from Fresno State University and Texas Tech University developed innovative sausage products, labels and marketing plans that were reviewed by a panel of judges composed of industry representatives. The judges conducted interviews with the student teams to evaluate the feasibility of their plans, including assessments of scalability, pricing and other commercialization factors.