Snacking Around XU: Product Exposition, part three

This is the third and last installment of my recap of the Product Exposition last week by the marketing students of Xavier University - School of Business and Management. There is a lot food stuff to sample again. In case you're wondering if there were any non-food proposals, there were but since this is a food blog, the emphasis on the food products is easy to see. In case you missed any of the last two installments of this series, here are the the links for your convenience. Part 1 and part 2.

Some ube cake samples.

By this time, I was already a little overwhelmed by the number of sweet food products I had to evaluate. It didn't help matters that the next up was some ube cake. For a cake it was nothing extraordinary, in fact it was a mundane product that I felt was never going to break out in sales. I certainly wouldn't be buying it with my money. But I had to give props to the group for how they presented their product. I just wished they had a better concept to sell.

Camote ice cream!

Up next was a novel idea, ice cream from yams. Not exactly ube ice cream, but it's made from camote, a common rootcrop high in starch. I appreciate the idea of selling ice cream, they are rather labor intensive to make and a small challenge to store and transport. They were actually the only group proposing ice cream as a product to sell, but this group was only one assigned to me. I enjoyed the novelty of camote ice cream,  and they had two flavors too.

The group Whoopies came next after the ice cream and I admit that there position was not exactly conducive to their rating. They were selling these little sweet sandwiches which had cream cheese as filling. They really looked good too. It was unfortunate that my taste buds were overtaxed by all the  sweets that came before, and it wasn't able to cleanse my palate with a glass of water, I found their little sandwich cakes to be too salty because of the cream cheese filling. Maybe if I had come here earlier it would have taste differently but I thought their product didn't work for me.

Some group with fruit shakes came next, I was a little thirsty so it really hit the spot. I actually passed over their table earlier because they weren't ready to present yet, but it was good that I had some beverages to sample that I held in reserve. The product itself was just what I needed then.

Love on Top is an appropriate name
 for a group making viand toppings from banana hearts.

The last two tables to judge just came in time for me. At least they weren't sweet and they were savory. The penultimate product proposal was a meatball made from banana hearts by the group Love On Top. As long as they weren't sweet, they were fine with me.

Ended my stint as a panelist
with one of the better products at the exposition.

The last product was actually one of the best of day. A group made some empanadas which came in three variants. I was only able to try one and I think it was the best one, it had a meaty beef filling and it was tasty. They even had dips to give even more flavors. I also liked it that it had a thinner shell that most commercially available empamadas I've had. Oh, before I forget, the group called themselves Pinas Empanadas.

So that ended my stint as a panelist for the Product Exposition. There were really great concepts there. I hope those would be able to move on to the next stage of the implementation. I actually I visited a couple more tables after I finished judging. I was just trying to see what the other groups were planning to take to the market. The last table that I actually visited sold honey and they mixed it with some flavors. It was great to end there, they offered free tea which after all those sweets was just about the perfect way to end my rounds.