[ad_1]
A UConn student team ended 2023 on a high note by taking first place in the National Food Distribution Research Society (FDRS) Student Food Marketing Challenge.
The team consisted of three students from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in the College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources. John Daly ’23 ’24 (CAHNR), William Hyers ’24, and Jacob Tymczak ’25. Assistant Professor Christina Connolly organized the team.
Connolly previously worked at Caltech, which has a large agribusiness program, so she had experience organizing student teams for the competition. 2023 marked Connolly’s second year leading his UConn student team to his FDRS.
“I took it over when I was at Cal Poly and it was so much fun that when I moved to Connecticut I thought I’d try building a team here,” Connolly says.
Most teams come from areas with large agricultural sectors, such as the Midwest, making UConn’s entry unique.
As part of the competition, all teams are given a real-world problem and challenged to develop a strategy to deal with the problem at hand. The UConn team was assigned Metin LLC, an Uzbek company looking to expand into international markets beyond Russia. The team looked at a variety of food products – fresh and dried fruit – and identified the best overseas markets for those products.
This was a unique challenge as most problems stem from local agribusinesses.
“The company wasn’t that established, so it offered a lot of opportunities. In short, they said, ‘The whole world is your sandbox, what can we do to make money? ?’” Hiers said. “That allowed us to be creative.”
Teams were given an assignment and then given one week to research and prepare. During that time, they had the opportunity to ask questions about the challenge to the contest organizers. They then spent his week working out a solution.
The team spent late nights creating and recreating the solution.
“It was a lot of trial and error. Sometimes we would go down one street and realize there wasn’t much benefit to it, so we would switch to another street,” Daly says. “There must have been three or he had four final solution presentation drafts by the time he got to the final solution presentation draft. It was a very good one.”
In the end, the team decided to encourage the company to sell fresh fruit to China and dried fruit to the UK.
“Every solution you come up with has a seemingly endless list of pros and cons,” says Tymczak. “We have no experience exporting from Uzbekistan or knowledge of the language, so it was difficult to really weigh these pros and cons and try to understand what was going on.”
Teams had the opportunity to apply conceptual knowledge about the “4 Ps” (Product, Placement, Price, and Promotion) learned in class to real-life situations.
“What I wanted to get out of this experience was to work on real problems and work with real companies,” Hiers says. “And in that respect, it was definitely an eye-opening experience.”
The UConn team had to advance through the competition before taking home the top prize. This competition will consist of a virtual component and an in-person component. First, more than a dozen teams from across the country submitted video presentations. The top three teams were invited to present live in Washington, DC in November 2023.
In Washington, DC, teams gave 20-minute presentations followed by a Q+A session from a panel of judges. The Q+A allowed the team to demonstrate the research and thought that went into the project, and added an opportunity for experiential learning.
According to the team, the judges found their presentation to be outstanding due to the depth of its research and financial analysis, surpassing the work of other teams.
“I think we all work together really well,” Tymchak says. “We all have our strengths and it worked well for us and it never felt like we were in conflict.”
After the competition ended, the company received the solution created by the team.
“These are real customers, so any solutions that all three teams come up with are sent to Metin,” says Connolly. “So the outcome of this competition could have real consequences, but it’s not just theoretical.”
This research is related to CAHNR’s strategic vision area. Ensuring a vibrant and sustainable agricultural industry and food supply.
to follow UConn CAHNR on social media
[ad_2]
Source link
