Two students from the University of Liège - Gembloux Agro-BioTech will be representing Belgium at the European final of the Ecotrophelia competition being held in Paris as part of SIAL, the world's biggest food trade fair. These ‘Student Trophies for Food Innovation’ reward young people's creativity in promoting healthy, sustainable food. Full'iz ( full for complete and easy for easy) is a nutritious takeaway breakfast. The aim? To give people in a hurry a balanced start to the day.
We met up at SIAL in Paris with these two freshly-qualified Agro-Bio Tech students, who were really looking forward to presenting their product to an international panel of judges. Full'iz is competing with 15 other European products.
Guillaume Thébault had already trained as an agricultural engineer and Brieuc-William Migeon as a dietician. They met during the Master's course in innovation management and food design that they took after their respective studies. Their complementary backgrounds enabled them to combine their knowledge to create an innovative and realistic project, which they were able to bring to fruition with the help of the Smart Gastronomy Lab. This Walloon living lab advises agri-food companies and looks at how new technologies can contribute to ‘better eating’ (research and development).
‘The agri-food sector has suffered from a poor image in recent years, with repeated scandals such as the horsemeat in lasagne, and we wanted to contribute to a positive change by showing that we can also offer quality products, both sensory and nutritional’, explains Guillaume.
So Full'iz is a nutritious breakfast to go: a high-quality, nutritional fruit drink that provides almost 25% of our daily fruit intake. This innovative product offers all the nutritional benefits of a classic breakfast, but in an on-the-go version.
A turnkey product and a healthy, complete option
‘The idea is obviously not to replace breakfast as a meal eaten at the table, but life as it is now means that it's not possible for everyone to take the time to sit down every morning and eat a balanced meal,’ explains Brieuc. ‘Full'iz is more an alternative to allow everyone, from the salesman on the road, to the students on strike or waking up early, to the mother who is late dropping the children off at school, to be able to eat something other than a pain au chocolat bought in a hurry, which is both expensive and very bad for your health. And in reality, we know that 20% of people skip breakfast altogether’.
A ready-to-eat solution that follows to the letter the recommendations of the French Health Council. ‘Full'iz is half as sweet as fruit juice, and in terms of calories, it's the equivalent of a plain yoghurt. It has a Nutriscore A rating and provides 20% of the necessary nutritional intake for one person per day’, explains Guillaume.
Before launching their product, the two Walloon students studied the competition, and although this type of product does not yet exist in Belgium, it does exist in Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, France and Switzerland, but in the form of protein-enriched water or milk with added thickeners, additives and flavourings. ‘Competitors' products quickly become very artificial, and we wanted to be transparent in our labelling, where nutritional values and ingredients are clearly indicated. This means more constraints for us, but we think it's really important,’ says Brieuc with satisfaction.
So what exactly is in a Full'iz?
‘The base of the product is natural fruit (30%), we've also added milk proteins, chias seeds to provide fibre and polyunsaturated fats because we know that in our western diets we often lack Omega 3, vegetable oil such as rapeseed and oat syrup as a cereal for complex sugars’.
And what does it taste like?
‘It tastes of fruit, rather like a smoothie. During the market study we carried out as part of our final year's work, the majority of respondents gave taste as the number 1 criterion, and we wanted to take this into account by offering a tasty product in two flavours: raspberry and banana or mango and passion fruit.
The product should be on sale by the end of this year, in convenience stores, supermarkets, cafés and coffee shops. In the meantime, don't hesitate to take a look at their flavourful Instagram account!
