Unusual food combinations are a staple of college cooking: late-night macaroni and cheese grilled cheese, finals week anything-goes-ramen.
Seniors in University of Richmond’s Bench Top Innovations program have come up with a surprising culinary combination of their own this year—a pesto-Caesar dressing, released this March under the name Envee.
Unlike much of what comes out of undergraduate kitchens, Envee is the product of months of collaborative deliberation.
Dr. Joel Mier, lecturer of marketing at UR and co-teacher of Bench Top Innovations with entrepreneur-in-residence Shane Emmett, summarizes the arc of the course this way: “We go from idea to revenue in nine months.”
In the fall semester, the class splits into groups of four, developing products to impress faculty and industry experts at the “Great Bake-Off” in November. In the spring, the class unites to form a company that brings the winning product to market. Envee is this year’s winner.
Bench Top Innovations is open to undergraduates of any major, which Mier says makes the course a more realistic model of the business world. Drawing interested students from disciplines across the university, “Has been the secret sauce.”
Students agree.
“Everyone comes in with very different passions, very different interests, which makes conversations and also the end result of the class so much more exciting,” says Envee’s head of public relations Kerin Debany.
Lindsay Batten, who was elected by her classmates to the position of Envee’s CEO, recounts Envee’s inception.
“In the beginning of the semester we were able to buy a bunch of different salad dressings to try flavors and ingredients. Our favorites were always creamy, green, healthy but tasty,” says Batten.
Knowing what they liked, the team then looked for ways to innovate. Green Goddess didn’t suggest enough opportunities for variation. Variations on ranch have already “gone way too far” says Batten, citing the existence of ranch-flavored ice cream.
The team turned their imaginations elsewhere.
“We liked the idea of a pesto Caesar, but we thought, ‘That definitely exists,'” says Batten. “But we did a lot of market research and we couldn’t find anything like it that was being bottled and served and put on the shelves of a grocery store.”
The next step was experimentation in the test kitchen, where they “tasted a lot of bad things that I regret eating,” she says. But once a batch tasted acceptable, the team dialed in flavors until they had something exceptional. “We made probably a hundred versions of it, until it finally started tasting really good,” Batten says.
Envee’s ingredients include basil, honey, garlic, avocado oil, lemon, parmesan, mayonnaise and anchovy paste. Batten explains a notable absence on the list: “Most pestos on the market include either pine nuts or cashews, but we wanted to make a dressing that was nut-free so that people with nut allergies could enjoy it as well.” Envee is even manufactured in a nut-free facility.
While working on Envee, the students discovered that the kitchen is just as much a testing ground for communication as it is for salad dressing. Mier says listening is among the core principles of design thinking that students learn in the fall semester, necessary for everything from team building to customer discovery.
“We teach them these core principles, and then we put them in the kitchen, where they’re at a metal table with three other teams around them,” says Mier. “It’s loud, all kinds of stuff is happening, and the only way to make progress from V1 to the contest is to figure it out: how to learn, how to listen, how to communicate.”
Collaboration extends beyond the kitchen and the classroom, too. The design and branding for Envee were developed with graduate students at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter. And for what’s inside the bottle?
“We work with a manufacturing facility in Chicago called Legacy Manufacturing for sourcing all of our ingredients, and to produce and bottle all of it for mass-manufacturing,” says Batten. Students in leadership roles recently traveled to Chicago to see Envee being bottled. “It definitely ranks among the coolest things I’ve ever seen,” she adds.
Students retain ownership of all intellectual property associated with the products they develop in the Bench Top Innovations program. “The college provides the legal structure to sell and to take revenue, but they don’t own the intellectual property and they don’t make the decisions,” Mier explains.
Mier hopes that graduates of the program can learn to be comfortable with uncertainty. “This [course] allows them to get a real flavor for it, and take responsibility for it in a business setting in a safe, secure place,” he says.
Currently, Envee is available for purchase at Libbie Market and Ellwood Thompson’s, and on Envee’s website.
“We love that Envee is very versatile,” says Batten. “It’s a salad dressing, but it’s also a condiment, it could be a marinade, it could be lots of different things.”
