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Recipe to Riches – the new Aussie food reality show debuts on prime time

Recipe to Riches, Australia’s new food reality show, aired last night on channel ten.

The show takes a fresh new look on popular cooking shows such as Masterchef and Ready Steady Cook by creating an entire product launch plan around a home cooked recipe.

Each episode sees three contestants battle it out to create commercial quantities of their home created concoctions, with the winning product adorning Woolworths supermarket shelves the very next day.

The products can essentially be anything from a ready meal solution, snack product or confectionery item – basically anything that is tasty, can be created in commercial quantities and marketed successfully to the masses.

The first episode saw three hopefuls, Casey, Matt and Connie compete to create commercial quantities of their creations to present to the panel of judges consisting of Muesli queen Carolyn Creswell of Carmen Fine Foods, advertising specialist David “Nobby’ Nobay, and former head chef of Tetsuya’s, Darren Robertson.

Each contestant received help from three assistants as well as professional tips from the face of M&J Chickens, renowned chef, Eddie Coffey.

Matt’s boneless chicken wings were first to be turned away due to a significant Tabasco miss-measurement issue, which left Casey and her cheesy, potato and pumpkin bake to battle it out with Connie’s croquettes which were derived from a traditional Italian family recipe.

Each creation was then presented to Nobby for a branding assessment where the target audience was established and a brand, logo and package created.

Both Connie and Casey then took their creations to the street where consumers had the opportunity to sample each product. This element served as a valuable market research opportunity for the judges, allowing them to assess the commercial viability of each product.

In the end, Connie’s croquettes won as they were deemed to be the most commercially viable product.

The show, like many others of its nature, definitely paints a fanciful picture of what in reality would takes months or even years of pitching and tinkering with the recipe to achieve.

What the show didn’t go into however was whether ingredients would be altered to maximise shelf life, where the ingredients would be sourced from, and issues relating to the price and profit margins of the products. Which in business terms, are what will make or break the idea.

If a product isn’t financially viable, it’s not going to make it onto the shelves – also the reality of pitching a product to Woolworths is no walk in the park.

But hey, I guess all that financial talk and sourcing of ingredients isn’t what get’s rating is it?

 

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