Chocolate box challenge

Students got a taste for business in an enterprise workshop challenge which involved creating a new chocolate box brand. See our photo gallery below

ENTERPRISING Ripon Grammar School students savoured an exciting new challenge as they were tasked with producing and marketing a fresh brand of chocolates.

More than 120 Year 7 students divided into teams, each with marketing, finance and design managers, and successfully created individually themed confectionary products with well thought through marketing plans, all within four hours.

Students also had to prepare a presentation for the audience of 150 people, outlining everything from target consumers to profit levels and proposed advertising campaigns as part of the initiative, designed to help RGS students build skills for the future.

Team Raining Chocolate (pictured above) were pronounced winners for their chocolate drop shaped confectionary, with a Yorkshire Dales sheep logo, in a range of flavours, with marketing material including multiple flyers.

Judges were businesswoman and parent, Jennifer Fall, former RGS librarian Debbie Peach and Richard Canham, formerly of Mastercard.

RGS enterprise and work experience coordinator Bob Walker said it was a great opportunity for all the students to do something outside normal lessons: “Students use their creativity and problem-solving skills to work as a team and to a strict deadline to produce an interesting solution.

“In addition, they have to use their entrepreneurial skills to convince judges that their solution is the best one through their group presentation. The challenge seems so simple but, in reality, it is a really difficult one to achieve in three hours.”

*See our photo gallery featuring students at work, some of their products and runners-up teams, below.