On December 8th, the R.W. Creteau Technology Center hosted the Army National Guard's MRE Challenge for the Seacoast Area. MREs are 'Meals Ready to Eat, they are common fare for soldiers across all branches of the military. The MRE Culinary Challenge, tasks students with remaking these MREs to make them more palatable.
The full MRE Challenge is an event that allows students in multiple disciplines to compete in real work scenarios. What school boasts the best marketing team? Which cooks are the most creative? Who's video skills are the best?
For the Culinary portion of the competition, students had 90 minutes to create a dish using the pre-released menu of the MREs. Students were provided an equipment list before the event along with a budget of $40 to use for additional ingredients, but ALL cooking had to take place during the 90 minutes of the event. Dover Career Technical Center had two student teams competing against Seacoast School of Technology who had one student team compete.
The meals were judged on taste, creativity/inspiration, appearance, use of MRE ingredients, and concept attainment. All three dishes were incredibly well thought out, tasty, and very creative. But only one team could win, and that was “Team Buttercup” from Dover!
The Culinary Snack component of the competition had students create 100 "perfect" sample snacks and deliver them to the event. Snacks needed to be identical, taste good, and be easy to handle. The winning snack was a buffalo chicken-style empanada created by two Dover students and it was delicious!
For the Graphic Design competition, students had to create a logo specifically for the MRE challenge. Each school was only allowed to submit one graphic (600X600 pixels) which would then be voted on in November. As for the Videography competition, students had to create a 30-second commercial for the event. Commercials should be exciting and encourage students to be a part of the Culinary Class or the CTE as a whole. These submissions were also voted on in November as well.
This leads to the Marketing piece of the competition which was to create a campaign to have students vote on the logo and the video made in the graphic design and videography competition. Whichever school had the most student vote based on relation to their student body count would win this competition.
The winner of both the Marketing Campaign and the MRE Video was the Seacoast School of Technology while the R.W. Creteau center took home 1st place for the logo!
The R.W. Creteau Center held its own in-house logo competition to decide whose logo would then be submitted to the challenge, 27 students from year 1 and year 2 of the Graphic Design program created logos. Hope Silveira's logo was chosen out of the 27 in-house logos and went on to compete and win against 7 other schools' logos that were voted on in November!
It was a proud night for the R.W. Creteau Technology Center to be able to not only host this fantastic event but also to have one of our very own students take 1st place in one of the competitions! Congratulations Hope!
Pictured Left to Right: R.W. Creteau Technology Center Director Michele Halligan-Foley, student Hope Silveira, Spaulding Principal Justin Roy, and Graphic Design Instructor Lori Discoe.