Grant: Engage Grants for colleges

Mario Baini's Emporium (Mario's) is a local grocer and take-out restaurant in Truro, Nova Scotia. For the past_x000D_ 12 years, Mario's has been producing custom toum sauces and spice blends based on traditional Lebanese_x000D_ flavours for retail and the demand has been growing organically year over year. A toum sauce is made from_x000D_ crushed garlic/olive oil and popular throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Mario's has approached Canada's_x000D_ Smartest Kitchen (CSK) at Holland College to help refine several versions of the garlic sauces and to help align_x000D_ those strong flavours with a more North American style palette. Canada's Smartest Kitchen, a Technology_x000D_ Access Center, is co-located in Charlottetown, PEI with the Culinary Institute of Canada, and is a culinary_x000D_ creativity R&D center that has focuses on new food product development, food science and marketing. CSK_x000D_ proposes to work closely with Mario Baini's Emporium to develop several toum sauces that would appeal to_x000D_ Canadians and mesh with North American cuisine. In this research collaboration, CSK will explore the_x000D_ potential for this product to be shelf stable vs refrigerated, explore new packaging technologies and "food kit"_x000D_ opportunities and conduct sensory science experiments on the organoleptic properties of the product. CSK will_x000D_ also identify a co-packer for the scale up of the benchtop prototypes to enable full production. This is the first_x000D_ collaboration between Mario Baini's Emporium and Holland College.