Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 2

TasteTro Inc. is an Alberta-based entrepreneurial company dedicated to providing innovative culinary products for the modern and healthy living style in Canada and other countries. For the last four years, the company has been developing the TasteTro Spice System, a small appliance for delivering spice blends for cooking and seasoning, to meet the growing demand for easy and healthy meal preparation. The spice system can hold twenty different herbs and spices in replaceable pods. Through an electronic user interface, users may select from many pre-programmed spice mixtures or dispense an individual spice in the requested amount. The device also has the flexibility to create unlimited custom spice blends.TasteTro is seeking technical assistance from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) to validate and improve the functionality of the TasteTro Spice System before commercialization of the technology begins. SAIT is proposing a twelve-month applied research and development (ARD) project in collaboration with TasteTro that will identify technical issues with the dispensing functionality of the system, maximize the reliability of the dispensing function, establish production and sourcing specifications for the selected herbs and ground spices to ensure successful dispensing, and set testing parameters for future spice and herb launches.