Today was another very successful day of data collecting! But unfortunately, we were only able to test the pudding. In the morning, Chris woke up bright and early to get to the bakery and begin roasting sweet potatoes in prep for our recipes. Sadly, the workers who were supposed to be there and open the bakery for us did not show up! So, we were unable to roast potatoes for the muffins, and we no longer had access to an oven to bake them. This meant we had to focus on just the pudding, and maximize what we still could get out of the day.
We luckily were able to use Belle and Marc’s pressure cooker to boil our sweet potatoes, and Matt proceeded to make our base pudding recipe. Since we have successfully gathered at least 30 data points for all three recipes, we are going to start from the base recipe again and get another 30 data points for each, to total 180 data points on the pudding.
Once the pudding was prepared, and we lathered sunscreen on, the team went to another village to begin taste testing and conducting more interviews.
We were able to reach our goal and get over another 30 data points! With clinic visits planned for the next two days, this makes our goal of 180 total points seem very attainable.
The mothers are really liking the pudding, and the kids are always so excited to meet us (except for some really little ones, who have cried upon site numerous times because they are scared of us). We have been noticing that many mothers breastfeed their children through well over a year old, so some of the babies turn their heads or don’t eat the food because they are not used to eating other things yet. It could be useful when we return to school to look into nutritious products we can make specifically directed toward breastfeeding mothers that could then potentially pass on nutrients to the children that way. We also think since so many of the other 2-5 year old kids that have gotten to taste our product loved it, the product could sell to an even bigger age range if we wanted to market it to include them. There’s definitely a lot to think about the more and more we explore, and we haven’t even drawn conclusions from our interviews yet!
While the rest of the team was at the village, Kayla took initiative to continue working on grant research for the team. She worked on the E-Team grant proposal, and explored potential new sources such as MAV Foundation and Nestle Foundation, which both provide research grants to projects addressing malnutrition.
Despite a minor hiccup in the morning, we were able to keep the ball rolling and do plenty with the day to be proud of!