The last laugh

9. Entry blog 20 November 2015: 7^th and last Bioprocessing lecture

The last lecture of the bioprocessing module, today we talked about downstream processing of the product and purification of product.  It’s proving to be difficult to translate some of the things we are learning in the lectures to food production. However, with enough critical thinking, not all of the things that are taught are useless to the food industry groups, e.g. Test to see if API is there would be the equivalent of checking for “gluten” in a gluten-free product. Quality checks for food are not as rigorous as pharmaceutical products (sensory analysis, microbial count etc.).

One of the last tasks was to work on other marketing aspects (logo, slogan, target market and unique selling point). Having done the patent and 3 similar products, I felt that I had a firm grasp of what our target market and unique selling point are. In addition, I can finally put my marketing and business module skills to use in critically analysing why our product would sell and why the customers would buy our product.

I thoroughly enjoyed working on the presentation for the teaching class. I love doing presentations and therefore, it really played to my strengths. Our biggest challenge was how do we convey our process in a simple, fun, engaging way that would invoke the audience to learn more about it themselves when they got home. I felt that this presentation was a good way to finish things off. I am really excited to hear what everyone else had to say, and very eager to learn about the other group’s bioprocesses.