Hartpury are Grassroutes winners
2011
A delighted Hartpury student team were voted as 2011 winners in the prestigious DHL sponsored Grassroutes Challenge competition at the Royal Agricultural College recently. Nine university teams pitched their business strategy solutions to a panel of experts, culminating in a presidential style head to head between the top two teams; Hartpury and Harper Adams.
The Grassroutes Business Challenge is the only national inter-University competition that is focused on enterprise within the food industry - from field to plate. The competition is designed to attract the very best graduate talent into the Agri-food sector and equip them with appropriate employability skills. The competition was established in 2008 and has continued to grow.
Jess Davis, Nicole Connor, Jamie Diplock, Patrick Graf Grote, and Hélène Sourdois competed for Hartpury and, along with the other teams, had to develop an innovative solution to a current problem facing the industry, create a solution and then communicate it.
The students said about winning the competition:
“Grassroutes 2011 was a fun packed, insightful two days. For three of us it was a completely new experience made easier by the boy's participation last year. We were expecting stress and hard working hours, but the competition this year was much tougher and we really had to fight in order to win.
We found that the best strategy of tackling our case study was to go about it in a relaxed and to the point way, without overcomplicating the situation. It was also very important to stick together as a team and to reach common agreements all together. Finally, we found that the best way to win was to utilise the resources offered to us as much as possible. We found that listening to the experts and using their counsel in our pitch was to our advantage.
Taking part in Grassroutes has significantly increased our employability by giving us experience in the world of business, in public speaking, group working and innovative thinking. We would highly recommend future participation of students in Grassroutes as this is an eye opening experience into the real world of business.
We would like to thank Gill Reindl and Mike Parsons for their help in organising and orientating our team, as well as Kevin Ball and Caphas Chisangowerota for their insightful advice”