FDBusiness.com

University College Dublin (UCD) has announced O’Kale Krisps (www.okalekrisps.com) as the overall winner of the 2017 UCD Startup Stars Programme. This year’s  programme, the University’s start-up support initiative for student entrepreneurs, has just ended at NovaUCD.

O’Kale Krisps, an early-stage food venture, has developed low-calorie, highly nutritious and air-dried kale crisps to give consumers a unique and healthy snack alternative when they are on the go. Each tub of O’Kale Krisps contains only 69 calories, is high in iron, calcium, vitamin C, antioxidants and anti-inflammatories. The snacks are currently on sale in three flavours (original, spicy chilli and cheesy) and in 28 stores across Ireland.

The members of the O’Kale Krisps team are UCD undergraduate students, Jack Parsons (Business and Law) and Oisin McElhinney (Arts).

Jack Parsons, O’Kale Krisps, says: “We have thoroughly enjoyed our last 4 weeks at NovaUCD during which we have further developed our start-up and we are delighted that O’Kale Krisps has won the 2017 UCD Startup Stars Programme.”

He adds: “Through our products we want to build a community around healthy food, healthy body and mind to help people live a happier life. We hope to have O’Kale Krisps available in stores in all corners of Ireland by the end of the year. We also have future products in the pipeline and may venture into other areas of healthy living.”

The UCD Start-up Stars entrepreneurship programme, now in its 3^rd year, has been developed by UCD Research and Innovation, the UCD Innovation Academy and UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, to support UCD undergraduate and postgraduate students who want to work together to develop and grow start-up companies.

The programme began earlier this year with cross-disciplinary workshops and course modules delivered at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School and the UCD Innovation Academy. During this period students from across the University explored and evaluated a number of real world problems before forming teams to develop start-up solutions to address the identified problems.

Five (5) early stage ventures, with a total of 15 team members, were then selected to participate in an intensive mentoring programme which took place over the last 4 weeks at NovaUCD.

The aim of this mentoring was to assist the students in refining their start-up ideas through a series of structured workshops, including taught content from industry experts, interactive workshops and regular pitching sessions. In addition each team also received a cash stipend and office space at NovaUCD.

Following final pitches O’Kale Krisps was selected as the overall winner as it was judged to have the most commercial potential and the founders received a cash prize of €3,000 sponsored by Xilinx. The four runner-ups also received a cash prize of €500 each sponsored by Xilinx.

The sponsors of UCD Startup Stars Programme are; AIB, Arthur Cox, Ericsson, Growing Capital, Goodbody Stockbrokers and Xilinx. A total of 17 early-stage ventures and 43 students have now completed the UCD Startup Stars Programme over the last 3 years.

The hashtag for this programme is #UCDstartupStars.

CAPTION:

Pictured at NovaUCD are UCD students, Oisin McElhinney and Jack Parsons, co-founders, O’Kale Krisps, overall winner of the 2017 UCD Start-Up Stars Programme. (Nick Bradshaw, Fotonic).