University of Richmond students unveil a pesto-caesar salad dressing

In the next few weeks, a new salad dressing may appear on some local Richmond grocery shelves. If things go as planned, it’ll be the envy of all the other salad dressings.

That’s because this new brand, called Envee, hopes to corner the market on a combination that they say hasn’t been done yet – pesto and caesar.

“We were worried that it had already been created, because if you go to a grocery store and look at the salad dressing aisle, almost everything has been created,” said Lyndsay Battan. “But we were really pleased when it hadn't. So it's completely new.”

Envee will also have a unique difference from all the other salad dressings lining the aisles. The entire product, from its taste, to its label design, to how it’ll arrive on a grocery store shelf, is entirely done by students from the University of Richmond. 

“It's a team of 16, but we started with four teams of four,” said Battan, who is a senior and was elected Chief Executive Officer. Other students are put in charge of operations, marketing, sales and financing.

The class held a launch party on campus, giving out samples along with free Chick-fil-A.

“The overall goal is to mimic an experience as close as possible to the real world,” said Joel Mier, lecturer of marketing at the Robin School of Business at the University of Richmond. 

The class is called Bench Top Innovations: Creating & Commercializing Culinary Magic. Mier said the program is open to any undergraduates who are curious about starting up a business. 

“[The] real world is that a business is not full of people who study business. Real world is a mix of people,” he said. “And that's important because diversity of ideas, diversity of backgrounds, experiences makes things better. Can you imagine if I only did it with 16 marketing students or 16 finance students? It'd be totally different.”

Students attend the class for the entire year, which is set up to mimic a start-up business with the end goal of launching a product. 

“In the fall semester we teach them design thinking principles,” said Mier. “How do you do customer discovery? How do you develop great empathy? How do you really understand how to learn more than and listen more than you talk? So we do a lot of that. ”

In that first semester, those teams of four are given a category of product to create.

“This year was a salad dressing. Last year was a sauce or a dip. The year before was a beverage,” Mier said.

Battan said her team went through a lot of test dressings using the college’s catering kitchen, combining different flavors before landing on the final combination of pesto and caesar.

“We basically just got to play around in the commercial kitchen and combine a lot of different ingredients and see what tasted good,” she said. “A lot of things tasted horribly. So it was a lot of trial and error. And we kind of thought of the idea of a pesto and a caesar, just because everyone loves pesto and everyone loves Caesar.”

All the possible entries are then judged at a big event, said Mier, who added that last year, more than 400 people attended in person while more than a thousand people viewed it online. 

“Our first milestone is what we call the ‘Great Bake Off,’” he said, which happens in mid-November. “And the Great Bake Off is a competition of the four teams. The students demo their food. That's the first hour. The second hour is they have to get up on stage for 8 minutes and pitch their product, kind of ‘Shark Tank’ style. We bring a series of outside experts.”

One recent class created Absurd Snacks, which is now available in various markets along the East Coast, including Whole Foods, according to Richmond Magazine. 

After the competition, the winning group elects a CEO.

“The CEO then hires head of marketing, head of sales, head of finance,” said Mier. “And then those who don't want a leadership position, they kind of identify what team they want to work on. And we leave the fall semester with a full company structure.”

Ginny Beringer, head of Envee marketing, said she’s learned quite a lot in the class, including how to manage a team.

“We worked directly with VCU Brand Center, which is the top advertising school in the nation,” she said. We got to learn how to design the label. Everything that it takes to get an actual label printed. And just the whole mass production of it was super awesome to learn about.”

Beringer said they also learned about event planning, running social media accounts, advertising and public relations. 

When they come back after vacation, the students then have to get the product made on a larger scale, find a vendor who can make it, build a website that can take online orders and start a sales plan to go meet vendors in person. 

“They have to go find accounts like Elwood Thompson's, Good Food Grocers, Stella's to hopefully carry it,” said Mier. Then we have to service the accounts. We don't want them to buy a case. We want them to buy a case a week. And so how do we help drive velocity and sales of products and support our clients? So that happens in the spring.”

All the money raised by the sales goes back to the school. 

“We're a nonprofit. The university is a nonprofit. So it goes into my next year's budget,” said Mier, who added that the class originally got funding from a $1 million gift from an alumni. And, Mier also got input about how to structure the class from alum Shane Emmett, who created the Healthy Warrior chia bar that was later sold to PepsiCo.

After graduation, if the students want to continue with the company, they can. The process is all done democratically, said Mier. Those four original teams own the product they created. 

Mier said if one student wants to go solo, that student would have to negotiate with their other three team members.

“So they graduate with ownership of an idea and branding elements, which they can then pick up or not pick up.”