A breakfast snack developed by a team of UW-Madison food science students is a two-time winner in collegiate competition. Now it”s time to see if it can prove itself in the marketplace.

Last year Healthy sTarts — a granola shell filled with yogurt and berries — earned first place in national food product competition sponsored by the Institute of Food Technologists for its inventors, food science students in the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

This year the students iced the cake — or rather, the tart — by using the same product as the basis for a business plan that netted a $7,000 second-place prize in the annual G. Steven Burrill Technology Business Plan Competition, sponsored by the UW-Madison School of Business.

Now they’re going for the big prize: getting the product onto supermarket shelves.

The Burrill competition invites student teams to develop and present technology-based business plans. The teams are expected to be cross disciplinary, with members with expertise in marketing and finance and others with the know-how to engineer the product.

The team that entered a proposal for Healthy sTarts LLC includes five students from the food science department: Kristen Blaschek, Brad Bolling, James Jordan, Sivaraj Kaliappan and Peter Weber. All were part of the team that developed the snack for last year”s food product contest.

It also included Peter Berman, a first-year accounting major who served as financial director; Tom Godfrey, a first-year MBA student in the Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship; and Jinjin Zhou from biological systems engineering, who provided both food engineering expertise and an international perspective.

Riding the momentum from their latest win, the team is ready to find out if an idea that succeeded in student competition can win in the marketplace. They”ve expanded their group to include members of last year”s food team who have graduated and gone on to jobs in industry.

“We’re now pursuing a provisional patent,” explains James Jordan, the team”s leader. We”re writing the patents. Then we”ll physically create the business, set up arrangements for production and suppliers.

“This product will be made,” he asserts. “The only question is whether we will license the product or take it forward ourselves.”