Agribusiness team takes silver in national competition

Traci Edmondson was already a Lakeland College alumna when she decided to return to her alma mater to complement her veterinary technology diploma with some business education. She enrolled in agribusiness and, this fall, proved her business acumen when she and her teammates placed second in a national business case competition.

The competition was part of the Canadian Agri-food Marketers Alliance (CAMA) and saw Lakeland’s team, made up of Edmondson, Maddison Heintz, Ahmed Parvis and Isabel Hladych, pitted against teams from six top universities and colleges across western Canada. The teams were given a startup product, 24 hours to come up with a marketing plan for that product, and then they pitched their plans to a committee that included the product creator.

“It was a lot of fun,” says Edmondson. “It was a little stressful to be on that time crunch, locked in a room with a few other people trying to figure out the best way to market the product. Everyone has so many different ideas, but you need to just pick one and move ahead.”

Edmondson wasn’t working with strangers, however. When she’d decided to participate in the competition, she convinced her two roommates, Heintz and Hladych, to come along as well. They got to know the fifth member of their team, Parvis, before the competition as well, spending the month before CAMA practicing for the big event.

At the competition, the teams developed a marketing plan for MYCO Pots, a mushroom-based biodegradable planting pot that hasn’t yet hit the market. Calgary-based creator Tatenda Mambo was at the conference as well.

“We decided that it would be best to sell them to reforestation efforts after forest fires,” Edmondson explains. “The pots are biodegradable, so it would be easy to put them in the ground and it would help the soil. We also went with selling directly to bursaries for regular consumers as well.”

The team was excited when they found out how well they had done.

“We felt like we did pretty well,” Edmondson says. “But you never know what’s going to happen. We were a little shocked to place second. The other teams were really good as well. There were a lot of good ideas out there.”

The entire experience taught Edmondson and her teammates about more than putting together a marketing plan in a day.

“I learned so much, because we got to network as well,” she says. “I think the whole thing boosted all of our confidence so much. Since that day, we’ve had to do presentations in class once or twice a week. You can tell the people who went to the conference because they’re very confident.”

Edmondson says the entire experience was an “absolute blast” and she’s thankful to instructor Shustyn de Jong and Lakeland applied researcher Carien Vandenberg for the mentorship they gave along the way.