Many have never heard of food such as fruit salsa on cinnamon chips, poached pears and cinnamon roll ice cream until students in the Food Product Development class at Iowa State invented them.

The other foods created by this year’s class include whole-wheat crisps with sun-dried tomato hummus, a five-cheese broccoli and wild rice soup, Indian-spiced breaded chicken with yogurt-cucumber dipping sauce, a cream puff with strawberry and soy filling and breaded rice balls with cheese and broccoli.

“Although we are instructors, we are really more just facilitators. It is amazing how innovative [the students] are, how creative they are, and some of these products are very, very good,” said Kenneth Prusa, professor of food science and human nutrition and instructor of the class.

Food Product Development, catalogued as FS HN 412, is a course for developing food products. These are not small-scale recipes, said Shelly Tomlinson, senior in food science and student in the class. Students start off making a small version, but then have to scale it up to 35 times the amount, she said. They also have to change the ingredients to make it so the products can last for months without going bad.

“A number of our students have developed products for companies that are in the marketplace. They have their experience,” said Lester Wilson, university professor of food science and human nutrition. “Students are successful, we get feedback from the companies, and they like what is going on.”

The class is set up as a fictional company called Dyscovry Foods. The students are “hired” as employees and instead of being given points, they are given shares of stock, Prusa said. The final grade is determined by the number of shares. Shares of stock can be obtained by doing weekly updates, writing reports and meetings with the board of directors.

“Although it is not really a company, we try to make it as real as possible so when they are hired by a real company it is like they can go to work the next day and hit the ground running,” Prusa said.

Tomlinson said she liked the class because it made her other classes seem applicable.

“This is kind of like a capstone that brings all the classes that we have had in science together,” she said.

Wilson and Prusa also mentioned their appreciation of courses called “capstone courses.”

“I think [capstone courses] are great because the students actually get to apply all the things they learned in the last four years,” Prusa said.

The course has three different stages, Tomlinson said. There is the formulation stage in which students create the ideas and make small-scale versions of them. The second step is processing, where they make 35 times the amount with stable ingredients that will not go bad as fast. The final step is commercialization, where the students have to produce what will be put on the store shelves.

Formulation involves finding a market for potential products using surveys and looking at food trends. They also have to identify what type of food they would want, such as something indulgent, something with more nutrients, something with particular flavor or even something for a niche market, Wilson said.

A typical day for Tomlinson’s group, who created the cinnamon roll ice cream, would involve baking, Tomlinson said. They also made taste tests and brought them out to possible consumers, but they spent most of their time in the kitchen making the product.

“We were always making something every day and we are always trying everybody else’s products,” she said.

Wilson said in the food industry, it typically takes about three to six months to make a new product.

The board meeting where the students present their final products was held Tuesday. There were also representatives from companies such as Wells Blue Bunny, Hy-Vee and Tone’s Spices at the meeting.

There will be a poster session open to the public at 1:10 p.m. Thursday in 210 MacKay Hall, where people can come and try out the new products.