Squirt of pink sauce hits spot, say girls

With a smile, Ashley Smith conceded that the marketing team may have some work to do in getting a new, and delicious, sauce off the ground.

"It's pink," she said with a smile.

The Year 13 student at Napier Girls' High School is the managing director of a company called All Sorts, which formed at the start of the year as part of the annual schools' Young Enterprise programme.

The sauce, a unique mix of three ingredients - one of them tomato sauce - is the second product devised by the group of 12 students who formed the company.

The sauce's production is being financed by profits which are already rolling in from their initial product, fine-glass coasters, etched with Art Deco images. They caught the eye of their business mentor, economic development adviser Ron Massey.

A group of councillors was heading to China for a sister-city visit and the question of what to take for gifts for their hosts came up.

"I saw the coasters and thought, 'yep, that's it',"' Mr Massey said.

The dozen students all took up the challenge as part of their curriculum at the start of the year, and under teachers Jenny Lunn and Louise Bassett-Foss have made a professional fist of it.

"We have formed sales, marketing, communications, finance and production teams," Ashley said. "We meet four times a week."

Like any business, they formed business plans and objectives, and have had to ensure perfect time and product management.

They scored highly in the first stages of the regional section of the national Young Enterprise programme, placing third at the oral presentations and second in the challenging "Lion's Den" staged recently before a panel of leading Bay businesspeople.

They will take part in the regional finals in October.

Mr Massey was impressed with what he had seen and believed All Sorts had the potential to make it to the national finals being staged in Wellington in December.

Mrs Bassett-Foss said the girls were learning valuable lessons along the way as they dealt with individuals and businesses to get their products on to the market.

"It has to run as a profitable business and they are working well together to do that," she said.

About 150 sets of the locally produced Art Deco coasters had been marketed and sold, and that had financed the development of the All Sorts sauce.

Where did the idea come from?

"We were hungry," one of the girls replied, adding that they spotted several different sauce toppings in a fish and chip shop and pondered if it were possible to combine three of them into one.

The results had been promising and their next aim was to get them into production and into places such as the Farmers Market.

Making the first batch was fun, Ashley said, and those who had tried it were impressed.

Pink or not, the young businesswomen, reckon the sauce will hit the spot.