University Relations

A team of South Dakota State University students created a meat product so tasty and so convenient, it won first place in a national contest.

“Breakfast on the Run,” created by four SDSU students, placed first in the Taste of RMC competition during the Reciprocal Meat Conference in Lexington, Ky., June 21 through 23. They made their concoction in the University of Kentucky meat laboratory. It was judged by a panel of experts from large meat processors like Tyson Foods and Oscar Mayer.

SDSU also won second place in a people’s choice contest, garnering suchcomments as “Very good, complete breakfast,” “Very good theme,” “Good for children,” “Interesting and creative.”

SDSU team members, all animal science majors, were Kurtis Sweeter, agraduate student from Worthing, Tanya Koger, a graduate student fromEldorado Springs, Mo., Jonathan Spronk, a graduate student from Edgerton, Minn., and Amanda Rigdon, a senior from Dunkerton, Iowa.

The contest required teams to develop a fully cooked, microwaveable breakfast meat product. “Breakfast on the Run” is basically a wrappedsausage on a stick.

Sausage ingredients are pork, eggs, water, Cheddar cheese, bacon, salt,maple syrup flavoring, sodium tripoly phosphate, black pepper, dextrose, red pepper, sodium erythorbate and sodium nitrate. The sausage is smoked and cooked, put on a stick, dipped in blueberry pancake batter and fried.

“It was a lot of trial and error,” said team member Koger. “Amanda had developed the sausage for a class at SDSU, so we kind of took her idea and tweaked it a little. We decided to put a pancake batter around it, then we thought it would be neat if we could incorporate fruit, because a lot of people eat fruit for breakfast. So we went with blueberry. We all worked together on it and came up with what we thought was the perfect product. And I guess we were right.”

The Taste of RMC drew top-notch competition, said associate professor Duane Wulf, who advises the students along with assistant professor Robert Maddock.

“Sixteen universities competed, all of which were Division I but SDSU,” Wulf said. “Of course, in meat science, we’ve been Division I for a long time.”

Other universities competing included the University of Wyoming, Colorado State, Oklahoma State, the University of Nebraska, Ohio State, Kansas State, Auburn, Iowa State, Michigan State, Texas Tech and the University of Florida.