First-year tauira Lucian Petherick was recently presented with a Top Scholar Award for the work he did creating and producing his own vegan hokey pokey chocolate.
There’ll soon be a new chocolate on the block and it’s already serving up sweet, sweet rewards for its creator, first-year tauira Lucian Petherick.
Lucian – who is doing a Bachelor of Science with a double major in Food Science and Chemistry – was recently presented with NZQA’s Top Scholar Award in Technology for his 60-page NCEA scholarship project on the hokey pokey vegan chocolate he created in collaboration with Wonderland Chocolate last year.
“It was such an awesome process and such a lot of fun,” Lucian says.
“My food tech teacher Nat Randall, at Wellington High School, set me up with Wonderland Chocolate, which is a pretty small vegan chocolate company in Wellington.
“Working directly with Kate Necklen at Wonderland, I made my own chocolate from scratch. I got to choose my own beans, looking for the ones with the best flavour and aroma and that would pair well with hokey pokey.”
And then came the hard part – testing and tasting hokey pokey recipes. On repeat.
“I did maybe 30 different hokey pokeys. I just kept on and kept on making it.
“I definitely got a little bit tired of hokey pokey because that wasn’t including all the controls of the hokey pokeys I was making along the way for every different one I made.”
Once he felt he’d made the perfect hokey pokey and chocolate, and met all the specifications required by Wonderland Chocolate, Lucian made a batch of 12 bars, which are currently going through 12 months of shelf-life testing.
“Me and my stakeholders each have four bars. We open one every four months to see if the look and taste are meeting specifications. We won’t make a bigger batch till we know how they hold up, but so far they’re looking quite good.
“And that means around Christmas time, hopefully, I’ve got a product on the shelves in the shops.”
Top Scholar Awards recognise the highest-achieving students in New Zealand Scholarship examinations, with one student receiving the award per category. As part of the Technology award, Lucian will receive $6,000 over three years and was flown up to a special ceremony at the Beehive in Wellington last month.
“The award ceremony was awesome, and it was great going home. I also got the chance to visit Wonderland and check in with my former food tech and hospitality teacher Nat. She was amazing – just the way she managed to support me through this. I couldn’t have done it without her.
“I’m also so grateful to Wonderland Chocolate. Kate just put so much trust in me. Like, I was a high schooler who had never had real experience with food technology before and she gave me her machinery and so much of her time. It was a massive investment of time and resources and trust really.”
Lucian Petherick and Wonderland Chocolate owner Kate Necklen at the factory in Wellington. Wonderland will produce Lucian’s chocolate once it passes the shelf-life testing stage.
Lucian was also awarded the University’s Kraft Heinz Food Science Scholarship, which was created to encourage students to pursue study leading to a career in food science. As well as $3,000 over three years, the scholarship comes with a placement at one of Kraft Heinz’s factories.
“I’m still learning very much about what food science can mean and what sort of jobs there are in the industry. I think the placement will be really cool and help me learn where food science might take me.”
And because good things come in threes, Lucian also received a University of Otago Leaders of Tomorrow Entrance Scholarship valued at $7,000, which was related to his academic achievements but also his volunteer work, he says.
“I’ve done a lot of cheffing at a place in Wellington called Everybody Eats, which uses donated and rescued food from different supermarkets. It’s a koha pay-as-you-feel restaurant.
“We provided restaurant quality, three-course meals to 150-200 people a night, some of them who wouldn’t be eating otherwise. I spent about 750 hours volunteering there.”
While he’s spending his first year at Otago settling in, he’d love to get back into volunteering, he says.
“Volunteering is something I’ve done for a long time and something I’m always going to do. It just feels good to be doing something like that.
“It’s also just a fun, social activity, especially in relation to food.”
It’s safe to say that it always comes back to food for Lucian.
“I’ve always just really loved food. I was 14 when I started working in restaurants and I’ve been cheffing for two or three years now.
“I’m definitely very well fed at Caroline Freeman but I’m looking forward to cooking when I move into a flat and I might look at getting some cheffing work next year.”
Lucian Petherick, pictured in the back, with his fellow Top Scholar Award recipients at the Beehive last month.
Studying Food Science at Otago was a natural choice, considering his parents are both alumni – they met in their first year while living at Studholme and have been together ever since – and his sister was already studying here.
“I didn’t see myself anywhere other than Otago. And I love Food Science so much. It’s everything that I could have hoped it would be.
“It’s so great to be surrounded by all these people who also really love Food Science, and I just find it all so interesting. I come out of each lecture and talk to everyone I can about how my lecture was and what I learned about that day.”
Lucian is also majoring in Chemistry, which aligns well with his main passion.
“I think what I love about Chemistry is how it relates to food. In high school I was aways talking to my Chemistry teacher about food. I’d go away and read Food Science textbooks and then go back in with questions for him.”
With two scholarships and an award under his belt, and with a product soon to be on shelves, his hard work has clearly paid off.
“I’m definitely in my happy place,” he says.
*Chocolate lovers keen to try Lucian’s hokey pokey chocolate in the future can keep an eye on Wonderland’s special rotating flavour Jerry the Juggler here.
– Kōrero by Internal Communications Adviser Laura Hewson
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