His company, Kōrure, is developing a lamb and beef innovation so tender it can be eaten without chewing by older or unwell diners.
The tongue-chewing, red-meat product proposal won the Meat Industry Association (MIA) Dragon’s Den competition and $10,000 against four other finalists developing innovations to lift red meat’s export value.
Mr Park plans to put out a Kiwi Tender range for grass-fed red meat next year, but not before the processing is perfected.
The final result is expected to produce a texture so tender it can be crushed with the tongue, while retaining the shape, flavour and nutritional density of whole meat.
Mr Park said the business concept remained close to his heart.
‘‘It’s sort of a passion project from a Christmas dinner because of my grandma. What I didn’t realise as a younger person is that as people get older day-to-day things get more difficult and one of them being eating and chewing. So I just wondered why my grandma wasn’t eating much and that is why I wanted to create a family dinner which everyone could enjoy, not just a few.’’
Mr Park started Kōrure as a 19-year-old commerce student at the University of Canterbury and, nine years later, has nine food-tech businesses.
He began by selling health supplements to his family’s home country of South Korea before realising a lot of companies were importing products from China and India and labelling them in New Zealand.
‘‘I was really unhappy about that so started Kōrure while I was at uni to generate genuine New Zealand products.’’
After looking ‘‘high and low’’, he settled on green-lipped mussels for their arthritis and anti-inflammatory properties and because they helped clean up local waters.
The businesses include a company based on university research for extracting mussel oil to make the supplements and another collects food waste to feed into larvae of the black soldier fly for making protein for chicken and fish farming.
Mr Park said the exposure of winning the Dragon’s Den style event against technical scientists and experienced business people would be valuable for his latest venture.
He said more product development and tweaking to make sure the products tasted and looked good would be carried out this year.
Prizemoney would go towards producing a minimal viable product so it could be taste-tested on elderly in families and rest-homes towards commercialising it next year. he said.
Product trials in the laboratory have already used kiwifruit enzymes to break down and tenderise protein so it is more easy to digest and malleable.
High-pressure processing will also be used with Lincoln University research showing it can be increased by 60%.
This will be accompanied by retorting — a thermal-processing method — which further tenderises meat and makes it shelf stable.
‘‘What we envisage is a very tender and quite tongue-chewable meat for the elderly and that is where the money will go.’’
The goal is to generate two vacuum-packed, ready-to-eat products for domestic and export markets.
One of them will be a ready-to-eat whole New Zealand premier meat which can also be used for cooking in meals.
The other will make a thinly-sliced, air-dried product, similar to a jerky, from offcuts such as trimmings.
An Eatender model, developed in Taiwan, will be adapted to develop tenderness levels for transforming under utilised meat cuts into the Kiwi Tender range.
The Kiwi Tender business has so far relied on revenue from his other companies and the plan is to launch a fundraising round for investors later this year initially for processing development.
‘‘Technologies like these take millions of dollars and I’ve done that myself from what we have spun out from Canterbury University. So the $10,000 is valuable to get to that minimal viable product stage.
‘However, we will need funding and support from other Kiwis to take this to the next level.’’
Previously, he has raised about $2million including $1.2m for Natural Extraction Technologies as well as support from many grants.
Five finalists shortlisted from 15 entries had five minutes to pitch their ideas to judges and the same amount of time to answer questions.
The other four finalists were Grass Fed Mineral Matrix, Lord of the Beefy Rings, Safety and Operational Intelligence and Regenerative Seaweed.
MIA chairman Nathan Guy said the Kiwi Tender proposal was selected because of the commercial potential for a Kiwi innovation in a process which already had a strong foothold in Asia’s hospital and aged-care sector.
