A group of Taieri College year 13 agri-business students have come up with a concoction which almost every southern motorist would be glad to have.
The four students — Mackayla Anderson, 17, Paige Allison, 17, Ollie McFelin, 18 and Addie Mortimer, 17, — have come up with a product called Winter Warriors for the Young Enterprise Scheme (YES), a nationwide competition for young entrepreneurs.
The product is a liquid mixture which can be sprayed on the front windscreen of cars the night before any heavy frost.
The group say the driver can then get up in the morning and there should not be thick ice on the front windscreen.
Ollie said with frosts hitting particularly hard in Mosgiel they had come up with the product and thought it would be popular.
They had made a great start to the YES competition, coming out top in the validation section in Otago and second in the country.
Validation is testing a business idea to prove there is a genuine market gap and that people are actually willing to pay for a product or service before teams invest heavily in production.
The group was placed best in the country for the video advertisement they developed for the product.
One only had to walk down a street on the Taieri on a chilly winter morning to see how frost on the windscreen was annoying, they said.
After the validation will come the pitch, promotion and sales, the annual review of the product and the awards at the end of the year.
And what was in the magic product?
Paige said they had discussed ingredients with professors from the University of Otago and had blended organic flavours such as potato juice and onion juice, a non-drinkable type of alcohol, and water.
They admit the product needs some fine tuning, which they would be doing, but things were off to a good start.
