Company Background
Heavenly Fudge is an awarding winning business, selling teas, coffee, scones, tray bakes and cakes. Everything in the premises is homemade and has built up a steady customer base in the Causeway Coast area, which is spreading throughout the North of Ireland. Another feature to the business is fudge making, using its own unique recipe, and due to its success, owner Daniel McHenry, has been approached by retail outlets to stock and sell his fudge products.
Challenge
Heavenly Fudge make a unique brand of fudge made in small batches, however in order to become commercially viable and sell fudge in larger quantities they were seeking specialised support to control the size and weight of the product for packaging.
Solution
Heavenly Fudge approached the North West Regional College (NWRC) looking for a newly designed maple wood setting tray so the fudge can be cut at the same size, weight and avoids waste.
NWRC were able to support Heavenly Fudge through the Innovate US programme, funded by Department for the Economy (DfE), which equated to 30 hours of mentoring support from Philip Devlin, NWRC Engineer Consultant. The project delivered full training to Daniel, which included upskilling in the design process concept development, matrix, scoring and product design specification specific to the new setting tray product.
Impact
The completion of this project resulted in successfully upskilling Daniel on elements of the Solidworks (CAD) programme, tailored drawing techniques of CAD design for this particular project. This lead to prototype development and prototype trailing, uploading of data for the routing of wood, the clamping and gluing of wood and the finishing of a wood product.
Heavenly Fudge has now the in-house skillsets that will allow them to innovate and develop future products and bring them to market and are currently exploring additional funding form Invest NI.
