We are so excited about the return of Grow2CEO with GIY this month. This campaign gives students of secondary schools across Ireland the chance to gain a better understanding about growing food and encourages discussion around sourcing food and making overall healthier food choices. It will also give students a chance to learn all about food entrepreneurship and food business. The end goal of this campaign is to get students to create a delicious soup recipe using the skills and knowledge they have gained over the course of the campaign’s 4 key challenges.

Create A 30-Second Advert For Your Recipe And Company.

Now you have your product, done your market research, know who your target market is and now you need to sell it. To do that you need to create a 30 advert to showcase your product.

Give Us More Insight Into Your Business With A 30 Second Behind The Scenes Video.

Last week we asked you to go out into your local community, talk to local food makers and food businesses and report back. It was great to see how many wonderful businesses are out there producing great food and we love how you have taken inspiration from them for your recipe and product.

Meet Local Business Owners, Get Tips, Upload A Slideshow Or Flipbook (Entry Deadline 26th April)

Welcome to the second challenge of GROW2CEO. You've all been sending us wonderful punny songs and photos of your sprouting rocket seeds and we're very impressed so keep up the great work.

We've picked some of our favourite posts and videos below and of course, we have our first spot prize winner. Keep reading to see if you made the cut!

Hello future food entrepreneurs and welcome to the first challenge of the competition. Can you ROCKET TO SUCCESS, get inspired by growing your food and business acumen and share your #GROW2CEO story with us?

You will have received your growing guide along with your kit, which has everything you need to get planting.

Week 1 Challenge (9th April – 20th April) Sing for Your Supper: Sow your seeds and sing us your puns, upload a video singing a popular song with lyrics changed to include vegetable puns.

GIVE PEAS A CHANCE UPDATE NUMBER 3

Happy Summer to all our newPEA & exPEArienced growing teams, although we are not sure if the sun got the memo to shine!!!

Only silver lining is that its great weather for Soup (Cully & Sully of course). 

A huge thank you to all of the teams who are posting, sharing, liking and interacting with our Pea Sized challenges so far. there are some teams who are really shining. We have posted out some spot prizes for these teams.  All of the great pictures you are sharing are really making us hapPEA here at the Hen House. 

(If you’re new!)… Give Peas A Chance is a campaign that we carried with Secondary Schools and our partners, GIY. This consisted of 4 weekly challenges, a short-list of five schools and an overall winner! The idea of this campaign was to foster a sense of entrepreneurship in students and a sense of growing…and these students certainly delivered!

 So the competition is over and a winner has been chosen. And what a competition it was!

CONGRATULATIONS to Sharon Pittuck! Winner of our 1st iPad giveaway as part of our SOUPer Ambassadors competition! 

Stay tuned as will we be giving away 2 iPad Minis in 2 weeks time! 

Sharon really got what we were looking for in the competition with her fabulous entries over the last 2 weeks, she posted notes in Tescos and event left soups around her neighbourhood for people to find!

... What a legend! 

The following teams were our spot prize winners - winning €250 GIY vouchers! Well Done Guys! 

• Team that made us hapPEA - #POD61 Pip & Pear (Waterford Childcare centre)
• Best reciPEAs - #POD253 Enable Ireland Cork (Enable Ireland Little Island)
• Most Risky Pea Posts - #POD284 Roscommon Western Development (Bros of Charity Team)
• Most PEAstigious Growers - #POD120 VOXpro Cork (Breakthrough Cancer Research)
• Best Promoted Peas - #POD250 ATC Shannon (St Gabriels Centre)

We are delighted to announce our chilled soups are landing in Tesco UK.

To enter see our Facebook Post Just tag a friend living in the UK and we will pop you in the draw to win!

We will announce the winner on Friday 22nd Jan.

Great article on the winner of our Chef-Factor Cooking Competition 2010, where contestants competed for the chance to win a place on the world famous Ballymaloe Cookery School's 12 week certificate course. 

Christine is now running The Café at Stephen Pearce's Pottery in Shanagarry and was recently featured in the Evening Echo. 

Congratulations to Optimal Chiropractics who are the #givepeasachance winners and have won €2,000 to spend in Ballymaloe and a GIY Food Garden worth €3,000 for their nomination Cork Association for Autism.

The runners up are BNY Mellon who have won €250 for their nomination Barntown National School.

There are 3 individual shining stars who we are awarding €100 for their growing enthusiasm throughout the campaign.

Some very lucky teams are going to get a cookie surprise from us this week for their ‪#‎sharethelove‬ ‪#‎givepeasachance‬ pictures.

Lots of cookies to get your hands on so keep sharing the love!

Thank you for taking the time to sign up to #givepeasachance.

We are buzzing with excitement and love seeing all the really innovative team names that are coming in such as Pea Weee’s, Peas & Q’s and of the course the Killer Peas…

Teams are registering daily and we should reach our target of 500 teams soon, so spread the word as we don’t want anyone to be PEA’d off !!

We will be sending everyone who registered their log In details next week so that teams can start getting down & dirty with the campaign.

We had a great night last Saturday at the chef-factor final, well done to Wayne on winning Chef-Factor 2011. :party: Here's a video of the final so you can get a glimpse of how it unfolded!

Finalists and entrants of the Cully and Sully Chef Factor competition joined their hosts and judges, Cullen Allen (Cully), Colum O'Sullivan (Sully) and Rachel and Darina Allen at the Grainstore at Ballymaloe for the Chef Factor Final (Photo by Harty Photography)

The quality of the entries in Cheffactor 2011 is really inspiring and fantastic. It is great to see so many people going to such an effort.

So for all of yee out there who entered... keep those campaigns going, you have serious respect from myself and Sully.
 

We were asked to judge and provide a prize for the Campervan Cook-off at Vantastival. What craic!

First, though, I do not recommend this for the faint-hearted, we're talking seriously high standards here! So for some reason, everyone was in a combi, don't ask me why, and they were given: rice, a banana, some mince, a pepper, chickpeas, a chilli, an onion, a tin of tomato, cream and wild garlic and they had 45 minutes to come up with something pretty sensational!

Thank you all so much for travelling from all over the country to make it to Ballymaloe last Friday for our party.

We had about 300 people, which was amazing especially when you consider the weather. What a party!!!

Everyone was so wonderful and happy and smiling. We were thrilled to meet you all and put faces to all the entries.

You guys rock.

Cheffactor is now open for entries! Tell your friends we'd love them to enter for a chance to win a great prize!