Blog 8: Are We There Yet?

Blog 8: Are We There Yet?

We’re nearly done. Lectures are about to finish up soon and our eportfolio is looking more and more like a website. We began this lecture by talking about downstream processing and in particular, filtration. Filtration is relevant to our process as we have to filter off the kefir grains from the water towards the end of the process. Ours is a fairly basic filtration method as all we need is some sort of grid to catch the kefir grains and allow the water to pass through. It is important that the grains are kept as they are reusable so something sive-like might be ideal.

We were told at the end of the first class that we wouldn’t have a class next week because there would be presentations in Grangegorman taking place and Barry had to attend. He highly recommended us to attend as well as they would be beneficial to our thesis presentaions next Janurary as well as if we got choosen to participate in these presentations next year.

In the second class that Friday, Barry gave us a sheet containing TWO memo’s, yeah, I know, what a slave driver (we did have two weeks to complete these though). The first of these memo’s asked us to review a piece of literature on a product that is similar to ours. We thought that this would be difficult as we couldn’t find any kefir water products when we did our research at first. The second memo told us to put three slides together on training instructions for the employees. The second part of that memo was to try and find three products that are similar to ours that are already patented or on the market. Again this could pose as tricky given the uniqueness of our product but I suppose that’s half the fun of it.

Shane, Aidan and myself relaised after this class that the end of the module is approaching and that we need more group meetings to make sure that we get all the work finished and to the highest standard as possible. We then decided to meet twice a week so that when we end this module we can say that we did work to the best of our ability.

I hope you tune in for my penultimate blog next week,

Bye for now,

Sean.