Duo scoop £1,000 in entrepreneur challenge

Best friends Rebecca Nevin and Elizabeth Pelegrin-New have scooped a £1,000 investment for their health food business idea, after coming out on top in a Dragon’s Den-style competition at City College Norwich.

The pair’s Chi Wellness enterprise proposal for a range of healthy alternative snacks and drinks, was selected as the overall winner in the College’s Entrepreneur of the Year Challenge at St Andrews House on Monday.   

City College Norwich media production student Rebecca, 18, from Great Moulton, and her friend Elizabeth, 36, from Long Stratton, hope to use their success in the competition as a springboard towards one day owning their own health food shop. 

Rebecca said: “It feels really amazing to have won and we are very grateful to have had this opportunity.”  The vision for the winning pair is to use the £1,000 investment to develop their Chi Wellness brand and to build up a customer base of “happy and healthy people”.      

There was good news too for creative writing student Jeannie Askew, 55, from Blo Norton, whose Welcome to Womanhood concept – a pack enabling parents to support girls entering womanhood – claimed the runner-up prize.  Jeannie will now have £1,000 worth of in-kind help from Business Revolution, through hot-desking space, marketing and social media support, to help her develop the pack.     

Five entrepreneurial ideas were pitched to the panel of judges, James Gardiner (Director, Business Revolution), Kieran Miles (one of City College Norwich’s two entrepreneurs in residence) and Richard Jarrald (Federation Development Director, City College Norwich).  

The event was the culmination of a series of enterprise workshops run with students at City College Norwich by Kieran Miles, which helped them to design and develop their business ideas in the lead up to their big pitches as the competition reached its finale.

City College Norwich plans to hold more challenges like this in the future.  Opportunities for students to bid for investments and start up real enterprises will be a feature of the new Enterprise and Employability Zone, due to open at the college in September.

Dick Palmer, Principal, City College Norwich, said:  “I would like to congratulate Rebecca and Elizabeth on their success in front of a demanding judging panel and against stiff competition from the other student entrepreneurs.  All of the participants have developed skills that will stand then in good stead for their future careers, from identifying gaps in the market to putting across well-researched and confident pitches.” 

“Our planned new Enterprise and Employment Zone will provide a hub within the college where even more students will be able to learn and practice these skills in the future.”

Kieran Miles, Entrepreneur in Residence, City College Norwich, said: “All of the students did really well in their presentations.  The judging panel were impressed by the students’ dedication, the quality of the work and the level of research that went into all of the pitches.”