Tereora College year 13 students who took part in the Young Enterprise Scheme presented their products and or services to a three person panel: Vaine Nooana Arioka (BCI CEO), Apii Tumutoa (Manager Health Promotion) and Steve Anderson ( CEO of Andersons) 

One of the four businesses Piriranga Mou, created the product lokD, which is designed to promote family time by keeping people off electronic devices, The product a plastic box with an electronic timer on top – can lock away phone devices from 1 minute to 10 days. In an emotional presentation, the businesses shared how family time had gone form quality time to being dominated by mobile phones.

Another business, Kai Tupuna, created a Cook Islands traditional cookbook. The company’s CEO Tearuru Raita said the recipes were exotic and rarely prepared today. We decided to come up with the idea from our group’s perspective we knew that our Cook Islands cultural was starting to fade away and even our kai tupuna, traditional food.” Raita said. “So we decided to do a cook book so that our people can learn their kai tupuna that our ancestors prepared.”

The business that won the pitch and the $800 cash prize was Tamou, which created a Cook Islands – themed board game in Maori. “It’s something that we came up with because we are very strong in our Cook Islands language, CEO Heinarii Tauira said.

We wanted to incorporate that into something fun.” Tauira said the game was similar to the money board game Monopoly but emphasized it was its own thing.

Te Reo created wallet size information cards designed to help tourists during their Cook Islands stay. One of the business team members commented that the idea was inspired from tourists asking for information on Facebook and wanting it all in one place. The Reo’s original idea was together the cards into airlines travelling to the Cook Islands.