Dubai

PepsiCo, the food and beverage company, announced the winning team of its Change the Game Challenge, selected from a pool of over 6,000 entries from students, graduates and working professionals, the company said on Thursday.

The winners were selected from Indian, Middle Eastern, Asian Pacific and North African entrants.

The final judging round saw three semi-finalist teams from each region compete in Dubai, UAE for the chance to present their business case to the Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, and her leadership team at the PepsiCo headquarters in New York.

The winners of the Change the Game Challenge 2017 were announced on Thursday as Siraphat Phattarabenjapol and Pattaraporn Sapamnuayporn.

The two business students from Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand won the competition for Palette, a line of nutritious, fun, and customisable crackers, created for children.

The winning duo competed against two semi-finalist teams from India and the Middle East and North Africa (Mena).

From the Mena region, industrial engineering graduates Abdallah Tannoury and Dimitri Khneisser from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon developed VitaFit, a detox, vitamin-enriched, protein beverage.

From India, Advait Potty and Arjun Odhayoth, metallurgical and materials engineering students from Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India created Pine Pro, a fruit-based probiotic beverage created using recycled pineapple waste.

As first-place winners of the semi-final round in each region, all three teams won a one-year job offer, working at the PepsiCo regional headquarters in their respective regions. The three regional semi-finalists were judged on their innovation, relevance in the nutrition space, feasibility/sustainability of the idea, their presentation, and the quality of the business case.

The Change the Game Challenge competition was launched on September 7, 2017 for its second consecutive year. The challenge tasks youth with developing their own health and nutrition business, which could be used to advance the company’s nutrition product portfolio by 2020.