Develop

Firing up this project was not difficult. We all had our own ideas from the start, so choosing which countries was very fluid. There was a chicken noodle dish that we wanted to try so we linked that with the country South Korea. Abel had a plethora of South American ideas off the top of his head, and naturally we chose Columbia as our second country. For our third country we wanted to choose somewhere that was known for their flavor, spices, and diversity. Greece seemed to be the perfect answer for our wild, mediterranean admiration.

We had the chicken noodle dish down, so some filling in was necessary. We started with Columbian dishes: empanadas, menado, pastelilles, tamales, hayaca, and chicken chichomes. These five dishes seemed the most marketable in a packaging sense. The empanadas and tamales are using wrapped up anyway in corn husks or tortillas. Next we found some interesting South Korean foods to make our list of possible winners. Added to the noodles was the fried spicy chicken, chicken bbq slices, bimbimbap, and omurice. The Greek foods were where we ran into a bit if a tizzy. Falafel, gyros, greek salad, chicken donuts, and chicken skins were our final product choices.

It was hard to imagine a packaged gyro or greek salad, and we were not sure the donuts would be Greek enough. We chose the chicken skins dish and decided to add a Greek kick to the rind's flavor. We chose the South Korean noodle dish that incorporated chicken as the actual noodles for our second dish. It drew our attention the most in terms of creativity. The Columbian dish we chose were the tamales. I could not get those Greenville, Mississippi tamales from back home out of my mind, so we had to chose tamales.

Everyone has seem frozen tamales in the frozen section of the grocery store. They are being commercially produced, but they are primarily selected to be marketed toward Hispanic cultures, and they are generally all the same. I tried to find some kind of tamale spin-off but could not find anything but regular tamales. This incited potential in a creative tamale product.

There were seemingly no chicken noodles on the market as well. Not even on the internet were chicken noodles being packaged. This could either mean that no one has thought deep into it enough or they are just non-viable in a market like today's. Speaking of today's market, there tends to be a healthy-vibe emanating from even the general grocery stores like Kroger and Publix, not just Whole Foods and Fresh Market, which is why our third dish was not seen at any of those places. Chicken skins are like pork rinds: greasy, delicious, and bad for you. But what is there not to love about some baked chicken skin with a Greek twist? I think baked and Greek are two words that can easily help us weave through the healthy trend arising and charge through with crispy goodness.