Okanagan College student's beverage formula selected for commercial development

Nadia Alves walked into the BC Beverage Technology Access Centre at Okanagan College's Penticton campus last spring with no particular interest in how beverages get made. She was a first-year science student, focused on her coursework, unaware that the building held a world-class research lab—the only one of its kind in British Columbia dedicated entirely to beverage development. Within weeks, she would co-create a recipe that a real company chose to bring to market.

Alves was one of seven students selected for a Work-Integrated Learning placement at the BC BTAC through a partnership between Technology Access Canada, the Business + Higher Education Roundtable, and the Government of Canada. The timing was deliberate. Glimmer Wine, a women-owned startup making dealcoholized sparkling wine, had approached the centre looking to develop a line of non-alcoholic extensions to their brand. The centre's manager, Karin Grosstessner-Hain, saw an opportunity to bring students into the process—to let them shadow real research, participate in sensory evaluation, and eventually develop their own recipe iterations under professional guidance.

For one month, Alves and her peers applied the precision skills they'd learned in their college labs—measurement, pipetting, systematic iteration—to a flavor-development challenge that would normally belong to industry professionals alone. The work felt abstract until it suddenly didn't. "The fact that there was a chance the client would pick my recipe, that someone would use something I created—I thought that was really cool," Alves said. When Glimmer Wine's founder Janet Helou came in to review the prototypes, she selected Alves's formula.

For Helou, the collaboration compressed what would have been a months-long development cycle into weeks. Running a startup means wearing multiple hats—she is both the chief of sales and the formulation scientist. The work completed through the BC BTAC's National Research Council Industrial Research Assistance Program framework, which allocated 20 hours, would have taken her "several orders of magnitude longer" working alone. More than that, the centre's connections to ingredient suppliers and its sophisticated equipment—instruments a startup couldn't afford to buy—meant the prototypes arrived nearly perfect. "The initial prototypes were close to 95 per cent or more perfect and only needed minor fine-tuning," Helou said. "It's hard to describe just how difficult this is to achieve."

What struck Helou most was discovering the resource existed at all. "To think that in our own backyard we have a world-class lab ready to perform any type of micro, chemistry, analytical, sensory testing and beyond was a revelation," she said. The centre's existence and capability drastically reduced her go-to-market timeline and gave her confidence that her prototypes were developed under rigorous scientific methodology.

For Alves, the placement opened a door she didn't know was there. "I actually didn't really know that this was a whole career before I learned about it," she reflected. "But when you think about it, all those beverages on the shelves—someone had to create them. Now I understand how much work goes into it." Beyond the technical skills, she got her first taste of real-world research and development: non-disclosure agreements, client consultation processes, the relationship between ingredient sourcing and commercial viability. It was an education in how the beverage industry actually works, delivered in her first year of post-secondary study.

The placement model serves a dual purpose. It gives students like Alves a window into a career path they might not have considered, while giving regional businesses access to research infrastructure and young talent. For the Thompson-Okanagan region, where the beverage industry is an economic driver, the arrangement strengthens both the workforce pipeline and local innovation capacity. Alves's recipe is now moving toward commercial production—a tangible outcome that validates both the student's capability and the value of embedding real-world research into college education.