UNAIR NEWS – Parents often run out of ideas to choose nutritional snacks for their children with affordable price. One of children favorite snacks is sprinkles or chocolate strands as they taste sweet and can be processed with other food such as milk or bread. All this time, there were not any other variants of sprinkles. It inspired five students of Faculty of Pharmacy Universitas Airlangga (UNAIR), Riyantita Tunjung Sari (2014), Alfu Rahmawati (2014), Arnia Nurlitasari (2014), Pingkan Nasuke (2014), and Citra Dewi Arum Pitaloka (2013) to create new variant of sprinkles made of dragon fruit. They used dragon fruit as the ingredient because it has a lot of vitamin, high level of antioxidant and three times vitamin C the oranges have.

“Our product is called Mera-mera. It was named that way because the color is red like the dragon fruit,” said Riyantita, as the PKM team leader.

The composition of these sprinkles were dragon fruit as the main ingredient, sugar for sweetener, lecithin, flavor, and natrium benzoate preservative. To get the nutrition of dragon fruit, the fruit is heated in an oven to lessen the water level without decreasing the vitamin content. Besides, the heating causes the color stronger. For the taste, it mixes the sweetness of sprinkles and sourness of dragon fruit. In their development, there were obstacles, such as lump up shape due to inaccurate heating temperature.

So far, the marketing targets of “Mera-mera” are children. For that reason, this PKM-K team created interesting packaging to attract their attention. The scope of marketing is not only Surabaya but it reached Malang, Sidoarjo, Madura and even Thailand.

“We hoped that we get the patent right of our idea and then we can produce and market the product even more widely,” added Riyantita. (*)

Author: Afifah Nurrosyidah
Editor : Dilan Salsabila