Winners of the eleventh Annual Rocket Pitch competition were welcomed at the Cabinet Office by David Burt.

The Premier chatted with the entrepreneurs whose ideas were judged the best in this year’s contest, which was staged by the Bermuda Economic Development Corporation.

Rocket Pitch is a chance for emerging entrepreneurs to submit a plan to launch a business to help serve both local and global challenges. Entrants in the competition have five minutes to tell a story on their business idea to a panel of judges and then respond to questions. This year’s event was sponsored by BEDC, the Bermuda Tourism Authority and the Department of ICT Policy & Innovation.

During the past 11 years, Rocket Pitch has helped to launch or expand more than 20 businesses.

Bermuda High School students Madison Thompson and Natalie Calderon were this year’s winners in the Youth Pitch category. They created “Meal Deal” — an app that will help people identify and track items in their fridge and let them know when they are running low and what nearby stores carry the items, as well as note the life cycle of foods and when they go bad. The goal is to reduce our local and global food wastage.

The PitchTech category was won by Adrian Lodge, with his business “Bermuda Island Games”, a series of educational games about Bermuda and Bermuda’s history that will allow students and visitors to learn history in a more interactive way.

Michael Paynter was the winner of PitchPink, with “e-Tour Adventures”, which offers electric bike tours on the eastern end of the island, packaged as a sustainable form of alternative transportation which offers an immersive experience on the gems found in the east.

In the PitchGreen section, the winner was Alicia Trott with her business “Seeds of Indigo”, an agro holistic wellness centre providing holistic treatments and plant-based nutrition. The business will also consist of its own farm to grow and produce the products on offer at the wellness centre.

Meanwhile, the PitchTown category was won by Jayde Gibbons with her business “Queendom Heights”, a photography business that sells local prints, greeting cards, books and apparel with images of Bermuda taken from a unique perspective. Her focus is on producing images that show what makes us truly Bermudian from a real, unfiltered lens.