10 teams of first year Chemistry Students participated in this year’s Royal Society of Chemistry Schools’ Analyst Competition. They were taking on the role of trading standards officers and so had to check out some unusual products from ‘Super Sugar Candy Store’ who were suspected of selling sweets that contained restricted ingredients. The teams analysed the sweets using chromatography and compared the sweet dyes with known restricted or banned food dyes.The “trading standards officers” also did a spot check on some Vitamin C tablets to check on manufacturer claims of the amount of Vitamin C present – this involved lots of titrations! Trading Standards Officers deal with and investigate complaints too – in this case a cake mix where the cake did not look like the one on the packet – so analysis was done to check the amount of baking soda present in the cake mix.
Congratulations to Henry Wardle, Lenny Gowland and Matty Sturman, QE’s winning team. With Gracie Wrigley, Michael O’Doherty, Paul Nimmo coming second and Mehtab Singh Datt, Chloe McAllister and Karla Chang in 3rd place.
Well done to all the teams that took part!
