Notre Dame student's winning essay to inspire new cereal

Notre Dame High School senior Audrey Deken won Gilster-Mary Lee's 2023 Create-A-Crunch essay contest. Her prize is the chance to work with the Illinois food manufacturer to create a Notre Dame branded cereal and cereal box design.

The essay was assigned to Deken's Life Skills class, and the topic was the use of Artificial Intelligence in manufacturing.

Deken said she was shocked she won because "English has never been my best subject." She said she never dreamed she would ever write an essay about breakfast cereal, let alone be part of creating a new one.

She said her dad is an engineer and helped her understand and explain how AI can help with manufacturing.

"I wrote about the best things that AI can do for manufacturing and some things that we should be concerned about," Deken said.

In her essay, Deken wrote that artificial intelligence helps reduce issues in the production process by limiting monotonous tasks.

"Some of these tasks could be maintaining records, making calculations and addressing queries," Deken wrote. "Artificial intelligence isn't seen as all beneficial. There are some challenges that manufacturers face -- job displacement, data security and privacy, ethical concerns, reliability and legal issues."

Notre Dame's Life Skills teacher Amy Neal said she was not surprised that Deken won the contest.

"Audrey kept coming to me to ask what the prompt for the essay was so she could be prepared," Neal said. "She wanted to start right away."

Deken said she's started coming up with ideas for what kind of cereal she wants to make.

"I want it to have a blueberry flavor so the cereal can be blue for Notre Dame," Deken said. "One idea for a name is Bulldog Crunch, but I'll try to come up with some other options."

Deken said she will visit Gilster Mary-Lee offices in Chester, Illinois, to brainstorm ideas for the cereal, and then once they are ready to go into production, she will get to go to the manufacturing plant and see how the cereal is made.

Neal said her whole class submitted essays to the contest and that Gilster-Mary Lee received more than 400 submissions from students in Missouri and Illinois.