Project completed on June 1, 2023
You can enjoy the interactive 3D model of Dateel below. If you’re on mobile, you can even use augmented reality (AR) 
to bring Dateel into your world!
“A great product isn’t just a collection of features. It’s how it all works together.”
— Tim Cook
The Dateel team emerged from a part of the Bioplex team. We had worked together before and liked each other’s company, so we decided to take on a new challenge and represent our school in the DIDI PDS 2023.
Nestlé and the Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation (DIDI) handpicked us to create Dateel, a nutritious smoothie for the health conscious. We were challenged with taking care of the whole process of making a product including the nutritional value, branding, advertising, and cost of production, all while ensuring it actually tasted good with locally sourced ingredients. Our product also had to contain dates as one of the ingredients.
Dateel boasts a Nutri-Score of B—the highest any beverage can achieve, as A is reserved for water. The name Dateel comes from the English word ‘Date’ for the fruit and the Arabic word for palm tree ‘Nakheel.’ Date + Nakheel = Dateel. We also shared our drink with our schoolmates and teachers for their feedback. By the end of our journey to deliciousness, people were queuing up to get a taste of Dateel. We were overwhelmed by the support we received.
I created the 3D animation part for the Dateel video using Blender—a free and open-source software (FOSS). The entire video was edited using Davinci Resolve. I used various tools along the way such as Inkscape for crafting vector images (uses mathematical formulae instead of pixels for infinite resolution) and Audacity, another FOSS, for audio editing. This project wasn’t very script heavy, but Python always manages to find its way into my projects somehow. This time I used it to manage files, handle data, and control some 3D objects programmatically in Blender (it has a Python API). JavaScript and Windows Batch also creeped in once in a while to automate tasks.
Simulating the fluid for scene 4 in the 3D animation using Blender
Animating scene 2 using Blender
Editing the video in Davinci Resolve
On the social front, I worked on my communication skills and gained the confidence to approach people on the street (some of whom are in the gif above) and ask them for their opinion on Dateel. This experience also empowered me to act out a more unique role in the video. One person can’t have all the ideas, so me and my friends worked together to brainstorm ideas for the smoothie as well as the video.
After qualifying for the final round, we had to sign an NDA with Nestlé and continue our work on Dateel. We initially did not factor in the cost to allow for creativity in the recipe, but it eventually became a focus after we signed the NDA. We found the products that would be cheapest to buy in bulk for Nestlé but still went along with our recipe and nutritional goals. By the end of the project, we had revised the video over a hundred times and were very happy with the result. You could even say that it was almost perfect.
Friends and teachers saying Dateel tasted good is great, but a Nestlé official commending its taste at the DIDI PDS 2023 is even better. They loved how we made it nutritional too. Dateel had turned into a smoothie success.
