Eggcitables, a company that makes a vegan egg substitute from chickpeas, won the $10,000 cash prize at the third annual 100 Entrepreneurs Planting Seed$ pitching competition, an initiative put on by the Halifax non-profit, 100 Seed$ Atlantic.

Hannah Chisholm, founder of Eggcitables, will mainly use the winnings to finalize her chickpea recipe so it has the same texture, smell and taste as an egg and with more nutritional value than current egg substitutes.

“I was really excited to even hear that I was a finalist and now that I’m here and got to actually pitch my product and then actually win, I am just really excited,” said Chisholm after she won the competition.

“The first on the to-do list is to incorporate . . . and work out the legal situation. Then I’ll develop a marketing plan to get this thing going.”

Chisholm was one of three finalists who presented at the event, which was held at the Halifax Public Library.

The other finalists are Elwood Pens, a handmade wooden pen company from New Glasgow and Creative Urban Timber, a custom furniture business that uses locally sourced live edge wood from firewood lots to make custom, modern furniture.

The annual event sells 100 tickets to folks in the startup community at $100 per head. That money makes up the $10,000 prize that is awarded to the company with the most successful pitch.

Read the Latest on Last Year's Winner Aurea

100 Seed$ was started in response to Ray Ivany’s Now or Never report which said only 12 percent of youth between the ages of 16 to 24 aspire to start their own business. The micro-funding pitching competition was the organizers’ solution to improve that statistic.

“It gets better and better every year,” said Allyson England, one of the co-founders and organizers of the event. “The pitches are awesome and I’m just happy to see more young people in entrepreneurship.”

The 2018 event was the third pitching competition held by 100 Seed$, which in November, registered as a non-profit organization and formed an advisory board which includes Halifax Mayor Mike Savage and Don Mills, the chairman of Corporate Research Associates. 

The past winners of Seed$ competitions were Canada Cold Press Juices in 2015 for its idea to make juice from wasted fruit in local orchards and Aurea, a cleantech company that outfits small-scale wind turbines to high rises, in 2016.