Name: Eloise Bristow
Age: 27
Job title: Head of marketing
Company & location: Moving Mountains, London
Education: I studied biology at the University of Bristol – my dissertation was about whether imported commodities labelled as alleged superfoods are worth the hype from a social and nutritional standpoint, or whether the humble oat is a better option (more often than not, the humble oat prevails!). Looking at how what you eat can affects your footprint – that’s where my interest in fmcg started.
Why did you decide to go for a career in food and drink? Right now, it’s time for sustainable fmcg to take centre stage, and I wanted to concentrate my efforts amplifying them.
Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): My job is to orchestrate the marketing strategy, scope out the opportunities to get all eyes on our brand, and steer our marketing team into producing impactful campaigns. This involves creative thinking to help us disrupt the category, and being a brand guardian to ensure we’re aligned across all touchpoints of our communications, from retailer decks, to packaging, to OOH.
What does a typical day look like for you? Clichéd as they come, but no two days are the same – all in all, fmcg isn’t a glamorous industry. One day I could be flipping burgers at a festival, the next staring at spreadsheets.
Tell us about how you went about applying for your job: Young Foodies are an organisation who have helped me with all my career moves in fmcg. From their graduate programme straight out of uni helping to prepare me for the world of fmcg, I’ve used them to recruit people and they’ve helped me with career moves too. They’re a great port of call for jobs in foodie startups.
“I used to think pre-working in fmcg that to be on a supermarket shelf, you must be a huge brand – but actually it can be a small team working very hard”
What’s the best part about working for a food and drink company? Other than having a freezer full of plant-based goodies, I love being able to calculate my impact in a few ways. The success of one campaign I can measure in a set objectives like ROS, brand awareness etc, but I can also tie success to the environmental impact we’re making, like how many meat eaters we’ve converted.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food and drink? Not sure if this is a common misconception, but my friends anecdotally are always surprised that there are only 10 of us manning the ship at MM. I used to think, before working in fmcg, that to be on a supermarket shelf, you must be a huge brand – but actually it can be a small team working very hard. Also, I didn’t know how much I’d lean on brand friends for advice and vice versa – it feels like one big community.
What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food and drink industry? Things can be turbulent – one day you’re dandy, and the next day you find yourself putting out fires. Recently I was having a day like the latter and getting unduly stressed when things weren’t going as planned at work. I distinctly remember my manager saying to me ‘remember, it’s just chutney’. As silly as it is, it put things into perspective for me, and every time I get stressed about something at work that is out of my control, I remind myself of this!
What’s your ultimate career dream? It’s hard to look beyond plant-based burgers, as that’s always been a dream for me! But heading up a brand that has a really strong mission: for example, the standard of marketing and mission at Tony’s Chocolonely is something I aspire to. Their mission to highlight the injustices of the chocolate industry is so entrenched in their marketing – even their product divides into ‘unfair’ chunks when shared.
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