Name: Greg Brady
Age: 29
Job title: Brand manager
Company & location: Savencia Fromage & Dairy UK, London
Education: Management sciences at Loughborough University
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? I was never really sure what I wanted to be growing up! I chose quite a generalist route for my university degree and found I gravitated more to marketing and analysis modules – on my placement year I worked as a marketing assistant and picked up the bug!
Why did you decide to go for a career in food & drink? I worked on the checkouts in Tesco during my A-levels, and always found all the products and brands I was scanning fascinating. If you think about it, each brand has their own story and I would love to be a part of building something that connects with people in their homes.
Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): Managing the Saint Agur range and Haute Fromagerie range for responsible and sustainable growth in the UK.
What does a typical day look like for you? As a brand manager your role is incredibly varied! Typically you’ll do reporting and analysis of some sort (to show or explain what’s going on in the market and how you want to address it).
At the moment we’re looking into how we can bring people back into blue cheese, as the cost of living crisis has meant less people are buying blue cheese compared to a few years ago. Today I’ve been working on our marketing budget and media plans, as well as our marketing campaign to support our new product Saint Agur Blue Delice (a mix of blue cheese and whipped cream cheese – very delicious).
“I would love to look back and think the work I’m doing now played a part in more people enjoying this amazing variety of cheese!”
Tell us how you went about applying for your job: It was fairly simple (isn’t usually). A recruiter reached out and this led to a telephone interview with my future line manager and HR director.
I then came for an in-person interview with my line manager and marketing director. I didn’t have to do a task on this occasion (but usually do). I’ve always found the negative questions trickiest to answer, like ‘what’s your biggest weakness?’ – I found the question ‘what’s your favourite cheese and how do you eat it?’ the easiest!
What’s the best part about working for a food & drink company? The best part is that everyone consumes food and drink, so you’ll be working on products a lot of people know about or have tried!
There’s also a lot of history and culture in food that you don’t fully appreciate until you’re working in the industry. Just looking at cheese alone, there are over 1,000 varieties with different tastes, textures and stories behind how they came about. It’s been fun working on Haute Fromagerie selection packs, our range with the mission to bring together premium cheeses in an accessible, ready-to-serve pack.
And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food & drink? The biggest misconception I find is that when you look at job adverts, you can often feel like you don’t have the right experience (e.g. three years in food and drink). That might be the case for some employers, but I had no experience in cheese (only in cleaning products and sportswear) yet Savencia F&D UK took me on.
What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? I think getting a job in food and drink is about being in the right place at the right time (as well as performing well in the interview process). If you’re passionate about a company or food and drink product, that’ll shine during the application process.
Don’t be put off if you think your experience may not be right – think about ways your current experience will still be relevant and transferable.
What’s your ultimate career dream? My career dream would be working as a brand director or marketing director on market-leading brands that are growing and really making change in the industry they’re in. It would be great to look back at my career and see the change I was a part of in the market. A lot of innovation and changes to the way we eat comes from brands, and it’s why grocery retailers have always stocked them.
Saint Agur is doing a lot of exciting things to try and change the perceptions of blue cheese. I would love to look back and think the work I’m doing now played a part in more people enjoying this amazing variety of cheese!
Interested in finding out more about food & drink careers? Check out GrocerJobs for the latest vacancies
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