Name: Jessica Duckworth
Age: 27
Job title: Innovation manager
Company & location: Princes, Liverpool
Education: Sheffield Hallam University, Marketing BA Hons
Why did you decide to go for a career in food? We spend a lot of time at work, so it was always important for me to find an industry I have true enthusiasm and excitement for. The food industry is incredibly varied, and my current role enables me to work across multiple brands including Princes, Napolina and Plot9, our new plant-based brand, providing me with plenty of opportunity to gain knowledge and experience across different categories, consumer challenges and brand developments.
Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): As an innovation manager, I am responsible for delivering a long-term stretching innovation pipeline, which aligns to our strategic territories, category and brand consumer need states, helping the brands within Princes Group to enter new categories, formats and temperature bands.
What does a typical day look like for you? Every innovation project goes through a set process, which involves exploration, ideation, costing and feasibility, development, implementation and then launch. This makes the role very diverse, with a real balance of creative and analytical responsibilities. My day can involve more practical elements of recipe development such as tasting sessions or ideation workshops, coupled with strategic planning to evaluate new market, category and food trends to influence our innovation pipeline or creating compelling sell-in stories to showcase our innovation to customers.
Tell us about how you went about applying for your job. Innovation has always been a career goal for me, so I had previously set alerts through LinkedIn to monitor upcoming roles and understand the types of roles that existed. A truly dedicated innovation role can be quite rare, as this is often a responsibility that falls alongside brand management or within new product development functions. Princes has invested significantly in driving innovation and putting it at the forefront of the business by creating a newly formed innovation team, unveiling a new innovation facility and development kitchen, as well as partnering with KICR, a consultancy and research agency that allows us to validate our development with consumers all the way through our innovation process. Applying directly through Princes gave me the opportunity to gain a better understanding of the business and these developments, which led to the creation of my role.
The application process involved two stages, including a creative task that asked applicants to demonstrate how they would approach a consumer challenge through innovation. An interview task is always a good indicator for a role and the skills you’ll require on a day-to-day basis. If it’s the right role for you, the task should be enjoyable and interesting, despite the usual pressures of the interview process.
“Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone can be a great way to learn and develop”
What’s the best part about working for a food company? Working alongside a development chef is certainly a big perk of the job. I am based in the innovation centre at Princes, which provides the team with a facility to host product testing, demonstrations, workshops and customer showcases. My desk is actually in the Innovation Kitchen, giving me an opportunity to stay close to the development on a daily basis. Seeing (and tasting) the concepts you have worked on and how they develop over time is a really rewarding part of the role, and has given me a real appreciation for the work that goes into every product on supermarket shelves.
And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food & drink? Of course, it would be an added benefit to work on a particular brand or food category that you are already a loyal consumer of, but it’s certainly not essential. Being open-minded can be a great way to learn and develop new interests, as well as offer a new perspective and help brands overcome challenges to drive trial, bring in a new target audience or reappraise a category.
I am currently working on developing an ongoing pipeline of products for our new plant-based brand, Plot9. Despite not personally following a vegan diet, I have been amazed at the diverse range of recipes we have created by simply harnessing the power of plants and putting veg at the core of everything we do.
What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? Try new things! I was fortunate enough to love the first marketing role I ever had, but it can take time to understand what you like and dislike in a role. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone can be a great way to learn and develop. The Princes Graduate Scheme offers the ideal opportunity to do this, by spending eight months at a time rotating across sales, marketing and buying, learning from the best and being supported with a tailored, award-winning, learning and development programme.
What’s your ultimate career dream? I am most excited by true breakthrough innovation and the ability to create first-to-market solutions that meet consumer needs. My current role certainly has the potential to deliver this and we have some extremely exciting products in our long-term pipeline coming up, which are designed to disrupt our current categories and help our brands to move into new areas.
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