My food & drink job: Lauren Phillips, graduate product developer, Itsu

Name: Lauren Phillips

Age: 24

Job title: Graduate product developer 

Company & location: Itsu Grocery, London

Education: BA Spanish with Film Studies at University of Warwick – with a year abroad in Madrid!

As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? A vet! I love animals and liked the idea of helping them. This dream was shattered when my mum’s friend informed me that this career would involve putting animals down. I was also pretty poor at science in school. In hindsight, this career was probably never for me.

Why did you decide to go for a career in food & drink? I think everyone that writes these entries always says the same thing, but I just love food and I absolutely love eating.

When I was at university, I spent a couple of my summers interning at L’Oréal and I really enjoyed the fast pace of an fmcg company. I hadn’t seen many grad schemes in the food industry before I found this one and the variation of the rotations really appealed to me. I thought that gaining experience in four different functions, all in the context of a startup environment, would provide amazing opportunities for me to understand the inner workings of a consumer goods business.

Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): I’m just about to complete Itsu Grocery’s two-year Future Leaders graduate programme. This scheme was brand new the year I started (making me the first grad to have completed it!) and aims to provide an accelerated route into management. This has consisted of four different six month rotations in supply chain, sales, marketing & NPD.

”For a younger person, I think the key ingredients (pardon the pun) for success in this industry are willingness to learn and passion”

What does a typical day look like for you? At the moment, my role as a product developer in the NPD team means that I spend a lot of time working with our suppliers to create new and great-tasting products. The NPD team is very central in the business, so I also work a lot with our internal teams to manage project actions and deadlines, from initial ideas to launch within the development process.

Our NPD team is split into three categories: ambient, frozen & chilled and each category has a very full pipeline of upcoming new launches. As a team, we’re always looking for new subcategories to launch into. Some of our most-recent NPD includes our new Zen’waters (the business’s first-ever launch into the drinks category). This requires a lot of research, but more excitingly, a lot of tasting.

Tell us how you went about applying for your job: I applied for this role online whilst I was finishing my final year at university. For the application, I was asked to write four short essays in answer to questions relating to the departments of each rotation. I then completed a multiple-choice psychometric test.

Following this, my first interview was online, this was just to talk through my experience and some questions following the results of my psychometric test. The final stage was an in-person assessment day consisting of three parts: a presentation, a maths test & a final interview with the COO, CCO and CEO. Quite a few steps, but well worth it!

What’s the best part about working for a food & drink company? How passionate people are. Good food brings real joy to peoples’ lives and it’s so great to see people enjoying the products we’ve worked so hard to create. I think also working for Itsu Grocery specifically as a newer company only starting in 2012, it’s really rewarding to see the growth we’re achieving year on year. We’re a small team of less than 100 people and every single person has had a really instrumental role in achieving our fast growth and 15 new launches in the last six months – successes we’re all really proud of.

Read more:

• Itsu to make drinks grocery debut with flavoured water range

• Itsu grocery sales to pass £50m thanks to NPD and new listings

• Itsu adds ‘convenient’ ramen broths, cooking sauces and noodles

And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food & drink? I don’t think people realise quite how much work goes into getting products into stores. While supermarkets seem like they have an abundance of space, there is so much competition for shelf fixtures, and ranges are constantly under review if products don’t perform.

I also never realised how far in advance we have to work. For ranging windows in retailers, we have to plan months (sometimes over a year) in advance. I will never view a supermarket in the same way, you don’t consider any of this when running to Tesco to grab a pint of milk.

What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? This industry is incredibly fast-paced. Even more so than other fmcg industries because you’re working with best-before dates. But this makes it the perfect place to learn when you’re just starting out. For a younger person, I think the key ingredients (pardon the pun) for success in this industry are willingness to learn and passion. Passion can’t be taught or learnt and I think if you’re truly passionate about food, you’re already halfway there.

What’s your ultimate career dream? I ask myself this question a lot and in all honesty I still don’t really know yet.

I’ve just accepted my first role out of the graduate programme as a category manager, in which my role will be to harness market data and trends to provide strategic recommendations to internal teams and retailers. While I’m not sure what my ultimate career goal is, I know I want to do something data-driven and insight related.

Interested in finding out more about food & drink careers? Check out GrocerJobs for the latest vacancies