Name: Lauren Williams
Age: 26
Job title: Head of Brand Partnerships
Company & location: Gemsatwork, Brighton
Education: Folkestone School for Girls
Why did you decide to go for a career in food? You have a lot of options and industries to choose from when working in sales. I came to the conclusion I wanted to work in marketing after seven years at Solar & Corporate Refurbishments, working with household names I grew up with like McVitie’s. I wanted to support new products launching into retailers, to feel like I am part of that journey. I love working with and supporting new businesses, developing relationships with fantastic marketeers and learning from owners of small fmcg startups. I find it fascinating.
Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): I sell targeted sampling campaigns for food & drink brands across the UK, whether that be launching an NPD, supporting new stockists, or just brand awareness. It’s all about helping you get your brand in consumers’ hands and seeing measurable results from our engaged network of offices. We have 10,000 workplaces signed up, which gives us access to 4.2 million consumers.
What does a typical day look like for you? A typical day for me involves creating bespoke proposals for brands to sell them the ‘office sampling’ concept and how we can reach their ideal consumer while supporting their wider marketing activity. I spend a lot of time chatting to brand and marketing managers over Zoom to find out as much as I can about their brand so I can make their campaigns successful.
“The teams in the food & drink industry are some of the most hard-working and friendly people I have ever met”
Tell us about how you went about applying for your job: I wanted to start selling something more exciting and something I could see myself being passionate about. So four years ago I used Indeed and started off in a prospecting role, but have had four promotions since then! Sales is more about how you come across rather than hard figures and qualification checks, so it was very informal and chatty.
What’s the best part about working in the industry? Brands send me their new products to try all the time and I am the world’s best consumer because if I really love something, I rave about it to everybody and purchase it consistently – so that might (selfishly) be my favourite part. But on a serious note I love knowing about NPD before the rest of the world and working with brands to create campaigns for a successful launch and promising future.
And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food & drink? I think consumers can never fully grasp the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes when creating and marketing a product to really make sure the target audience is catered for in every aspect. On top of this, understanding the risk behind launching a food or drink item in an already saturated market and how agencies, like mine, have to really stand out from the crowd for food and drink businesses to invest in us.
What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? The teams in the food & drink industry are some of the most hard-working and friendly people I have ever met. There are also so many opportunities, from working on the brand itself to selling to brands and helping marketing their products. Everyone speaks to each other in the industry, everyone knows everyone. If you get a good reputation for yourself you can be super successful as nothing is more credible than word of mouth and doing a great job for people. So be kind, willing to learn and honest.
What’s your ultimate career dream? One day, I would love to do some work with a small fmcg startup in food & drink. Selling the brand’s products into major retailers and using my experience from the agency side of things and speaking to hundreds of brands throughout the years to help support a new product launch. Beyond that, I would honestly love to gain enough knowledge and become an advisor or be a non-exec director across a few agencies or brands in the fmcg world.
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