Name: George Tatlow
Age: 27
Job title: Head of NPD
Company & location: Wrights Food Group, Crewe
Education: Painsley Catholic College
Why did you decide to go for a career in food? I credit my dad with my passion for food – he is a keen cook and family holidays always centred on food so I’ve grown up eating varied and sophisticated dishes, which created a real fascination in food that’s carried right through to adulthood.
Explain your job to us in a sentence (or two): My role is heavily based around project management and I’m responsible for leading on the briefs from our retail and foodservice customers, such as creating new products for seasonal launches to adapting recipes for plant-based alternatives for many of our favourite meat-based lines.
What does a typical day look like for you? It starts with a team briefing to run through the day or the week in terms of customer submissions. I’m involved in line trials, exploring different flavour profiles and pulling together project plans as well as hosting project update meetings and presenting back to customers on a given brief. I will take customer calls and support on customer visits where we discuss upcoming innovation, taste and flavour developments and ingredient sourcing. Sometimes I’ll travel to customer sites across the country and my role also involves travelling overseas to review and stress-test new production machinery.
“If you live it and breathe it, you’ll love working in this industry. It’s never a job, it’s a lifestyle.”
Tell us about how you went about applying for your job. It was a two-stage interview process which involved preparing and presenting a SWOT analysis and presenting my vision for developing the department – something I began implementing as soon as I secured the role. I didn’t find the process too difficult as I’d been working at Wrights as a development chef so was familiar with the team and the business and felt I had a good understanding of what I’d like to develop.
What’s the best part about working for a food company? I love just how far our products reach. In a restaurant kitchen, you may be serving a dining room of around 30 people. In food manufacture, your food is reaching hundreds and thousands of people every day, across the country. Having products out there and getting the recognition is really rewarding and when you hear people talking about the food you’ve developed – such as at my team’s football ground, where I see and hear people eating and enjoying the pies I’ve helped to develop – that feels great!
And what’s the biggest misconception people have about working in food & drink? That the quality of ingredients and of the manufacturing is low and that everything is ultra processed. It’s simply not true. The process is a lot closer to what you’d make at home than people realise – we use good-quality suppliers and take a lot of care over everything we produce – it’s simply scaled up for the volumes we need to produce today. But we go to great lengths to ensure the quality remains high.
What advice would you give to other young people looking to get into the food & drink industry? Work in as many in different sectors as you can to get that true understanding of the food industry. I worked in hospitality for years before making the move into food manufacturing and it’s given me a fantastic understanding of how our products are received and served. Above all, you need to be passionate about food – if you live it and breathe it, you’ll love working in this industry. It’s never a job, it’s a lifestyle.
What’s your ultimate career dream? This is the industry I want to spend my life working within – I love the pace, the environment and the challenge. My aspiration is to use all of the years of food and sector experience to become a strategic director within food manufacture.
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