The Company
Global Fine Foods are an ethnic finger food company. They manufacture Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Jamaican finger foods and samosa’s. Operating within the Chilled and Frozen sector, Global Fine Foods are an expanding business who supply at the premium end of the market. A family owner-managed business operating within a fast moving sector, they are innovative and dynamic, able to launch products faster than their larger competitors.
The culture of the business is very open, decisions are made via group discussion, they are passionate about quality, the management work hard at making the workplace a fun place to be, they give ownership to their employees to make decisions, they pride themselves on being responsive and innovative to customer needs with NPD is at the core of the business.
The Challenge
Recruitment of an NPD Technologist.
Through meeting the company and discussing the role, we established that finding the right ‘character’ was at least as important as finding someone with the right experience. At the meeting Global Fine Foods used words such as, ‘dynamic’, ‘go getting’, passionate’, ‘highly motivated’, ‘craves responsibility’, ‘can juggle multiple tasks’, ‘team player’, ‘highly creative’, ‘wants to learn’, ‘wants success’. This language left us in no doubt that the business needed a real star, with genuine passion, personality and commitment that matched the company culture and ethos.
We also recognised that as a young business with a lack of experience within their NPD function, it would benefit them to recruit someone to their NPD team who had maturity and reasonable experience, alongside passion, creativity and a willingness to share their vision with others. A very challenging remit.
The Result
We identified a candidate from a blue chip branded foods environment, whom whilst young in years, had the maturity that comes with working for a corporate food manufacturer. We promoted Global Fine Foods to this individual as being empowering, creative, fun, fast paced, dynamic, and responsive to customers. This appealed to the candidate who was frustrated at the slower pace of product development within a corporate NPD framework where commercial opportunities were being lost as they couldn’t act quickly enough. This individual desired more ownership, the ability to make decisions, a faster NPD cycle and more responsibility.
Although a food science graduate with a few years NPD experience, this individual had no experience in the ethnic finger food category, but we knew this wouldn’t be an issue as they had the right character and personality, which had been identified as crucial at our initial meeting with the company.
Once appointed, the candidate was given the responsibility and blank canvas they desired at a very early stage, and went on to prove themselves to be an extremely talented NPD Technologist. Demonstrating real flair for the category sector, they developed in excess of 70 commercially successful new products for the business, managed the NPD process from concept through to full scale manufacturing.
