Candy Dish Blog

Recently I told Carl that when I was a little girl, I told my dad I was going to enroll at Mt. Olive College and work my way through school by taste testing pickles.  My dreams were dashed when Dad pointed out that I’d have to taste bread and butter pickles in addition to my beloved dill pickles.  Oh well.

Since coming to work in the food industry, I now know for sure that there are pickle taste tasters in the world.  I know this because I personally know people whose jobs include tasting candy and chocolate.  Seems pretty awesome, right?

Here are, in my opinion, the Top 5 Coolest Jobs to have in a candy plant:

1. Research and Development Scientist
Formulate new or improve existing confectionery products, troubleshoot production problems, ensure compliance with industry and government specifications and regulations.

2. Industrial Engineer
Plan and monitor workplace design, conduct time-, methods- and motion-study analyses to make production as efficient as possible.

3. Electrical Engineer
Design new products, write performance requirements, develop maintenance schedules, test equipment, solve operating problems, estimate time and cost of engineering projects, may include work with robotics.

4. Line Worker
Form candy by hand or, more frequently, operate one of several machines in the candy-making process.

5. Innovation Technologists
Develop new concepts for confectionery products, research market and production trends, test flavors and formulations.

Keep in mind these are jobs within the plant.  All confectionery companies need accountants, marketing folks, sales people and tons of other job specialties to keep the engine running.  Plus, there are jobs in related fields, too – like confectionery buyers for retail stores, brokers, and people who work for the companies that make the equipment or ingredients candy makers use.  Or, you could work for a trade association like Carl who talked his job on Monday, Laura who filled us in on being a candy scientist on Tuesday or me. Only you’ll have to wait a long time because no one wants to leave the candy association!

The Friday Five is a Top 5 list of just about anything related to candy.  If you have ideas for an upcoming Friday Five, please let us know.

I was just discussing it with Rebecca, our editor for NCA’s SmartBrief daily candy news newsletter, and I think she agrees that we work in a pretty special industry. Rebecca is a food editor, so candy is only one part of what she works with, and I think the whole of the food industry is exciting, but more especially candy.

When I tell people I work in the candy industry, they light up and immediately tell me their favorite sweets. People love candy. If I told them that I worked in the drill bit and machine tool industry or in a gear factory, I might get some nods and blank stares. Sure, those things are necessary, but they do not have the allure of candy.

Truth be told, our industry has every type of job any other industry has. Executives, receptionists, engineers, R&D folks, factory line workers, security officers, scientists, maintenance people and even photographers and writers. And more. We are like the Army. Any job you can get in civilian life you can also find in the candy industry, except in our industry you still get to be a civilian.

The big difference is that we bring joy to people’s lives. We make something people love. Even when I have a very stressful day, I can know that today I helped promote an industry that makes people happy. To me, that’s worth a lot.

As I stated before, I didn’t plan to end up here. I came here because I fell backward into a good position and it ended up working out. What I got was much more than a job and a bag of candy. And yes, Susan sent me home from my first interview with a bag of candy to write about as part of the interview process. No joke. What I got was something special, more than a paycheck. It was completely unexpected and has become very treasured.

For those of you in college now or else still new in your careers, what I recommend is making a matrix of job types and industries you would like to work in and seeing where your interests lie. Most people go after a particular job type but considering the industry is just as important.

You also need a mission statement of some sort. Ask yourself what you want to contribute to in the span of your life. In my own case, I wanted to bring happiness to people. This job I have now is a great way to do that. In the past I have worked in education and social services and found those just as rewarding in that respect – helping people feel good.

I don’t have high aspirations and know that, like Mongo, I am but a pawn in the big game of life. I am not solving the world’s many problems, but I am adding a little light to the world, gumdrop by gumdrop. To me, that’s definitely a good direction to go.

Like Carl, I am often envied by my friends for my sweet gig as a candy scientist here at the National Confectioners Association. There are different types of candy scientists in the industry. For example, research and development scientists work on developing new flavors and formulas, while quality control scientists make sure the candy is safe to eat and consistently delicious, and engineers work on fixing and maintaining the equipment used to make candy.

My job is actually quite unique. I spend a lot of my time helping confectioners understand all of the government rules and laws that they need to follow, including really tiny boring details like the exact font size their labels must be printed in. I also get to help promote industry-wide collaboration on scientific projects such as designing equipment to make candy safer and developing a method to measure antioxidants in chocolate. Another fun part of my job is putting on industry short courses about the science and safety of candy production. When I’m not busy with candy school, laws, or coalitions, I just help out when anyone needs a scientific opinion on candy, or anything in general, such as how to make cheese out of eggnog (not recommended, btw).

The luckiest part of my job for me is that it’s my first job out of school and I wasn’t even quite finished with my master’s degree when I started working here. My first day of work was at the candy expo, a welcome change from the 18 years I had spent in school prior to that day.

I first got involved in the satisfying field of candy science as a freshman in Food Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I started working as a lab assistant with my advisor, who happened to study chocolate and ice cream. Food Science was a fun major and particularly employable. I had two internships – one at ADM Cocoa, where I worked at a cocoa plant in the Netherlands, and another one at General Mills, where I helped formulate Nature Valley Granola Bars.

I went on to graduate school where I learned more about health, science and policy and the opportunity to apply to this job came as random luck through a conversation I had when I happened to run into my old college advisor. Basically, I think Carl’s paradigm applied to getting my job as well, but I think that for me, the biggest component of being good at something had to do with my passion for learning about food.

Editor’s note: Many thanks to Laura, who agreed to merge the Careers in Candy theme with her weekly Candy Science Tuesday post.

Science Lab by *Maya*

I am not trying to brag here, but I have had lots of people asking me how they can have a job like mine. They want to know how they can work in the candy central hub of sweetness activity, get to sample the latest, greatest candies, ride oompa loompas through the office and generally work with great people, fun stuff and in a positive atmosphere and a constant-growth, recession-resistant industry.

That’s a great question and one I wonder at almost daily. How did I get so lucky? I get to use my training as a writer and follow my dreams as a photographer and work in a wonderful industry with interesting people. The flowchart here explains the journey to success pretty well, I think. I first wrote about this when talking about photography as a business but I think it holds pretty well for any industry.

If you are still reading and curious, I got my job pretty much the same way everyone gets a really great job – by a combination of being good at something, knowing the right people, plain old dumb luck and then the secret sauce. Let’s look at these elements more closely:

• Be good at something. If you aren’t good at the primary skills you need for a particular job, you might want to back up and retool. Being good at something isn’t enough, though. You also have to let people know that you are good at it. There is a psychological principle that if people hear a statement over and over, they will eventually believe it or at least accept it as common knowledge. Promote yourself and all the good things you do. In my case, I wrote for various blogs and had already established myself as a writer and photographer and know something about social media. Bingo.
• Know the right people. Most jobs come from some sort of personal interaction or social network. That’s right – social networking is best done face-to-face. Talk to people, ask them about themselves, listen and have a conversation. Don’t know the right people? Find the person you want to emulate in your career and ask him/her for a meeting over lunch to discuss what it takes to be successful in that industry. Nobody turns down a free lunch and an opportunity to talk about themselves. In my case, I met Susan through her then-boyfriend and now-husband Don, whom I had met as a colleague and fellow writer a couple years before.
• Plain old dumb luck. Sometimes landing that peach of a job happens because you are in the right place at the right time. There’s no planning for this sort of thing but you can increase the chances of it happening by surrounding yourself with the right people and letting them know, in a polite way, that you are good at something. In my case, dumb luck came from mentioning to Don that I was looking for a new job, so he put me in touch with his girlfriend, who was looking for someone like me and hired me, and Don and Susan eventually got married, so that really was a great hiring decision on her part.
• The secret sauce. This is the mystery ingredient in any sandwich that is worth a darn. What makes it taste so good? The secret sauce. What is it? I dunno. In the case of finding or keeping a job, the secret sauce is what gels everything together and makes it work. It’s a quantity you cannot specifically enumerate other than to say that it works. It’s usually something like a chemical reaction between different personalities in certain environments. It’s the thing that creates synergy. No other way to describe it, unfortunately, and no way to predict whether it will be there. It can be fostered but not created, found but not completely understood.

The real answer to your question, though, is that you cannot have my job because it is occupied and I have an army of oompa loompas to defend me should you try to get me to vacate my post. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts on all this, and if you want to buy me lunch to talk about getting a job like mine, I will certainly let you ride an oompa loompa while en route to a nearby restaurant. The little guys can’t hold out forever, unfortunately.

This week on Candy Dish Blog we are going to look at careers in the candy industry. It’s a tough time to be looking for jobs, but if you are interested in adding one more job search site to your bookmarks, check out the Confectionery Industry Job Site.