Can you describe your role at Hormel Foods and how it supports the Originate Initiative and our innovation efforts?
We as a team work on products. We take ideas, thoughts and processes and create new items which might be utilizing a new process or a new procedure or new equipment, or it could be a brand new product for the consumer.
What does innovation mean to you in the context of your job?
Innovation means collaboration, between the scientists, the chemists, the microbiologists. It is an entire group of individuals here at R&D, over at corporate, and our plant personnel. Everyone needs to work together to get new products to market.
How has your background in food chemistry and food science contributed to your work in product development?
I understand interactions between ingredients and raw materials. For example, we’ve produced salsa for many years at the Beloit plant. We wanted to have crunchier vegetables and have better accessibility to those vegetables. We created a better product by utilizing brand new raw materials — fresh jalapenos and fresh onions — using a new process, increasing the hedonic score by two points and actually decreasing the cost of the product. A hedonic score is a rating. We show the products to customers and they rate and rank the products. The higher the hedonic score, the more the consumer likes the product.
What does an average product development project look like? Can you walk us through the process?
Items and ideas are vetted. An idea can come from any person at any place at any time. It can be the consumer. It can be a working mom. I have quite a few people who have come up with ideas to make their lives easier, whether it’s because you’re a working parent or you just want an easier meal fix. Does the idea help the customer or the consumer? Then we take the idea and move it to the pilot plant and start making prototypes. We show the prototypes to marketing, who will approve or reject the product. If it’s not approved, we go back to making prototypes in the pilot plant. Once a product has been approved, we scale it up from the pilot plant to the plant. We then run line trials at the different plant facilities, and then we move it to fruition and to the consumer.
How do you work cross-functionally with other areas and departments in the company to innovate?
We have a weekly meeting that gets operations, marketing, sales, finance, everyone together. To create a new item and get something to market, you have to have speed to market. You have to have the product within a certain cost. But it also needs to have that special quality. It’s usually a fine balance between these three. And if it doesn’t happen together as a team, it doesn’t happen at all because we are better together.
You told us earlier that you’ve been at the company for 36 years. Why have you dedicated so much of your time, energy and talent to Hormel Foods?
Hormel Foods is part of my life, not just having a patent and creating a lot of different products for the last 36 years. The products become your babies. You see them from birth all the way going off to college and getting settled. It gives me pride to work at Hormel Foods, and Hormel Foods is taking care of me as a person. It’s taking care of my family. R&D is a wonderful place to be. We have a great staff. We have a great team. It takes a lot of individuals to make the team function. I love Hormel Foods. This is the best place to work in the whole wide world.
