“If you want to study tigers,” Dr. Tanya Rodriguez mused, “would you study them in the zoo or in the jungle?”
“That’s why Hormel employs me,” she laughed, “to be in the natural habitat of consumers. To cook with them in their homes, to shop with them, to take the pulse of the consumer.”
That, in a nutshell, is the tip of the iceberg of Dr. Tanya Rodriguez’s journey from the University of Wisconsin to her globe-trotting vocation with Hormel Foods today. Studying to be a medical anthropologist while trying to finish her dissertation, she spied an opportunity on the job board that described ethnography, being home with consumers, looking at retailers, and truly trying to understand why people choose the products they do.
“When you study health, you inevitably study food,” she added, “and my research already covered how food affected overall lifestyle; the job with Hormel seemed like a great opportunity to further explore that.”
