A Day In the Life at Enjoy Life

Hi everyone, my name is Linsey. I am the Senior Manager of Research and Development/Innovation at Enjoy Life Foods, and I think I have the best job at Enjoy Life! I get to play in the kitchen and think about future Enjoy Life products all day long! Sometimes that means I’ll be coming up with a recipe using some of our products for our monthly email blast. Sometimes that means I’m back in our plant, working with our production team on new cookie recipes – and tasting each and every one of them. It’s a tough job, and I’ve gained about 5 pounds since starting it, but I wouldn’t trade it for any other job at the company. In this post I’d like to tell you about a “typical” day in the life of a product developer here at Enjoy Life. Since no two days are the same, I’ve taken some liberties with my timeline…but you’ll get the idea!

8:00 Arrive at Enjoy Life – I’ll spend about an hour catching up with the Enjoy Life team (most are here by then), responding to emails, making phone calls, and planning my day. I also check in with our intern, Judi, to find out her plan for the day.

9:00 Innovation Meeting – I get together with Federico, our president, to discuss our current and future products and new product development. We have a lot of work to get done, so our meetings can be pretty long.  We are working on implementing some new systems, so sometimes our meetings can stretch out to almost four hours. Luckily, this doesn’t happen often!

10:00 Taste Test – Whenever we work on a new product, we have a taste test with everyone on the staff. We don’t sample just one product; we have a whole panel of things to taste. I recently gave Scott, our CEO, a sampling of eight different Snickerdoodle cookies to try! Usually, we taste only three to four different versions of the same product. Once we have a few samples we like, we will run it in our plant and send out samples to our customers (like you!) for evaluation. What you say is very important, because it helps us determine what we are going to introduce next.

11:00 Plant Production Test – We run a small “pilot run” of a new recipe (about 50 lbs or so) through our equipment to test it. This way, if it does not work, we have not wasted too much time and ingredients on the test. If it does work, we do a “scale up,” in which we run an entire full-sized batch to see how it runs. Once that works, we add it into our regular production schedule.

12:00 Lunch!

1:00 Formula work – While I work on new products, I play around on paper with the recipes, which we call “formulas.” I figure out costs, look at quantities of ingredients, and call suppliers. Sometimes I also use this time to meet with suppliers and evaluate samples with Nicki, who purchases all our ingredients.

2:00 New Product Meeting – In these meetings we talk about our great new products and production timelines. We discuss how the product will be launched, necessary sales support, and evaluate any market research we may have.

3:00 Emails and calls – A lot goes on at the office. We have meetings, you send us questions, suppliers want to get in touch. I take about a half hour in the middle of my day to respond to my email and return phone calls.

3:30 to 6:00 Experimenting in the lab – I make sure I spend some time in the lab. I take photos of new products I am working on, adjust a formula, or make a new recipe for our website. Because my job is split between two areas, I need to give equal attention to both Research and Development, and Innovation/New Products, which means some days I can only afford a few hours in the lab.

6:00 Go home – When my work is done I leave for the day. It isn’t always at 6 – sometimes I stay as late as 8 pm, depending on what I need to get done. That’s pretty unusual. I actually really love my work, so staying a little longer is, in fact, quite fun for me. When I’m home, I study up a bit on food science, eat a good gluten-free meal (I’m lucky to have no real food allergies), and go to sleep, so that I can be refreshed when I start all over again. I usually wake up excited to start my day. Because there’s always something fun to work on, and sometimes I don’t know what it is until I show up!