Building a career in the food industry

Abstract

Daria Liutcerina, interviews Bob Bowman. Here he shares his story as a professional in the field of food science and covers many challenges but also opportunities in the field.

BB: I was born and raised in Croydon, Surrey. I went to a local Grammar School, where my favourite subjects at O-level were maths and biology. However, after taking advice, I studied chemistry, physics, and pure & applied maths at A-Level.

My interest in food was sparked when, during my sixth-form years, I worked as a Saturday boy at my local Sainsbury store. I discovered that food retailing was different from many commodities. Stacking products on the shop floor wasn’t just about keeping shelves full; products had different storage requirements, shelf-lives, etc. When it came to considering further education after school, I was totally disillusioned with the pure sciences I had studied and could not envisage taking any one of them further (I hope they’ve changed the curricula since to make them more exciting). That's when I began considering studying food science. I looked at all the possible courses but, on my very last day at school, my form master handed me an A4 sheet about the National College for Food Technology (NCFT) in Weybridge, which had just dropped through his mailbox that morning. I applied and was interviewed by the principal, Professor Denis Mounfield, one of the founders of IFST, and was offered a place on the 4-year Food Technology course.

BB: I often describe my career since graduating in 1970 as consisting of two halves – half spent in employment with various food businesses and the other half self-employed. My first job was as a Development Technologist with Brooke Bond Oxo, based at their new technical centre in Croydon. I was tasked with developing a range of heat-sterilized products in flexible pouches. The project required frequent trips to a small factory in Fakenham, Norfolk, where I conducted heat-penetration trials using specially modified retorts adapted to run on super-heated water.

During one of these trips, between Christmas and New Year, a retort malfunctioned, spraying water under pressure. I was injured and spent New Year with my legs bandaged, which almost disrupted plans to announce our engagement at my girlfriend's parents’ house in South Wales. To this day, I bear scars from the incident.

Additionally, I became the go-to expert in materials testing and texture measurement, a role that led to my photo appearing on the front page of the Financial Times. This became an amusing anecdote, serving as my ‘ice-breaker’ at subsequent training courses.

My line manager at the time, Keith Anderson, who later became a President of IFST, persuaded me to join the institute as a Licentiate on 1st October 1971 (a membership lasting – well, I’ll leave you to do the maths). I was later promoted to Quality Controller at their recently acquired Haywards business, which had factories in Southeast London, a position I held for almost 10 years. Those were challenging times.

The country's finances were in a poor state (pre-Thatcher), industrial relations were at rock bottom (winter of discontent, 3-day week, rolling power outages, etc.), high unemployment and stiff competition for the few available vacancies.

The factory premises were old and in poor condition, certainly well below the standards expected of food manufacturing today.

I was still employed by the Technical Centre and was not seen as part of the factory management team, in fact quite the reverse. Quality Control, focussed as it was in those days on product testing, seemed to exactly oppose production management's aim of getting numbers out the door. I began to move the focus of the quality team towards process monitoring – I wish I had thought up the phrase Quality Assurance! I came across a quote by Olympic rower Matthew Pinsent that sums it up: -

‘It's all about Process Over Product: you don’t think about the result, you think about the process that gets you there. As long as you make sure that this is alright then the end-result will take care of itself.’

I’d heard rumours that my predecessor would have screaming matches with the supervisors – not at all my style.

Years later, at a job interview, a managing director told me that he didn’t think I was confrontational enough for a role I’d applied for. I replied that if he expected confrontation as the norm, maybe it was him that wasn’t suited to his role … end of interview!.

It was a great relief when it was announced that the business was to be relocated to a new factory, built on the outskirts of Bury St Edmunds. We moved here in 1979 and have not moved since.

Workwise, there were plenty of new things to hold my interest. The factory relocated about 80 miles away from SE15, but it felt like we jumped ahead by more than 50 years in terms of technology. Instead of the old manual jar feeds, we had automatic ones. We said goodbye to open boiling pans, replaced with scraped-surface heat exchangers. We swapped the traditional heating and cooling vats made of oak for tunnel pasteurisers. Fun fact: we were actually the first to use this cool gadget developed by LFRA, which could measure and store product temperatures as they passed through a continuous pasteuriser. Fascinating stuff to get my teeth into.

My interest began to wane after 3 years and in 1982, I left BBO and took a job with one of their suppliers, almost by accident. The business owner lived in the next village and our children attended the same playgroup. I was seduced by a significant pay rise plus company car. Eventually, somewhat reluctantly, I took over the Production Manager role, which involved frequent travel to a secondary production site in Bradford. In short, the role lasted a little over 4 years before ending in redundancy. On reflection, this had not been my best career move, as my previous employer had been taken over by Unilever.

Through Campden Food RA, I obtained a contract to join a Saudi company producing ready meals for Haj pilgrims, for 3 months. When 2 million pilgrims turn up in the desert to celebrate the Haj, they create a catering problem on a massive scale. The products were heat-sterilised in semi-rigid containers using the same technology that I had worked on in my first role with Brooke Bond.

On my return to UK, I secured a role with a produce company based in Chatteris, Cambridgeshire, part of Booker Agribusiness, as Special Projects Manager, reigniting my passion for product development involving new technologies. In this instance, the project aim was to develop a range of convenience ‘fully prepared’ (peeled, cut and/or shaped) vegetable products for caterers, using modified atmosphere packaging to extend shelf-life. This raised several technical problems because fresh produce, unless processed in some way, continues to respire and, when sealed in packaging for transport and storage, does its own job on modifying the atmosphere inside, taking up oxygen and giving off CO₂. Different products have different respiration rates and respiratory quotients, the ratio of O₂/CO₂ exchange. Unchecked, the changes lead to senescence. The permeability of the packaging to air gases and careful temperature control were critical to maintaining the atmosphere inside. Manageable in a small retail pack but more problematic for the bulk catering market we were targeting. We were working with packaging suppliers at the forefront of development of high permeability films.

The business went through major upheaval, and I ended up redundant for the second time in the mid 1990s. By now, I was fed up carrying the can for the failures of others and set out to investigate working for myself.

BB: Based on my experiences with fresh produce I won a short-term contact for a year with Whitbread – the catering side, not brewing! This was followed by another 3-month contract with LFRA. There was no turning back; I convinced myself I could become self-sufficient. So began, in 1997, the second half of my career as a freelance consultant. Looking back, I refer to the previous 27 years as the longest apprenticeship in history!

From humble beginnings as an auditor of fast-food outlets and budget hotels for Trust House Forte, I developed three significant business strands:

■ As a consultant advising producers on food safety and quality management systems.

■ As a registered BRC Auditor for a leading Certification Body, qualified across all 13 product categories.

■ As an outturn surveyor of perishable food imports for a consultancy providing cargo surveys, loss adjustment, training and general consultancy to companies involved in trade with frozen and chilled products for insurance companies, carriers, importers and exporters.

Despite my efforts at self-promotion, the bulk of my income has come from subscriptions to IFST's Consultancy List. For anyone considering self-employment as a sole trader, I highly recommend subscribing. However, the platform lets’ you search by name, not by location.

Now in my 70s, I have been retiring for the past 5-6 years at least. Changes in legislation and compliance standards make it difficult to keep up but still find myself drawn back to assist some recent clients with, for example internal auditing and handholding through audits, etc. You can take the man out of food technology, but you can’t take food technology out of the man!

BB: Don’t wait to talk to your past self – do it now and always listen to what energises you.

Follow your instincts.

List what you’re good at and what you’re bad at. Find ways to improve in both areas until you excel at something.

You’re better than you think! Cut yourself some slack and forgive yourself for what you did wrong. Remember: the only people who don’t make mistakes are those that do nothing.

BB: I struggle to recall a particular one but have a stock of memories, many humorous, of my time working in food. No matter what your occupation, it's essential to maintain a sense of humour.

One I recall was working as a supplier auditor for DBC, the Foodservice arm of the Danish Bacon Company. When I arrived in Reception of a well-established food company, they were clearly not aware of my visit despite my name, albeit misspelt, on the visitors’ board behind the Receptionist's desk. Once I had explained the purpose of my visit and who sent me, there were several rushed phone calls until three ‘suits’ appeared. It soon became clear that ‘DBC’ had been misheard as ‘BBC’.

The relief of the suits when the mistake was revealed was palpable.