A day in the life of a Food Technologist

Hi, my name's Ashley. I'm an Associate Research Technologist at the Fonterra Research and Development Centre in Palmerston North. I'm based in the Dairy Foods team. I'm involved in new product development and new technology development based on cream cheese and cheese products. Food technology is not being a chef. You've got to know a lot about maths, chemistry, a bit of biology, and a bit of physics. You have to be creative and think outside of the box. You have to think of something new and exciting that will catch the consumer's eye. So when I get to work in the morning, I always start it up with a cup of coffee, and then I always check my emails and see what's ahead for the day. My day normally consists of team meetings. I interact with a lot of researchers and technical officers in my team. Because we have projects that span quite a few different products, I also work with people in the Beverages team, in the Engineering team, and of course in the Chemistry and Microbiology team. I also do lab work. In the pizza lab today, we are testing our mozzarella on pizza bases. We want to see how much it stretches, how much it blisters, and how much oil off it is. So when we make different mozzarella formulations, we might be looking at the composition, or we might be changing the processing to be able to change our stretch or blister. The consumer market is forever changing, which changes our products quite a lot. But that's part of the fun challenge, I would say. The main thing that I've been working on here at Fonterra is processed cream cheese. You know our block products in the supermarket, which are great for making cheesecakes. Some of the other products I've worked on include portions and lollipops and jar cheese. And those are more common in the Middle East and China. I also work with people overseas. So they can either be our customers, they can be based in China, Japan, Middle East, or I can work with our Fonterra officers overseas. The most rewarding part, I find, is when you make a formulation and a customer in China picks it up and starts putting that formulation through their factory. I love this job for the people. The people employed here are fantastic. And I love getting my hands dirty, making some sort of new product that's never been made before. You have to love food to suit this role and wearing a hairnet all the time. We do a lot of lab work and a lot of computer-based work. To become a qualified food technologist, you need to do a Bachelor of Food Technology, which is a four-year degree with a compulsory honours. You can major in food product technology or food process engineering. As an associate research technologist, I can get promoted here to be a research technologist or a senior research technologist. There are also other pathways I could go down. I could go into marketing or I could go into management. I would highly recommend this career to anyone who loves food as much as I do. I love seeing products on the shelves and knowing which processes and ingredients went into making that. So if you love that too, this degree's for you. Kind of rhymed. Maybe I should go into marketing.