Sophie Barley

Hi, I'm Sophie and for my placement, I completed the M&S food technical placement scheme. Unlike most placements, this one is divided into two sections: 6 months with M&S at their head office and 6 months in a food factory.

Working for M&S was a great chance to see how much work goes into the quality of the products you see on the shelf. While I was there, I had a few projects, one which looked specifically at improving the nutritional quality of some of the most loved café products. As well as working on my own independent project I had many opportunities to shadow senior food technologists, which allowed me to see over 30 different food factories. While at M&S there really was no typical day but there were a few typical weekly tasks including: reviewing customer feedback, travelling all over the UK to different factories, weekly quality checks and reviewing the store Natasha’s Law Compliance. The best part of working for M&S was completing weekly quality checks on the café cakes as well as benchmarking products in different categories.

During my food factory placement, I worked at Greencore, a food company that specialises in ‘food for now’ such as sandwiches and wraps. During this placement, I worked as a Process Technologist. This role takes kitchen recipes and scales them up so they can be made in a factory. I had a large amount of responsibility from day one as I was part of an incredibly fast-paced project which improved the quality of all the M&S sandwiches and wraps. As well as improving existing projects, I also worked on some new product development. This allowed me to take full responsibility for products and it has been incredibly rewarding walking into an M&S and seeing my products on the shelf. A typical day while at Greencore included a morning briefing with the team, working on quality contracts for the products, a daily taste panel, afternoon factory trials and finally, calls with both our suppliers and M&S for progress reports.