Estelle works for Princes Foods in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, which is our European Head Office. She joined the company in 2019 and manages and coordinates our customer own-brands and new product development in the region. Estelle says:
One of the things I really like about working for Princes is that you feel part of a team and you’re valued.
Whoever I’m liaising with across the company, I like that we communicate and work well together.
In my job I have to be very flexible and work effectively under pressure. When new products come to market – whether they are Princes’ products or a customer’s own-brand – it’s my team’s responsibility to coordinate everything to make sure they’re delivered on time, to the right technical specification and that the customers are kept informed throughout the whole process. As a result, we work very closely with the technical, quality and sales teams.
In the new world of hybrid working, it’s not always as easy to have face-to-face time with colleagues, so I came up with a solution called ‘Food for Thought’.
Piloted in the Netherlands during Covid, it was an online weekly session for colleagues to colleagues.
We’ve had sessions on everything from the company’s green goals to where we source our tuna from, and they’re all recorded so if colleagues can’t make it they can watch it at a later date. It was a chance to informally catch up with each other, share skills and to learn more about what other people are doing in their jobs in the business.
It’s great to have this regular contact with each other and it’s brilliant for new people joining the company because they can meet everyone in the team, even if some are working from home.
The pilot went so well that it has been rolled out across the Group, which I’m very proud of.
To date we have had over sixty sessions and we’re about to celebrate our third anniversary. Since it went global, we’ve had presentations from our manufacturing facilities in Mauritius, home to our world-famous tuna, and Italy, our tomato and pulses processing and packaging plants. We’ve also had a talk from our IT department about the rise of AI and how we can embrace it.