In this series, British Baker talks to people from across the baking industry to find out about their career path, what their job involves, and the latest trends that are shaping their work.
We’re looking to showcase a diverse range of talent and job types across the industry, so if you’d like to be involved, please email amy.north@wrbm.com
Name: Robin Loud
Age: 60
Job title: Technical applications specialist
Company and location: Dawn Foods, Evesham
Education: City & Guilds Bakery parts 1 & 2 at Brunel Bakery College in Bristol
Tell us about your career to date
I started my bakery career in the 1980s working in small craft bakeries as a baker/confectioner. I then moved to Mountstevens Bakery in Bristol at the start of the nineties, working my way up from junior chargehand to supervisor and then onto technical manager. After two years working in NPD at Entenmann’s, I joined the Fabulous Bakin’ Boys in Witney as NPD & process manager for six years. I then spent seven years with Macphie of Glenbervie as a technical baker covering the Southwest and Wales until 2014, when I joined Dawn Foods.
My time as a hands-on baker and in bakery sales has helped me in the role I now do as I understand how ingredients work in real bakery situations and the day-to-day challenges that many of our customers face.
Explain your job in a sentence (or two)
I support all internal and external customers on the most suitable and best use of Dawn products from across all our markets. As well as providing advice on consumer trends, I have a creative role, and this involves devising inspirational recipes or undertaking live demonstrations both to customers and organisations such as the Craft Bakers Association.
What does a typical workday involve for you?
There isn’t really a typical day for me which makes my job so varied! I am based at Dawn’s Evesham site, where in any one day I could be making products for trade shows or customer presentations, designing recipes for marketing literature and advertisements, working with NPD (UK & Ireland as well as EU) to test new products before launch, or training new starters or the sales team on our portfolio.
Every day is a school day! Don’t be afraid of learning new ways to do things
Tell us about a challenge you have overcome recently.
One of the most interesting parts of my job is bringing new concepts and ingredients to market. There has been an increased demand for vegan products over the last few years and it can be challenging to create products that fit all the requirements in this space but still retain product quality and taste. Removing egg from a cake mix, for example, means that not only are you removing the taste, colour and texture but you are also faced with making the cake work with no egg in the recipe. Part of my role is to test new recipes and ingredients in a range of different applications in the test bakery and feed back to NPD accordingly. Dawn has always wanted its vegan offering to be as good as, if not better than, the regular ingredients in its portfolio. Providing the technical bakery input to Dawn’s NPD team to achieve this has been challenging but rewarding too.
What are your career highlights so far?
I really enjoy imparting the knowledge I have gained working over 40 years in the baking industry. And as Dawn is a global company, I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many other sites and share expertise and best practise with other technical application colleagues.
What advice would you give to up-and-coming talent in the baking industry?
Every day is a school day! Don’t be afraid of learning new ways to do things. I’m 60 with many years bakery experience but I still enjoy being shown the occasional tip or better way of doing something.
Interested in a career in bakery? Check out Foodmanjobs for the latest vacancies.
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