I’m not sure why I’m posting this here, but I guess My Food Job Rocks is my personal blog. Yet I hope you can find something useful in this story. Whether you decide to move to a new city, or leave the one you’re currently in, or are debating if it’s time to leave, here’s another perspective.
This story is meant to show the true trials and tribulations of living in a city where you know no one, but somehow, you scrape tooth and nail, force yourself to talk to people, lead groups, create businesses, change worlds.
I loved my time in Phoenix, it made me felt like I lived there for a lifetime even though it’s been just 4 years. The dramas and stories that were forged have made me grow up and appreciate the things I had. To the point where my friends back in California, see me wiser and I feel more whole.
I’ve decided to split this article in 4 parts, but post it all at once. My Food Job Rocks is a food industry blog, more than it is my personal blog, so instead, I divided the content based on years, and at the end of the article, you can click the link to go to the next year.
Let’s start with year one.
Year One – Where to Plant?
My first day out of California was on a plane to Quebec, Canada to learn the art of granola bars. Then a week to Pennsylvania. I was the only one fortunate to do this because R+D training is special or something. After my two weeks of becoming an expert, my awesome dad met up with me in Phoenix as I landed on the plane. I found an awesome house with a roommate couple with 3 nice dogs. I thought I was going to live there forever.
After he set up my room in Arizona, he flew back to California, where I spent the first 22 years of my life.
The first 3 months of my job were pretty cool. Got there around 7am, cleaned up the plant, learned a bunch of stuff, and just rolled through the motions. They kept on promising I would get a manager in R+D, but that never happened.
In fact, they scrapped it all together and I was put with the Production Manager. Though I think the Production Manager had good intentions, he was a terrible boss. I argued with him a lot to a point where I got a Performance Improvement Plan PIP and had to “shape up”. He was also known to shove people under the bus. This is where the thoughts were racing “I have to get out of here”. I would always joke with the QA manager about it, we were best friends.
When you hate your job, a lot of things happen. You start to pick up habits of escape and I think that’s really dangerous. You might eat more, or you might drink more. I started to date frequently and realized I really didn’t like it, but I kept doing it because I thought I could find happiness. I think most people who hate their job will take unhealthy measures of filling the void, and that’s when people become soulless husks.
Yet in the darkest of times, maybe you find something that could change your life. Maybe as you scour through the internet, you find somewhere you could make money online. I think everyone has these types of days and one day, I found entrepreneurial podcasts that made my commute a little easier.
As I consumed more business media, and eventually, I stumbled upon a meetup group called the Artisan Food Guild. They were doing a revitalization of the George Washington Carver Museum and I wanted to help. So I just showed up and helped.
This was lead by a person who looked like Santa Claus mixed with the Dude from the Great Lebowski. He was smart, practical, and he wanted to revolutionize food. So I wanted to help him. I begged him to be my mentor, and I gave him $5000 dollars to take me under his wing. At the time, it was for whatever I could do to help.
I would ask for his advice on everything. He would teach me how to price myself, or price products, and even help me with personal problems and life decisions. I really respected him.
As you might have guessed, I’m not mentioning his name. Because it ended poorly.
Year One was hard to remember. Maybe waking up at 4:30am every day took a toll on my memory, or maybe I chose to forget it. I remember dancing with the mixer operator to Bruno Mars’ Uptown Funk, or chatting with the engineer who was my age just to waste time, and respecting the hell out of this 50 year old Hispanic woman who would be on time, just putting 50 lb bag after 50 lb bag of cane sugar into a 10 foot vat.
I remember that it made me respect the people making your food are human, like you and me, and they have it a lot harder than me.
For every factory in the middle of nowhere, or an unsafe neighborhood, there is someone working their butt off, taking 12 hour days just to put food on the table. This was probably the biggest impact that has affected me as a product developer and whenever I design products, I always think of how I can make it easier for the worker. Can that just be fewer ingredients? Or perhaps a process that makes protein bar dough flow easier? How can I replicate what I do on the bench on the line?
This job gave me the foundation for appreciating food, and I can’t thank the people there enough for that.