Food industry hungry for fresh graduates

By PHILIPPA STEVENSON agricultural editor

Food technologists have a smorgasbord of jobs to choose from when they graduate after four years of university study.

Food companies, on the other hand, have lean pickings when it comes to recruiting staff to help them meet the challenges of rising food standards.

Professor Ray Winger, head of food technology at Massey University, said there were up to four jobs available for every graduate.

He said the situation had been unchanged during the 40 years the university had offered the four-year degree, with all of the around 1000 who had graduated and wanted work finding a job before they were capped.

It was frustrating that the numbers studying had dropped from around 100 to 35 when it was such an important sector for New Zealand, "and the people get jobs," he said.

In recent months, up to 15 head hunters had contacted him after finding the market bare of food technologists for jobs here and in Australia with salaries of $60,000 a year.

The food and beverage sector earns about 40 per cent of New Zealand's overseas income from goods and services.

In 1992, an industry plan estimated that if exports could be lifted by 90 per cent by this year, it would have created 28,000 extra jobs.

New Zealand Dairy Foods is an exporter, and has 40 per cent of the domestic dairy foods market.

At its Auckland plant, senior development technician Jane Wilson enjoys working in a field where she feels challenged and stretched.

She was keen to study medicine, but the Palmerston North Girls High pupil was encouraged to look at food technology by a school careers adviser who was familiar with the field because of Massey University being located in the area.

Wilson said the classes were pleasingly small, the study material for her bachelor of technology initially "fairly dry" but increasingly interesting as the years passed.

Karllie Prisk is a sensory technologist at Dairy Foods, working on the likes of products' taste, smell and "mouth feel."

She went from her Whangamata home to Otago University to study pharmacy, but didn't enjoy it and followed friends into food technology. She completed a bachelor of consumer and applied science last year.

It was a very good, all-round degree and "at the end you come out with a lot of job choices," she said. Sensory technologists are even rarer than food technologists.

Laurence Eyres, Dairy Foods general manager technical and development and a former Massey associate professor of food technology, said studying maths, physics and chemistry were fundamental to a food technology career.

Students needed high school science to give them the ability to cope with the university subjects.

"You can't suddenly decide you are going to be a food technologist having done Spanish, art and history," he said.

There was a wide variety of university subjects which equipped people for jobs in the sector, including bio-chemistry, chemistry of materials, engineering, business, human resource and project management.

The eight staff in Eyres' group include two working on packaging, four food technologists, a sensory technologist and a technician.

Technical questions in packaging might vary from the construction and durability of milk crates, or bottles, determining whether plastic sheeting was recyclable, what it was made of, whether it would be appropriate to mix with other products, at what temperature it softened, and whether it could stand up to being washed.

Part of a food technologist role could be dealing with international customers who wanted to know the technical details of products, or local espresso makers wondering why their milk was not frothing.

Wilson dealt with that last query recently and found that because of the wet weather affecting the cows' diet there was less protein in their milk than usual. Higher protein means more froth.

"Most technologists come into the techo job and after a few years they start evolving into managerial roles," Eyres said.

"They can go into marketing, operations in the factory, technical accounts, [and] general management, and most of them have left the [laboratory] bench after five years.

"It's a great stepping-stone," he said, pointing to leading industry figures like Montana Wines managing director Peter Hubscher, who started his working life with a bachelor of technology, and cereal magnate Dick Hubbard, a graduate of Massey's food technology course in the 1960s.

Eyres said the shortage of food technologists had been dire for at least five years and was getting worse.