In the scope of the event “Wave Experience – From Leadership to Transformation”, we asked José Namén, Head of Recipe Business at Thermomix International, to share with us his experience in his company transformation, with the programme “Recipe Academy”.
Consulting House (CH): What project was implemented at Thermomix International?
José Namén (JN): More than just necessity, eating can be an absolute pleasure. Bimby understood that. But also understood that it’s not only related with the act of eating per se, but it is also about the experience – the cooking experience. Vorwerk created an appliance that stands out in the market in terms of quality and functionalities, with a universe of recipes associated to it.
Our Bimby customers are constantly demanding high-quality recipes. As a consequence, the recipe development is as crucial as the development of the appliance. To constantly deliver these recipes, we needed to officially create recipes in a professional way, to standardize the recipe development process and develop a training process for this new profession – the Recipe Developers.
The recipes have to be written with specific requirement to make it compatible with the machine. Not only do they have to be safe to cook but also they need to be tasty and everyone has to be able to produce what is promised. This means: What you see (in the recipe photo) is what you get. The recipe development process requires specific skills and competences, which are not generally available as such on the job market. We were facing many challenges to tackle this “problem” and we created the Recipe Academy – an 80% online and 20% in-person academy to train world-class Recipe Developers- for both newcomers as well as experienced recipe developers.
CH: Give us a little more insight on the project. What where the reasons behind it?
JN: We had three main reasons that triggered this type of project. For one, our team of Recipe Developers, was very diversified. Some people studied something else other than recipe development. We have some chefs or nutritionists, but those are only a fragment of the actual group of recipe developers. A recipe might have been developed by a lawyer or an engineer, for instance. Another reason was the scarcity of formal education and training in the industry. Before, new recipe developers were trained only “on the job”. The knowledge on Thermomix Recipe Development was not shareable and mainly linked to personal knowledge and experience. Yes, there are recipe creators in the industry, that is not unique, but not with the specifics our company needed. Finally, the third reason was the need of a standard high quality process that was, effectively and efficiently, replicated worldwide. For instance, a recipe developed in China, has to be equally functioning in an appliance in Portugal – and that requires special technical knowledge.
We were faced with the question “how do we overcome these issues?”. And, with the support of some experts, including Consulting House, we took advantage of their expertise in building academies and training. As a result of that, at the end of 2017, the pilot version of the Recipe Academy was launched, globally. This academy provides standardized training modules on all important components of the recipe development. This is an online platform complemented with campus weeks in which participants met in-person to share experiences and apply their knowledge.
CH: What were the main challenges in the process?
JN: For one, we did not have all the information at hands – that was really challenging. The challenge was bigger and more complex than we had imagined.
Under the moderation and facilitation of Consulting House, we worked out the competencies and modules we wanted to tackle in the academy. They were not technical experts on our recipe development process. They did not even know it. But, I would say that maybe now they are more experts than what we are.
The goal was to make the knowledge of developing very explicit recipes and translate it into a learning structure, to be able to train an unlimited number of people, regardless of the geographical location.
We put all our cards up front on the table and we considered Consulting House as “one of the team”, being open and openly discussing the challenges, bottlenecks, resources and expectations. Getting them involved as part of the problem, and the solution, worked out very well.
CH: What do you highlight on this project?
JN: I think that, with the help of our partners, the training process became more structured, organized and complete. With the process that we went through, we were able to identify the key areas that were needed – after clustering, categorizing and organizing all the information that we had – to create a standardized and structured way to teach it. This led to a more impactful preparation of our “Recipe Developers” across the world, in less than half of the time required by the previous ad hoc training process.
After the conclusion and assessment of the pilot, expected soon, the final version will be launched and a new profession will be opened to the whole world – Recipe Developer. For me, the main difference of our academy was to educate and give a role that was not in the industry, yet. I believe that in the future these type of solutions (academies) are needed, especially for roles, degrees that are not in the industry, but well-needed in companies.
