Food! We eat it we cook it we love it. What more can I say?
But when you think of jobs in the food world, what's really out there?
So much more than you think! Whether you have a recipe that you need to put out into the world
or if you just want to help feed the planet, we've got five jobs in the food world just for you.
First, let's state the obvious. If you're into food you've probably considered becoming a
professional chef. Becoming a chef takes tons of training, whether you go to culinary school or
work your way up through the ranks of a restaurant, and once you become a chef the
challenges don't end there. Executive chef Leticia Nunez told us about the non-stop
excitement and pressure that comes with running the biggest buffet in Las Vegas.
I am the executive chef for Bacchanal here at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. I realized that food
was my passion when I was about eight years old. I love being in there with the food, developing
the recipes, you know, we have to cook in big batches, so making 200 gallons of lobster bisque
it's challenging, right? Because you have to be the same every day so there's a lot of balancing
and we have to move very fast. But I do-- I get to cook every day. I love being with the team,
you know, elbow to elbow cooking something. I have to cook something or else I'm not right.
If cooking professionally is your dream but you're not sure about culinary school,
there are other routes you can take. If you got into the sourdough trend last year
you might know baker Brian Ford. Brian started a blog and instagram account to document new recipes
and show off his latest creations but after one of his sourdough recipes went viral, his skills
as a blogger actually helped propel him into a job as a professional baker and cookbook author.
I was like, yo, I know how to bake. Let me take pictures of my bread to document, like,
my progress. I made an Instagram. That's when I got into sourdough. I, you know, started throwing
stuff in the bowl and, like, letting it rise and playing around. You know my following was like
a thousand people. One day I was baking. I was like, man let me make some Pan de Coco. I haven't
made that in a long time. That was like the deal breaker for me. Like I made it with sourdough, I
posted a video of it, and it just like, exploded. People, like, freaked out over that. Following
starts increasing. People start contacting me. What do you want? It's just a video of bread. 'The
recipe! The recipe! The recipe! The recipe!' It's like.... a recipe... how do you put... oh, blog! I
start my little LLC, you know, baking blog company and so I've since been able to use that platform
and turn it into a business. It's easier to start than a physical restaurant but uses the same
principles. I can bake, I can share my baked goods with people, I can help people bake better bread.
If you love food but can't cook to save your life, you can still use food to
make the world a better place. As the head of Google's Food for Good project, Emily Ma uses
computer science to build food systems that are sustainable, nourishing, and equitable for all.
There's actually plenty of food for everyone .There's plenty. Like, we grow
somewhere like two to four times as much food as we need.
But we really suck at getting it to the people who need it. In the United States it just is
so surprising to me that we have a surplus and yet there's like 47 million people who don't
have easy access to food on a regular basis. Like it's just not okay, right? There's this,
like, weird disconnect and I think that's where computer science can start to help,
because what if we could take all the excess food and actually get it to all the people who need it?
And that's like, the really cool problem that we're working on right now. The striking statistic
came out that 30 percent of all greenhouse gases actually come from our food system and that hit
me pretty hard, because that's like, the one thing like all of us need to do every day,
which is to eat. So I'm super curious about answering the question of like, what if there
was a smarter food system where I didn't have to ask Chef Joe to take an extra hour every day to
manually test a temperature of like 35 different things and like then write it down and then like
type it in a computer. It seems like, what if there was a world where that was all automatic--
where all that information came through sensors and then went into the cloud and then we could
make sense of it? So I actually feel strongly that we can train algorithms with computer
science to automatically figure out what they're seeing. But it's hard. It's a really hard problem.
if you're the person who has that one secret family recipe that everyone always begs you to
make, you should look into food entrepreneurship. Food entrepreneurship entails everything to do
with the business side of food, from opening your own restaurant to developing and selling
a brand new food product just like Sashee Chandran did with her company, Tea Drops.
I always grew up with tea being a staple at our at our dining table, but one day I was at my desk,
and as I mentioned I love tea, so I was trying to make loose leaf tea at my desk
and by the time I would make it I have to... I would be late for a meeting.
And every time I tried to use tea bags instead I was never satisfied with the quality because
it was just not as flavorful. It didn't have as much aroma. That was my first point of inspiration
to think about the idea for Tea Drops. It took me about a year and a half of experimenting. I
would spend my weekends and my weeknights kind of blending and I was obsessed with figuring
it out. And once I had that, I started sharing it with my colleagues and friends and family,
and now we're available in over 1600 retail stores from Anthropology,
Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus to grocery stores, and we also sell online and on Amazon.
Speaking of tea, let's talk more about drinks. Master Distiller John Jeffrey works at Bently
Heritage Estate Distillery where he oversees the creation of spirits like gin and whiskey.
Distillation is definitely a science, so if you want to go down this path
you should start exploring all the different realms of food science.
Food microbiology would be governing anything to do with fermentations which includes, like,
yogurt and kombucha. Food engineering is literally the plant design side, right? So
if you're doing a dairy plant you have to take things into account like the flow of materials and
the speed that you want things to flow but also temperature control and how you pasteurize milk
what is the legal definition of pasteurization and how do you design those processes.
And then food chemistry is anything from like, how does a cooking process change or produce
flavor or create, you know, what is happening when bread bakes, to how could you design a facility to
take the aromatic characteristics of something and isolate them in order to use them as like a
natural flavoring or a natural aroma, right? So you could do anything from like, making juicy
fruit flavor for gum to helping design industrial bakeries to building and running distilleries.
We've produced a bunch of spirits that are on the market but the bulk of what we make
is gonna be sitting in barrels for the next four or five years, so I sort of plan for producing
all of that and then determine how many barrels we're gonna fill and you know interact with the
ranch to figure out how many acres they need to plant for the next three or four years to
get us all the grain we need. So I spend a lot of time on that, talking to suppliers.
Whether you consider food a science, an art, or just a fun hobby that you'd love to turn into your
career, there's definitely a job path for all you foodies out there and we hope this video helped
point you down the path that's right for you. What kinds of things are you interested in? Let us know
in the comments so we can help you explore jobs connected to your interests in a future video.
And as always, make sure to like and subscribe for new videos every Tuesday!