Table Talk

As work placements go, it's fair to say Laura Bradshaw wasn't too impressed when she was sent to a chicken producer in her third year of university. "All my peers were going off to well-known brands like Cadbury's, Nestle and M&S," she tells Elisa Roche in this episode of Career Conversations, "and I was going off to a chicken factory." But, Laura now says it was a pivotal moment in her career: "It was the best grounding I could have hoped for." She describes how she got to work on product trials in France: "I was totally thrown in at the deep end. I had a great experience." Fast-forward to today, and Laura is a New Product Developer (NPD) at Pilgrim's, the UK's biggest pig producer and manufacturer. Her job is to develop new food products, which means spotting the very latest trends, and developing meals and snacks around that theme to appear on supermarket shelves. She says it's a mixture of glamour - eating in fancy restaurants to see what's titillating the trendiest tastebuds - and v