As part of our recruiting work, we spend a lot of time navigating job boards to reach as many eyes as possible and place exciting job opportunities in front of the right audience. A few years ago, a Substack newsletter called Thinking Food Jobs crossed our path and we’ve been hooked ever since. Each Friday, Barbara Rotger—a former program director at Boston University’s Gastronomy and Food Studies Program—sends out a curated list of terrific job opportunities covering a wide spectrum of food related sectors, organizations, and roles (think: everything from extras for a Hershey feature film to CEO of the Good Food Institute). We spoke with Barbara recently to learn more about the Thinking Food Jobs project.
What was the inspiration behind Thinking Food Jobs and what prompted you to launch this project?
It came out of my time working in the food studies program at Boston University. When I had a little spare time, I would put together a list of suggested job opportunities for students. That got shared well beyond the program’s students and alumni. I began to realize that there was real interest in this as a service. When I was leaving BU, it seemed natural to keep doing these lists as a way to keep a toe in the food world and also meet a need in the sector.
Where do you find the job postings to put in the newsletter? Are you scouring? Are people sending you things? A mix of both?
Occasionally people send me things and I really appreciate when they do. But a lot of it is me hunting. I have a list of job sites and search terms that I use every week. To me, that’s really the fun of it—it’s a treasure hunt. And if you’re not the job searcher yourself, you can go out and look for these great fun job opportunities and you don’t have to think, “Ugh, but I don’t have the qualifications for this,” or, “Gosh, I can’t move to that part of the world.” I get to do the fun part of the job search without the stressful side and can keep joy and levity in the work.
What’s the criteria that you’re looking for? What makes you decide that a job posting is TFJ-worthy or not?
I look for things that are food and culture related, for the space between the farm and the fork, and roles that don’t fall into clear categorization. If you’re a food scientist or a dietician, those are jobs that you can define and search for easily. What I’m trying to find is all the other stuff that doesn’t fit as neatly into a category. Not to say that I won’t post jobs that would fit into some of those neater categories, but what really makes the list helpful is finding the other things. I posted one last week for an archivist at General Mills, something a little bit unexpected. So I look at the small nonprofits doing interesting work, but also for unusual jobs within a larger company.
Do you have a sense of who the readership is at this point? Who and where are the people who’ve subscribed? How many of them are there?
It’s a little more than 5,000 right now and I have subscribers in every state but one. The who side of it is trickier. I know I have subscribers from food studies and culinary programs, and from schools that have food related coursework. But then it’s just a wide variety of people looking for that first job after college or people who have always been interested in food and are looking to turn their careers in that direction. There’s also a category of people who are not necessarily looking for employment, just kind of dreamers. Maybe I don’t have the job for you this week, but I can help you think about what the range of possibilities are and what kinds of organizations you might want to research.
What’s one of your favorite jobs ever posted to TFJ, whether for reasons of title, responsibilities, employer, geography, or something else?
I like anything that combines some aspect of history and culture with a concrete application for that knowledge. I have one queued up for tomorrow developing on-ship and on-shore culinary programming for American Cruise Lines. They may have lectures and demonstrations paired to the destination, so you need to know the culinary culture of where you’re visiting, be able to do a demonstration, and book tours to go see producers. Two weeks ago I posted a position at Washington State University, managing a research program related to apple orchards—researching heirloom cultivars, historic orchards, and documenting all of that. Both roles combine history and culture plus concrete applications of that knowledge.
Based on your experience with TFJ and at BU, what do you think the food systems world needs right now as regards developing successful organizations and good careers paths?
I come at it mostly from the prospective employee. I’m always pleased when I see a thoughtfully written job description that doesn’t just quickly toss out, “we need X many years’ experience and a master’s degree.” Rather, they’ve thought about who it is that they need for the work. I came across one that said “bachelor’s degree suggested, sense of humor required,” which conveyed that they thought about the unique needs of their organization. And I really hope that the trend towards more transparency in salaries continues. When I’m trimming down my list to get it to a manageable amount every week, that’s the first filter I look at. For the ones that don’t list any salary range—it has to have a strong reason for being on the list if that isn’t stated.