Before Elsebeth Baungaard, 48, lets her three children eat ice-cream on holiday, she snaps a picture of the packaging. She has a substantial collection. “I like to see how different people eat ice-cream around the world,” she says. “It’s not all the same – two weeks ago we had a customer in Taiwan who wanted to add red beans to vanilla ice-cream – a slightly strange combination, but I love the innovation.”
Baungaard is a product and concept manager at Tetra Pak, based in Aarhus, Denmark. She sometimes works in a mini pilot plant, where ice-cream producers test recipes and discuss ingredients, and the impact they will have on processing, as well as develop new and exciting products, or try new equipment and processing methods.
“There’s much more to ice-cream than the taste,” says Baungaard. “We have to think: does it look delicious? How is it wrapped? Is the paper easy to open and environmentally friendly?”
Her job is one of many that are unconventional and interesting at the packaging and processing company, which ships cartons across the globe. “People don’t often associate ice-cream with Tetra Pak, but about 40% of all industrially-produced ice-cream [is made using] some processing equipment from Tetra Pak,” Baungaard says.
The diversity of business lines and job opportunities are what has kept her at Tetra Pak for the past 20 years. Baungaard joined the company aged 28 in 1998, as a mechanical designer, after completing a master’s degree in energy and production technology. She has held several roles at Tetra Pak – including team leader for freezers, technical product manager for components, and R&D project manager – before taking up her current post.
“I like that I have constant, new challenges in areas where I’ve never worked before,” says Baungaard. “And I love that I work across functions – with engineers but also marketing and sales people. You have to consider not just the technical details but also operations, safety and hygiene. It’s not easy.”
Cross-disciplinary work is her biggest challenge, but co-workers are on hand to help. “I’ve learned so much from colleagues – for example, how to convey technical details to the market to launch a new product,” she says.
Her longevity at Tetra Pak is a testament to the company’s effort to promote diversity and inclusion and ensure women can get in – and get on – in the company. That is a priority for the business, whose inclusion strategy includes flexible work arrangements, diversity training for employees and reforming its recruitment process. In addition, the company’s future talent programme is aimed at developing the next generation of engineers and leaders.
A lot has changed since Baungaard joined Tetra Pak, as only the company’s second woman technician in the ice-cream business. “And when I was at university, I was one of only 10 women on my course out of 100 people,” she says. “I think this is changing, but one persistent problem is that girls in high school don’t aspire to be engineers.”
She has tried to address the issue through visits to local schools to promote career opportunities for women. “I’m joining the battle to get more women engineers,” Baungaard says. “I think you will always get the best business results if you have a diversity of perspectives.”
Her results have been very positive. Baungaard’s proudest achievement is creating, with a team, the Tetra Pak extrusion wheel, which produces ice-cream products with big inclusions, such as whole nuts or cookie dough chunks, on sticks.
Because the wheel moves continuously at a synchronised speed to the production line, it can produce up to 12,000 products per hour, per lane – double the capacity of other technology that is currently available.
“The wheel is able to make all the famous tastes and textures, for example ice-cream with chunks, [which is] typically found in tubs, into a stick product,” Baungaard says. “So the portions are smaller – which is a big consumer trend, as well as eating on the go – but the variety of products is expanding.”
She believes that premium, single-serve products are behind the growth of the ice-cream market, which was forecast to achieve a compound annual growth rate of 3.8% in value and 2.2% in volume between 2017 and 2022.
As the sector grows, so, too, will opportunities to do fascinating and unconventional work such as Baungaard’s. “I highly recommend a career at Tetra Pak,” she says, adding: “What I do is so exciting. It’s the best job I could imagine having.”
