Jago never had the “what do I want to do with my life” problem. He studied food science and agriculture at university, worked in food part-time through his degree, and came out the other end looking for a graduate role inside a real food manufacturing operation. Nestlé’s NextGen program made perfect sense.
He’s five months in now, on his first rotation through Manufacturing Excellence at the company’s Wahgunyah site in regional Victoria. It’s a small town near the NSW border, and the Nestlé plant there runs 24 hours a day, five days a week. The volume of product moving through it was the first thing that caught him off guard.
“The scale really surprised me at the start. The sheer volume they run at.”
What the days look like
Each morning starts on the factory floor with operational reviews. From there it’s project work, data analysis, and production support before stakeholder meetings and whatever escalations have come up by the afternoon. The hours are 8 to 5, though the site around him keeps going well past that.
Manufacturing Excellence is about keeping a large operation running as efficiently as possible: finding what can be improved, working with production, quality, and whoever else is needed, and seeing it through. For Jago, that means moving between factory floor and meeting room on the same day. Takes some adjustment, but it suits him.
The scale
Jago knew Nestlé operated at scale before he got there. What that means on the ground is harder to picture until you’re standing in it.
The Wahgunyah site is a 24-hour, five-day operation, and the product moving through it daily is, by his own description, daunting. It’s also part of what makes the work feel meaningful. When the volumes are that large, even a small process improvement has wide reach.
“It’s a really cool thing to be a part of that volume and see the impact even a small project you deliver has on such a wide number of products.”
The people and culture
He describes himself as a people person who was quietly nervous about the culture when he started. Five months in, he didn’t need to be.
“I’m a people person, and the people here are great, all the way from the operators you interact with every day trying to solve their problems, to all the cross-functional teams.”
He didn’t expect that mix. Operators, engineers, quality specialists, production managers: different functions, different backgrounds, all working toward the same output. It’s become one of the things he values most about the role.
Engineering is a degree in problem-solving
Jago came in with a food-science background, not an engineering one. A few months on a factory floor has shifted how he thinks about the distinction.
“Engineering is essentially a degree in problem-solving. You have to really enjoy exercising that part of your brain because you are faced with a new problem that seems to pop its head up every day.”
Some are quick fixes, some take longer to work through. For someone who studied science because he liked figuring out how things work, that part fits.
Why the NextGen program
The rotation structure was a big part of the appeal. Two years, two factory sites, real exposure to how different parts of a large food operation work across different locations and teams. The brands moving through those sites (NESCAFÉ, KIT KAT, MILO, UNCLE TOBYS, MAGGI) give the work a tangibility that’s hard to find in a lot of graduate roles.
The training and support behind the program also caught him off guard. There’s more available than he expected, and while he admits he doesn’t always make full use of it, knowing it’s there has made a difference.
“Just knowing in the back of your mind that there is that much training resource available did surprise me.”
Where it goes from here
Jago knew what he wanted and went after it. Five months into a program that takes him across two factory sites over two years, he’s inside one of the world’s biggest food companies, still getting his head around the volume of it all, and building a career in food manufacturing that looks like what he had in mind, just bigger.
Find out more about Nestlé’s NextGen program here.
