Tuesday, April 9, 2024

My name is Heike Grewenig and I work for the Mondelēz International Engineering team, based out of the Lörrach Plant in Germany.

I joined Mondelēz International in 1996 with Cadbury in Bournville, UK – straight out of living and studying in Germany. At first, I wasn’t sure about signing a contract for longer than 6 months; 27 years later, I‘m still hugely enjoying working at the company!

Until 2018, I worked in various Research & Development roles in Bournville and Reading in the UK, before my family and I decided to move to Germany, where I come from originally.

I had the great opportunity to join the Mondelēz International Engineering team as a Project Manager; this gave me a totally new insights into a different function, other ways of working and seeing our plants from a different point of view. I also became the bridge between my previous Research & Development function and my current engineering function.

In a company the size of ours, you have the possibility not only to change functions and countries, but also change category; the opportunities are very wide. I would recommend anyone to work in different functions and countries if possible. It gives you a sense of understanding the company and its people better, the different country and regional challenges; and you can take the best of your knowledge and experience to each next role.

In Mondelēz International Engineering I am looking after the identification and implementation of new technologies. This is to keep improving our efficiencies and effectiveness ahead of our competitors. During my early days in Engineering, I had the pleasure to carry out a project in our Bludenz plant in Austria where we implemented a new technology for making fillings for chocolate bars. The fantastic attitude of the site with its team spirit made this implementation a success.

With the learnings from this project, we have pushed the technology further from filling into chocolate making and are now implementing it into our Lörrach plant. Thanks to the experience and great knowledge transfer between the Bludenz and Lörrach teams, we have achieved a future-proof technology innovation.

The key ingredient of success was the openness and curiosity of both teams and belief in the new technology!