maintenance mechanic

production operator

process operator

laboratory technician

warehouse worker

My day consisted of various things such as Client Project & Cross-Functional Team Coordination: Coordinating multiple client fragrance development projects by liaising with internal teams, both locally and internationally, including perfumers, labs, marketing, production, customer service, scent designers & tracking all relevant details of project briefing and related submissions.

Client Meetings: Scheduling, organizing and preparing meetings, included: submission materials, sampling, blotters, submission sheets, and all support material. Client Service: Daily and ongoing support and communication to customer needs, such as pricing, oil, coordination of shipping, documentation and samples. Project administration during project development, entering projects, sending out submissions and reworks, directing internal team, managing deadlines and requests, monitoring pricing, logging in bases, updating projects, keeping project folders and records, ordering oils, stability requests, regulatory paperwork, tracking progress of approved fragrances, entering adoptions, entering into SAP, prices, and initiating line extensions.

Data Management: Maintain/Ownership of data integrity, included: SAP/Business Warehouse/Price Lists, oil references, sales reporting tools, approved levels and bases, etc. 

Safety/Toxicology: Ensure clients’ current portfolios meet the latest industry regulations. Issue necessary safety documents; Coordinate all tox works, working with regulatory team to maintain fragrances in compliance with new amendments.

I've learned how to jungle multiple Global account with a positive attitude.  The workplace culture is strong and positive.  Hardest part of my job was balancing the work / life balance.  The most enjoyable part of my job were my team mates, very supportive and helpful to teach and learn.

I came to International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) as a Theoretician (a branch of Physical Chemistry that deals with writing Mathematical Models from fundamental Physics of interaction for the prediction of molecular behavior).  

My experience there was quite diverse. My duties ranged from data analysis of metadata aggregates through time for financial points of interest.  It also involved taking classes in-house on flavor/fragrance chemistry, and attending meetings in various departments to facilitate innovation.  I developed a model for increasing synergy for anti-microbial effects in synthetic accords, and also used my computational skills to demonstrate the ability of commercial products to aid IFF in it's pursuits for prediction.

The R&D campus is a family-like environment.  One never knows when they will be asked to join others for lunch at a nearby restaurant.  We talk about various aspects such as the greenhouse where head-space of exotic plants are captured, analyzed, and then recreated in labs for perfumes.

I feel I learned a great deal, and I have ambitions to make smoking far less a risk factor through modification to electronic cigarettes.  I feel I have true insights that many others do not, or could not have.  I believe someone from BIG TOBACCO should reach out to me to discuss.

The people are friendly and extremely knowledgeable, however there is very little room to move up in the company. Promotions come with a pre-requisite of already performing duties for the higher position, and are not guaranteed. Work-life balance is great if you are good at time management and daily goal-setting. Training is thorough and generally lasts as long as you need to be successful. 

Bonuses are dependent on the overall success of the company, and raises are dependent on an individual's performance through the year, with a maximum raise of 4%. Your performance will also be measured against your peers, though there is no defined "ranking" system in place.

Management could use some work in terms of listening to those lower on the totem pole and enacting their suggestions for success. Managers are usually scientists with little people-management experience, though there are a lot of resources for personal and professional growth (online courses, open communication, certifications, etc.). Generally, everyone who works at IFF genuinely care about their work and each other.

Granted, you get to see and experience what makes the "world go round" when it comes to business and how you make the "flavors" that are ingrained in your everyday life. When it comes to the workers, it's a gamble.

Once you enter that sphere, it's very similar to entering any armed forces organization: what you've done prior doesn't count, your resume doesn't exist and is used as a script, and they need to SEE what you do (i.e., a superficial environment; it's "title dictating behavior" with a dash of hypocrisy). Temps are expected to leave on the first day or week; you will be given a "white card" (i.e., carte blanche). If you're given a printed pass, welcome aboard! If you socialize during your stay, you're deemed "not a worker." If you work during your stay, you're deemed "not a social person," which is a very black-and-white approach. If you follow the instructions given by a trainer and they're wrong, that's your fault because they saw that. If you were given the instructions and you think for yourself to do better, you're deemed "insubordinate" or "Hey, I like this [insert person]" in a redundant fashion.

Tl;dr potential good pay if you're willing to deal with horrible work environment and lose a prominent chunk of your family's time.

More detailed review: Lousy cut throat environment with management who doesn't step up when they need to. When things don't go how they plan they overwork and mandate weekends to all the hourly worker but the manager themselves decides to have weekend off or go home early. Hourly workers is unappreciated and treated badly. They even took time away from someone who made plans months in advance to see their kids but because of "mandatory overtime" they lost good times with their kids. The pay potential is there if your drive is only to make money but ONLY AFTER YOU GET TRULY HIRED, which may take a LONG time since they rather fire good people and get a new temporary worker to take advantage of them since they have no benefits. All the co-workers I talked to all have this common agreement.

Working here you're on your own. Management & supervisors don't have your back. The turnaround time for your tasks to be completed is unrealistically short. Other departments and even some perfumer's are overly demanding when they can't get their request done in 5 minutes. There's no downtime to actually maintain your area & put away your library of bottles. The pace is chaotic and the place looks like a war zone with bottles everywhere. The lack of organization from up top is hideous. People spend every moment of their shift, every single day running around like chickens with their heads cutoff. The extreme exhaustion daily is not worth it. All they care about is the bottom line & care about their employees. They will run you to the ground if you allow it.

At the start of working here, the environment wasn't bad. I was day shift, was able to learn the job more efficiently and get a grasp on day to day operations. Not to mention, having contact with management was helpful. But as soon as my transition to nights came, everything changed. This company is run by idiots. None of them have spent any time as an operator and if they have, its all power-hunger and they no longer care about the difficulties that operators face, both with the equipment or with the production backlash. The GC plant is over 100 years old, is falling apart and is using the same equipment from when it was first built, causing more frequent down periods, which leads to loss of production, loss of money, leading to the operators being blamed for corporate stupidity. Save yourselves the trouble, apply at the gas station down the street from this place so you can see how miserable these people are when they have to go work in this awful plant.

Over the past 20 + years working there I've experienced and learned a lot. My typical day to day operation was to produce quality product and ensure that the customer receives their order on time. It's all about on time performance.

I've learned how to work well with others and keep close contact with management when trying to accomplish our end of the day goals. The people I worked with were wonderful in helping me sustain a friendly and safe place to work. Some of these people are not just my co-workers but life long friends. Truly hard to find that now a days.

I feel the hardest part of the job was trying to accomplish a task with limited resources. Sometimes you have to make good with what you have but can be very frustrating. You learn to adapt and move forward.

The best part of the job was knowing that I completed the goal at hand... Quality product.

These people don’t care about you. All they want to do is take. You work 7 days in a row and they don’t want to pay overtime until you hit 40 hours and want you to clock out for breaks but not leave the premises. Want to be able to change benefits every 30 days and give everyone the worst plans so that management can get a big bonus for “saving” money. 

Management is abysmal. They think they can run the plant and tell you how to run when they don’t even know what’s happening. They would rather try and hire inexperienced people who they can take advantage of instead of paying a fair wage to keep the plant up and running. 

People consistently work 12’s and 16’s around the clock. There’s absolutely no work-life balance. You have to use your days off but get mad when you do. 

The plant is stifled by oblivious management and greedy shareholders.

They hire x military, and immediately make them supervisors, and managers. Most have no business or operations experience, have no clue, and rely on senior people there to show them the ropes. Have a useless personell department, who also are clueless, snobby, and no personality, definitely no help when you have questions, or concerns.
Most people there who have 15 years plus are friendly, most new people are snobby, and dress like they are going to a night club.
Most equipment is as old as my grandparents, and constantly breaking down.  almost every department has a charity case, sometimes even two, (people who just show up for the paycheck, and their coworkers are made to work harder to pick up their slack, a lot of favortism, and nepotism, team work is a joke, once again brown nosers do as least as humanly possible, while others are constantly under the gun to pick up the slack.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Maintenance mechanic 1 salary reported	$20.00 per hour
Production operator 1 salary reported	$20.00 per hour
Process operator 9 salaries reported	$49,078 per year
Laboratory technician 7 salaries reported	$25.06 per hour
Warehouse worker 1 salary reported	$20.00 per hour

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