July 18, 2023

Each day at ADM I am learning something new. As I continue to work on my projects and collaborate with others, I am learning new information, technical skills, and soft skills. I have 2 Tier-1 projects, 2 Tier-2 projects, and a few quicker projects that are on my dashboard of to dos and I am enjoying each of them for different reasons.

ADM.com Protein Webpages:

This project involves optimizing ADM.com's website pages. The goal is to improve communication of materials, boost engagement, and solidify the information on the webpage by auditing with some criteria and previous learnings. So far, I have helped to update format of the pea protein webpage and improving the layout of components on the protein systems webpage. For next steps, I have performed an initial audit of the soy and wheat webpages and plan to present this audit and receive feedback next week.

Alternative Protein in Pet Food:

This project is more stop-and-go and requires continuous updating. Later this week, I plan to continue developing a slidedeck to present upcoming pet food market trends, different types of pet foods, how ADM's portfolio fits into these pet foods, and why a customer should choose ADM. Along with this presentation, I plan to create a sell sheet and the content that goes within to serve as a physical copy of how ADM can serve their customers and consumers for happy and healthy pets.

Competitive Analysis:

This project is turning out to be one of the more fun projects that I am working on. I am updating a document from 2020 about the plant-based protein industry, who they key competitors are on a global and regional scale, and what they are doing in their respective spaces. I have so far compiled information from individuals across the company and continue to add and revise this document. The goal of this project is to develop a document that compiles information that exists within ADM about the plant-based protein industry and provides ADM employees with a better background. This has been a rewarding project too, as many people have mentioned how useful an analysis like this is!

I2L Ideation Session:

For the Global 2023 Savory I2L Ideation session, I am serving as a main support and facilitator. I have helped to compile and create content for this meeting, as well as learning to provide technical support for the meeting in August. This has been an exercise in people management as well as teaching others how to use Mural, the collaboration software that we will be using in the session. I have learned how to better reach out to people and provide sufficient deadlines, as well as how to teach someone the most effectively on how to use a new application. This project spans ADM's regions in NA, EMEA, LATAM, and APAC to form a global ideation and brainstorming session.

Nielsen Target Hunting Project:

Within the Nielsen database, my goal is to find some smaller and fast-growing players within the meat extension category for a win for ADM. These are customers that ADM would target and hopefully be able to offer more than their current supplier. This project is slow moving, but I am able to expand my technical skills of using Nielsen and PowerBI to dig deep into data and create insights.

While with ADM this summer, I've also been able to reflect on potential careers and look forward to the future. I have been able to learn a little bit more through my above projects and others what I would and wouldn't like to do post-graduation. I have also set up some interviews with people around the company to learn about their roles and have been surprised with some learnings about myself. I have found that I gravitate toward anything with data and research, whereas before I would have wanted to focus more on customer interactions and selling. This has helped me to realize that I probably want a role after graduating that lets me dig deep into data to create insights.

My internship wraps up on August 11th and it seems like I started yesterday! I hope to keep moving along with my projects and continue learning something new each day.