Chocobake
Nestle Toll House (2013)
Today was my second interview for the role of project trainer for the Nestle CBI team. The first interview went very well, but I think I really nailed it in the second, and I owe it all to this discontinued product. The second interview for this job is to facilitate a training to the project managers. The content and methods used in the training are entirely up to you.
One of the more common drivers for consumer contacts across all channels is from people who are either looking for Chocobake or who know that it has been discontinued and are asking for it to be brought back. The bad news is that the company has no intentions of bringing it back to the market, but the good news is that you can replicate it very easy using Nestle Baking Cocoa and vegetable oil. Our representatives give the recipe for this all the time, whether it's over the phone, in an email, or in a good old fashioned letter in the mail (if that is how the consumer contacted us). However, we've never had the team get together in the test kitchen to produce this very simple recipe, so that was the subject of my training. I had the baking cocoa, vegetable oil, and all of the kitchen utensils ready, as well as some old Chocobake product to serve as a comparison. I then gave a presentation on the background of the product (including examples of consumer contacts) and instructions on how to replicate it before walking both managers through the steps to produce their own Chocobake. While the managers were comparing what they made to the old Chocobake product, one of them asked me for examples of how this product is used in a recipe. It was a follow-up question I was hoping that they would ask, because bam... here's a dozen recipes from Very Best Baking spanning the past three decades of things that call for Chocobake as an ingredient.
I have never walked out of an interview feeling this confident. This went as perfectly as I could have hoped for!
