Kellogg Food & Agribusiness Club (kFAB) | Home Chef - Steve Fox

Can you describe your internship briefly?

I was an MBA Intern on Home Chef's New Product Innovation team during the summer of 2019. Home Chef is a meal kit company that was acquired by Kroger in 2018. The new product team contains only ~6 people who focus on developing and incubating new product offerings - collaborating with the culinary, tech, and sourcing teams. My internship was 10 weeks long and out of their offices in Chicago. Originally, I had been slated to work on their operations team, spending some of my time at their plants in the Southwest side of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta suburbs. I was the only MBA intern that summer, but the internship was really effective in helping me make connections in the Chicago start-up food scene.

Was there room to go beyond the initial setup of the internship?

The Kroger and Home Chef team have set really ambitious and exciting targets for growth, much of which would depend on Home Chef's ability to develop new products to drive growth in both the e-commerce and retail channels. As a result, the New Product team had plenty of work for me during the summer; I felt empowered to contribute to a range of projects across the team, but there was not much time to be diving too deeply into direct work with/for other teams.

How was the interaction with your colleagues?

The Home Chef team is really welcoming and friendly - everyone was really willing to share their experience and perspectives. My colleagues included professional chefs, market researchers, and lots of folks who have been with the team since day one.

To what degree did the internship provide you with a good understanding of the industry and function? And to what degree did it provide you the opportunity to develop new skills, knowledge (e.g., via coaching or training) or a relevant network inside and outside the company (conferences, touchpoint with relevant people in other departments…)?

Home Chef is at an interesting intersection between the Retail culture and world of Kroger and its legacy as a more nimble food startup. I really enjoyed working and thinking about how to face the challenges of both CPG / e-commerce within this context. My projects required gaining experience in running / working in market research projects alongside a really interesting and bright team. By the end of the summer, I still felt like there was a lot more I could learn from this team and wished I could've seen some of these projects through to completion.

Would you see yourself working there in the long term? Why/why not?

Home Chef was really flexible in working with me, knowing that I entered the summer expecting with a really generous offer from my former employer to sponsor my education. I would definitely consider returning to the Home Chef team - I was really impressed at their willingness to combine the best of both great traditional industry/corporate experience and the speed / innovative spirit of a smaller company.

For MBA students, I also really appreciated the value / interest that the Home Chef team placed on this skillset - they seemed to have many more of such folks than many other local startups I had met, so I think it's a place where you can really dig in and make an impact from that background.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give current students seeking positions?

I think you want to think about what you want to do at Home Chef (Ops, Marketing, Tech, etc.) and get in touch with those folks to see directly what they're interested / worried about. Home Chef's work has gotten sufficiently complex where each team is really thinking through a separate range of issues and managing their own human capital needs. Any team would have to justify extra hands for the summer. As a result, you'll need to communicate how your work/skills will be useful for them for the summer, and I'd recommend keep in touch right upto the internship to make sure that you're still aligned with their needs / working with you to develop a specific project.