This is the most unnecessarily complicated and inefficient company I have ever worked for, with the most outdated ways of working and systems. Onboarding is horrendous, I genuinely felt like I was being hazed. They make you figure out through trial and error that you need to complete trainings get access to the basic systems needed to to your job, then make you figure out how to self assign it, and then you realize it’s about 175 SOPs to “read”. Then sometimes that doesn’t even get you access and you have to go find some obscure form to fill out and get signed by your manager?! So that’s the first 3 months. Once you muddle through that you begin to realize that the processes for everything are at least 3x more complicated than what is actually necessary and way slower than every other company in the CPG industry. If you speak up about that, you’ll quickly learn the blind confidence of a 2 year old CPG company rivals that of a toddler, as leadership genuinely believes they’re doing it right and the industry is wrong. QA essentially runs the entire commercialization process and tells every other function what to do, despite not having relevant expertise. It’s quality assurance as theater, insane amounts of paperwork that don’t actually reduce risk. Enterprise systems are clunky, don’t talk to each other in a productive way, and are unreliable, so there is a lot of manual data entry built into routine processes. It’s a compliance culture, and every management consultant in the world will tell you that’s the surest way to kill innovation; the business results prove that principle out. TBD what impact the KC acquisition will have on any of this in the future.
