A coffee connoisseur (Picture: Lucy Ray / PA Wire)
Welcome back to How I Made It, Metro.co.uk’s weekly career journey series.
This week we’re chatting with Jasmine McNaught, who is the Technical Manager at Nestlé UK & Ireland, which essentially means she’s a professional coffee taster.
Aged 51 and based in Tutbury, she knows more than most people about coffee.
Her first experience of coffee came as a child, when helping her grandmother harvest beans in India. Now in the UK, she works on producing product, and can tell where a coffee bean has originated from with just one sip.
Here’s how she made it.
Hi Jasmine. Tell me about harvesting in India as a child, what was that like?
My earliest coffee memory is from when I was 10 years old, visiting my grandmother in Karakkad in Kerala, in southwest India.
People are very practical there and grow things to eat and use.
My grandmother had a beautiful plot; I remember feeding plantain skins to her cows, and she grew all sorts of tropical plants from black pepper and pineapples to coffee.
She let me help her harvest the ripe, red coffee berries, and she made sweets from the coffee pulp.
We then dried the beans in the sun before roasting them, taking their skins off and making cups of coffee.
I know most 10-year-olds don’t drink coffee, but this is a really special memory that will always stay with me.
A lifelong love of coffee (Picture: Lucy Ray/PA Wire)
How did you get into working in coffee?
After completing my degree in chemical and biochemical engineering, I started out in the oil and gas industry, but quickly realised I wanted to work in food manufacturing.
When I first joined Nestlé, I worked across lots of different sites, which were manufacturing everything from pickles to condensed milk and coffee.
The coffee process particularly interested me – you start off with a natural raw material, which is then transformed into the Nescafé instant coffee that so many of us know and love.
Did you know that 6,000 cups of Nescafé are drunk around the world every single second?
I knew I wanted to specialize in coffee production, and Nestlé helped me to do just that.
Have you done any training?
I’ve done an external sensory science course with the Institute of Food Science and Technology.
Sensory science is about how humans respond to the properties of a product they experience through their senses i.e. sight, smell, taste etc.
Do you go back to India at all?
Throughout my life, I’ve tended to visit my family in Kerala every few years.
I spent a whole summer in Kerala with my grandmother when I was 19, and although she had a slightly smaller plot by then, she still had coffee bushes and I remember making my own coffee from them.
My husband’s English and we’ve got two kids – it’s really important to us that they’re connected to their Indian heritage, and they love visiting my family members that still live out there.
No one knows coffee better (Picture: Lucy Ray/PA Wire)
How can you tell where coffee is from around the world when you sip it? How much experience goes into that?
There are some origins with really distinct flavours, and with enough time and training, you can start to distinguish them.
As an example, Brazilian coffee can have a distinctive chocolate note. And Columbian coffee tends to be fruity.
What does coffee mean to you?
I’m always struck by how many lives coffee touches around the world.
It’s at the heart of our social and professional lives and culture here in Europe and whole communities are centred around coffee in the places where it’s grown as a crop.
An average working day in the life of Jasmine McNaught
9.30am: Coffee tasting – checking the quality of the raw material we’ve got coming into the factory, and the quality of the finished product before we send it out.
10.30am: Virtual meeting with my European colleagues to update on the latest innovations and projects.
12.15pm: Daily factory leadership team meeting to discuss team, processes and factory output.
She’s based in a factory (Picture: Lucy Ray/PA Wire)
12:30pm: Lunch.
1.30pm: Mentoring session with Nestlé colleagues who are working towards becoming chartered engineers.
2.30pm: Visit to industrial services team on-site to check in on steam production.
3.30pm: Waste Committee meeting (a passion point of mine) where we discuss how to minimise waste from the factory – over and above the fact that we already send zero waste to landfill.
4.30pm: Catch up and training refresher with fellow mental health first aiders.
5.30pm: Home.
What’s your favourite kind of coffee?
I love a strong, Italian-style roast. I especially love the strong, rich roast of Nescafe Alta Rica and the balanced delivery of Azera Americano.
What’s your favourite part of your job?
I love working with a really diverse group of people – understanding their personal stories and what gets them out of bed in the morning.
What’s your least favourite part of your job?
In some ways it’s similar to my favourite! I do spend quite a lot of time talking to people across our organisation when we’ve got important decisions to make – explaining why we recommend making a recipe change or altering the way we do things in the factory.
I recognise though that being responsible for a product like Nescafé is a huge privilege and a responsibility, so we have to take the time to get everything spot on. If I ever start feeling impatient, I just have to remind myself of that.
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Jasmine helped her grandma harvest coffee as a child in India. Now, she works for one of the world’s biggest brands.