Alex Prorok

Develop and commercialize new frozen dessert and fluid product ideas for customers, including various packaged applications, sandwiches, sticked novelties, cones and flavored milks. Liaise with sales and project managers, procure ingredients, create pilot plant samples, manage scale up through plant trials and full production, and coordinate labeling for new products. • Support 20+ manufacturing sites across the country to troubleshoot formula and processing related problems • Work with sites to implement ingredient reduction through consolidation to increase efficiencies • Manage suppliers on product matches and ingredient sourcing challenges • Design and execute sensory evaluations to ensure ingredient matches and formulation changes meet customer expectations • Leverage frozen dairy experience to ideate, develop and launch a variety of frozen dairy products, including innovative novelties, in a variety of forms and packaging for multiple internal and external customers • Develop and launch national flavor milk products involving 100M+ impressions and world renown brands, as well as spearhead product improvements to increase product performance • Expanding skill set and knowledge related to cultured dairy products through project collaboration and evaluations • Mentor summer interns and oversee development and training

• Served as Project Leader for commercialization projects from ideation through final execution • Developed and maintained plans to monitor and track project progress • Worked with team members and customers to develop comprehensive timelines • Coordinated meetings and project follow ups with Operations, Marketing/Sales, Supply Chain, Quality, Graphics, Purchasing, Finance, and R&D to ensure customer expectations and timelines were met • Assisted in product development from concept to scale up of formulations and prototypes

• Initiated the development and commercialization of dozens of products from pilot plant to production scale-up while coordinating with key team members • Worked with national grocery chains on new product lines, seasonal sku’s and product improvements • Coordinated co-manufacturing processes involving multiple national and international customers for a variety of novelty and packaged ice cream products • Completed cost saving exercises including the consolidation of ingredients used in hundreds of products to eliminate single use items and non-preferred suppliers in order to increase plant efficiencies, resulting in savings in excess of $1.5M • Collaborated with suppliers on matching current ingredients to secondary sources to eliminate potential supply constraints • Directed sensory testing to ensure product improvements/matching falls in line with customer expectations • Attended focus groups and working sessions across the country to gain insight into market trends and consumer attitudes, and use research to create innovate flavors and concepts to present to customers • Assisted in the training of summer interns and newly hired product developers

• Evaluate processing procedures to identify product irregularities • Develop experimental write-ups to investigate product abnormalities • Communicate with coworkers to complete projects and identify problems • Write up reports to convey experimental results from tests

• Managed, prepared, and analyzed wheat samples for breeders • Compiled data and organized spreadsheets for nutritional testing • Ran a variety of instruments to test samples for quality

• Prepared and set up samples for analysis • Collaborated with coworkers to ensure proper cooking and preparation of samples was achieved • Maintained cleanliness of work environment and instruments