Leprino Foods Reviews

Pros

Great Management Team, always challenging.

Cons

You will need to be willing to put in long hours to last at this company.

Pros

Profit sharing is nice after 2 years. 401k is also nice. Health benefits are good but expensive.

Cons

Overworked. No work-life balance. You are expected to attend meetings on your days off. God forbid you get a schedule that balances work and life. You're expected to work 60-70 hrs between days off. There is no movement unless you're part of the good ole boys club. The pay would be decent if you only worked 40 hrs but you don't so you might as well work at McDonalds. You'll make the same amount. Only now are raises based on actual performance so there were a few years with no raises. Takes 6 years to earn 3 weeks vacation. Calling in sick as a supervisor is frowned upon. Why give sick time?

Advice to Senior Management

We do well as a company but at the plant level, corporate needs to get with it. You will never keep your lower management or get people to move up once they see how the treatment is. Especially with more degrees coming into the work force, they are beginning to see that there are better companies and opportunities out there.

Pros

Great company for a workaholic to succeed and be happy. Profitable company, so if you have the financial justification to do something - you can.

Cons

Constant change means that there is rarely time to rest and relax. This is exciting for awhile, but even a swimmer needs to get out of the water sometimes....... This makes the job environment a bit cold.

Advice to Senior Management

Use your intelligence by being more proactive in being smarter up front. Try to reduce the need to be so reactive and use your numbers to be a smart proactivator.

Pros

Health Committee, good location, stable company,

Cons

Incompetent SSi (SAP department) leadership, lack of business involvement, 1970's benefits and employee policies, No Parking, draconian IT policies, etc. SAP department run by non IT Core Leadership Committee.

Pros

Career growth opportunities are great if you can relocate.
The company is very stable. You don't have to worry about losing your job due to the economy.
The Profit Sharing is extremely generous.

Cons

The workload is hard to manage even for those that don't have family considerations. There is very little trust to implement creative solutions for worklife balance.

Advice to Senior Management

Not everyone is motivated by money. Find ways other than profit sharing to reward exceptional talent. More time away from work would help them stay more focused and perform at even higher levels when they are at work.

Pros

Good pay, good benefits. Not many companies do profit sharing like Leprino. Bonus 4 times a year. The hourly employees take pride on their task. Growing company.

Cons

You would be expected to work way more than you should. Everyone is too busy. Plants are located in rural areas where people are reserved. 8 hours a day is never accomplished. Work basically becomes your life.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire more employees in each plant so it is not so overwhelming. The reason people leave the company is because they feel that they don't have work-life balance.

Pros

Excellent technical services division, in-depth training to understand proprietary equipment and processes.
If Leprino doesn't work you to death or fire you for no reason, working there can be an excellent career launcher.
Accounting, Accounting, Accounting. Very high profits stem from creative accounting techniques employed.
Great profit sharing benefits.

Cons

-EXTREMELY HIGH LEVEL OF TURNOVER: all levels; this turnover particularly applies to supervisors, department managers, plant managers.
-Leprino corporate often hires poor management at the plants and expects them to meet objectives without understanding process
-Good Ole boys mentality
-Leprino says it cares about safety, but is very poor with safety of its employees overall. Many of the safety issues at the plants are scary.
-Antiquated data gathering methods at plant level. still use paperwork as main means of data collection.
-Old fashioned, manual techniques employed in plants; not labor or cost-efficient

Advice to Senior Management

Corporate focus should be on: reducing management turnover, and supporting the 3 smallest plants which are the highest cost generators.

Many smart focused individuals have left or have been pushed out at all levels.
Leprino is not a company that people retire with; to work at Leprino Foods is to SURVIVE Leprino Foods.

Pros

People care about quality and working hard. Leprino is at the top of its industry but doesn't act that way. Strong future.

Cons

Massive systems conversion is causing pain and duplicate efforts. Half of the company punches the clock and the other half wears 12 hour days as a badge of honor. Not a lot of balance here.

Advice to Senior Management

Lead. The company needs to grow but it still acts like a small company. It is time to grow up.

Pros

- If your from a dairy science background this is the big leagues, I feel sorry for you.
- Free Block of Cheese at Christmas
- #1 Mozzarealla cheese maker in the world. Your friends will be very impressed if they are losers.
- Work is evenly distributed, everyone gets lots.

Cons

- No Summer Hours. In fact, Fridays are usually longer days because that’s when you have all your meetings with coworkers who have been traveling all week.
- Found myself working on the weekends to keep up with all the useless reports they wanted
- Just nine paid holidays
- No vacation for your first 6 month, it doesn't even accrue during this time.
- When traveling ( and theres lots ), its hard to buy a decent meal on the low per-diem. And its not the type of per-diem where you get to keep what you don't spend.
- As someone else mentioned, you are not allowed to have a drink with your per-diem ( How infantile )
-Dry atmosphere in the office, conversations with your co-workers are like talking to fence posts.

Advice to Senior Management

Lighten up, it just cheese.

Pros

When you reach a responsible management level there is an almost unlimited ability to accomplish business objectives, as long as you are willing to crank up your own personal and your team's time commitment. This is a work first company, everything else is second. So if you love what you do, this is the place to jump in to.

Cons

There will be no additional or timely resources for ever increasing workloads. This is going to result in either a crumbling infrastructure as more and more effort is focused on growth in the production plants, or it's going to result in the loss of real talent at the critical business nodes.

Advice to Senior Management

Slow down a bit! There needed to be a couple year break after the market share goal was reached allowing the company to gain back quality, leadership, secure all the infrastructure, staff up properly, make the change to the business systems, and set the course to the future. The current drive to 5X the size of the company with be the epitaph written on the tombstone of this once mighty underdog.

A couple of things to think about:
1) look hard at the huge waste of money bringing in the P&G sales force. It is crystal clear that this industry is driven off a complex set of pricing standards and quality/availability, not on marketing wholesale to food processors who already know Leprino Foods. That will become very clear as the sales and marketing folks try and explain last year's great performance (taking credit for it) Vs this year which will be a very bad year because of pricing. Leprino had some great relationships with big customers driven by very effective salesmen, excellent quality and value, and the most effective of those salesmen are still at Leprino, the others have done nothing so far, and that will show very soon. Inability to land significant stable business will result in an end to this experiment.

Not all is bad in the new marketing area. The experience the P&G folks have brought in focusing on customer needs to help grow customer businesses was greatly needed. Leprino has been a very internally driven and focused company, so it's exciting to see this change as it will stabilize customer loyalty long term.

2) focus on cheese and cheese quality, and cheese profitability, and cheese markets, and cheese performance, cheese cheese cheese. The unquestioned dominance of this company in cheese should remain it's core value and product. If that means growth plans have to be pulled back fine, but a focus on cheese will keep Leprino on top. The ongoing focus on other much riskier ingredients businesses can be important in the future, but right now there are reasons to focus back on the core values and business that made this company great.