CORNERING THE MARKET
18
Almond Facts
MAY | JUNE 2016
Baking Up a
Storm to Promote
Almond Flour
Promoting a new almond product requires creativity.
Showcasing the product’s unique qualities, versatility
and availability are key to encouraging new and existing
customers to adopt the product. Introducing
Blue Diamond
Almond Flour
to the market presented such a challenge to
the cooperative’s Global Ingredients marketing team – one
they met with flying colors.
Enter the Almond Flour Cookbook, a fully bound, self-
published book filled with recipes that showcase the ease
and flexibility of cooking with
Blue Diamond’s Almond Flour.
“Though almond flour has been around for a long time,
we wanted to learn firsthand how the product is best used,
so we could pass on those findings to our customers,”
said Angie Raimondi, Global Ingredients Product
Marketing Manager. “Initially we hired a professional
recipe developer to create unique baked goods and dishes
using almond flour. Having a love for cooking and baking
myself, I volunteered to develop some recipes of my own.”
Raimondi’s journey to Product Marketing Manager
and volunteer recipe developer for
Blue Diamond
has
followed a unique path. After graduating with an
agricultural and biological engineering degree with a
minor in engineering entrepreneurship from Penn State
University, she accepted a job to work for Campbell
Soup Company in a leadership development program.
Campbell moved her to Sacramento for her first rotation
and soon after arriving in Northern California, news
broke that Campbell would be closing their South
Sacramento plant. Though she was given the opportunity
to stay with Campbell and relocate, she had grown fond
of Sacramento and the West Coast. “I was very fortunate
to land a job at
Blue Diamond
, enabling me to stay and
start a really exciting career,” she said.
Her start at the cooperative was as a swing shift supervisor
in the Sacramento plant, both on the main production
line and in retail packaging. From there, she earned a
promotion to packaging manager, enabling her to be
more involved with the new product development process.
“I must have done something right because my current
manager reached out to me and asked if I had any interest
in transferring over to the Global Ingredients marketing
department,” she explained. “It was an opportunity that
seemed to come once in a lifetime, so I jumped at it!”
In addition to helping to develop recipes, Raimondi’s role
allows her to collaborate with many different business
units within
Blue Diamond
to help customers incorporate
almonds as ingredients into their products. “I get to
manage new projects from concept to final production and
in the process I get the opportunity to collaborate with
incredibly skilled colleagues throughout our company.”
