Pros
Colleagues below management level were wonderful and fun to work with. There were a lot of wildly intelligent people to learn from. I also lucked out and got one of the few managers that were kind and knowledgeable.
Cons
Leadership team has no idea how to run a business, they are all PhD's with no industry experience and I've never seen executives that are completely clueless as to how to properly run a business. The company is very unorganized and departments operate isolated from each other. There is no clear direction during product development whereas in normal food companies marketing should give clear objectives based on what food characteristics consumers want. Any direction that is given comes from the leadership team (who some will say has some questionable preferences), feedback is either simply just good/bad or "not firm enough". Leadership seems to want a rock for every product... Most projects aren't even feasible short-term, they should be focused on fixing the illogical operations of current products before investing in long-term. Products in the lab are amazing but the company fails to execute scale-up and launched products get ruined because 1. commercialization team is not very involved during development so a lot of learnings get lost 2. Products are not designed properly to be scaleable because most employees have no industry experience and are hired straight out of college (not their fault as there is no proper guidance from leadership). Teams do not collaborate due to "confidentiality" so you end up repeating tests that you know another team has done which wastes time, resources, and money. Oh and they're so worried about confidentiality because there is such a high turnover rate and people leave every single week. Workload is completely unbalanced, some people were working overtime and some people did absolutely no work (I was one of the people that did no work). If you offered to help someone else, you would get denied so you couldn't even give yourself work if you wanted. And on a final note, pay is below market value so go work somewhere else that pays you your worth and you'll also learn more.