Working at Dannon

One unique aspect about Walton is its proximity to the Walmart vendor community. Several years ago, Walmart informed all of its vendors that if they wanted to continue to do business in Walmart, they needed to have an office located in Bentonville. As such, every major company that sells to the largest retailer in the world has an office located 20 miles from campus – kinda neat, huh?

As such, when we all started looking for internships this year, most of the opportunities were with the vendors. I went through several interviews and though I liked most of the companies I spoke with, none offered the unique experience Dannon did. As part of the Dannon team, I would not just be working with domestic Walmart sales, but rather on the Walmart International team. Dannon liked me because of my international experience (it DOES pay off!) as well as my ability to speak Spanish. I was given a second interview and accepted their offer almost instantly.

I now work as part of a four person team as an analyst. We focus on Dannon’s business in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, Japan, Mexico, the UK, and our new markets like Costa Rica and Guatemala. The other three team members do category analysis, new business development, and transportation-logistics. My main job duties include pulling reports off RetailLink (Walmart’s scarily huge database of everything forever) and integrating them into readable excel reports that are then circulated throughout our team, the entire office, and to Walmart. It’s actually a lot more fun than it sounds. Quite often, I’m basically taking all kinds of pieces to a puzzle and putting them together to make a coherent, useful picture…and I like puzzles.

This summer I will also have the opportunity to spend time shadowing other people in the office. As part of the internship program, we are charged with completing several “projects” and reporting on our success. We, generally, get to choose the projects so that we can work on things that are most suited to what we would like to do once we graduate. Since I am so interested in Shopper Marketing, I am hoping to get to work on a project in that area as well as maybe get some Category Management experience (just ‘cause it seems really interesting).

Now that it’s summer, this job is my main focus. I’m here 40 hours a week, just like a normal job, and I can’t wait to get started on my own “projects.” Up first is intern orientation in NYC (yes, they’re sending me to New York for a week!). I’ll keep you updated as to how everything goes. Cheers!