Blog #7: Elise Benstein

For this Blog, I chose to write about Elise Benstein. Elise is a food scientist at the Jelly Belly Candy Company. Elise says, that she likes to have a job where she gets to create something that makes people happy, even for a short time.  Elise got an undergraduate degree in food science and nutrition, she liked it so much that she went on to get a degree from a culinary institute, and got a job at the Jelly Belly Candy Company. Elise says that when making the jelly beans, they stop to do taste tests and ask for input along every step of the way. Elise tells road trip nation, that Jelly Belly sells their "irregular" candies as "Belly Flops", and turns their "mess-ups" into something that still has value. Elise shares the story, of an attempt at a pizza-flavored bean was so bad, they used it as the vomit-flavored bean in the "Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean" line.

I chose to write about Elise because the concept of chapter 8 in the book Outliers, is similar to her job, but it is not as hard as farming rice patties. In the chapter it talks about rice patties and how much work the farmers have to put in, in order to get a good amount of rice when it comes time to collect it. Rice patty farmers work 360 days of the year, and only get 5 days off, but it is similar to Elise's work, because at the Jelly Belly company they have to work long hour and have to trial and error for many of their flavors that they make.